Goodbye President Gay

For John, BLUF:  What will be the long term consequence of Dr Claudine Gay stepping down from bzeing President of Harvard.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Claudine Gay Has Gone Away

Here is the sub-headline:

Is this the dawn of a new day?

From InstaPundit, by Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds, 2 January 2024.

Here is the lede plus two:

Harvard President Claudine Gay has resigned.  She follows Penn’s president Liz Magill, and leaves only MIT President Sally Kornbluth surviving among the three university presidents who disgraced themselves in their testimony over campus antisemitism.

So what’s next?  And what should be next?

I’ll approach those in reverse order.  Kornbluth should resign too.  Her performance was just as bad as the other two, and the plagiarism charges against Gay, while apparently well-founded, aren’t why Gay resigned.  She resigned because she sounded like a gray bureaucrat when confronted with the bloody reality of terrorism and antisemitism abroad, and shameless support for terrorism and antisemitism at home.  Kornbluth sounded no better.  University presidents are supposed to be leaders, and you don’t lead by retreating, squid-like, behind a cloud of gray technicalities and evasions.

I agree, 7 October may be the day DEI took a fatal blow.  But that does not mean the Faculty and Administrators at Harvard have seen the light.  The are probably still teaching the old lines (Prof Reynolds mentions in the article Frantz Fanon and Hebert Narcuse).

Only when our betters, such as the staff at Harvard, realize what our two and a quarter centuries have done for the world, and acknowledge its progress, will we be able to move on in the direction of progress, acknowledging our problems, but thankful for those who went before us and hopeful for the future.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff