Harvard Can’t Have a President Who Plagiarizes. But America *Can* Have a President Who Coups.
Welcome to the Upside Down.
1. Hahvahd
Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, has resigned in the wake of twin scandals. This is a teachable moment. About Harvard. But also about America.
We have two sides forming up for and against Gay. The first is the Chris Rufo right, which sees Gay’s resignation as a scalp they can claim because she is a black woman a hypocritical liberal elite. The other side is liberals who see the attack on Gay as part of a broader campaign against diversity.
Both sides are correct.
Claudine Gay really did commit plagiarism and she really did perform terribly when questioned about antisemitism on her campus. Either failure should be sufficient to cost her her job.
And the right really does get a win from this episode in the sense that it is a warning shot at everyone in higher ed that conservatives are out there, searching for ways to cancel them—sorry, I mean, “hold them publicly and professionally accountable.”
And the left is correct, too. The campaign against Gay wasn’t primarily motivated by a devotion to scholarly principles.
But this incident does tell us something about the state of college.
There was a time—as recently as the early 1990s—when university presidents were supposed to be serious intellectuals who guided their institutions through curricula and research while contributing their own work to the academy.
This definition of the job hasn’t been true for a generation. Today, a university president has only one job: