The Patriot Post® · Harvard's DEI Hire Resigns for Plagiarism

Six months ago, Claudine Gay made history when she became the first black president of Harvard. Yesterday, she made history again when she resigned in disgrace as the shortest-tenured president in the school’s 388-year history.

Imagine that: The people of the United States elected their first black president 15 years before “progressive” Harvard did. No wonder the school’s board of trustees was so reluctant to let her go. Perhaps a recent op-ed in the Harvard Crimson, the school’s student newspaper, was the final straw.

Of course, Gay isn’t actually leaving Harvard. She’s simply being removed from the presidency. As such, she’ll go back to drawing her handsome $900,000 salary as a professor. Great work if you can get it.

“Claudine has proven herself a first-class academic leader as well as a rigorous scholar in her own right,” Dr. Henry Louis Gates crowed at the time of her appointment as president. “And under her leadership, Harvard will continue to be a model in upholding the highest standards of academic excellence, advancing the frontiers of knowledge while also advancing strategies of inclusion.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to “academic excellence” and “inclusion”: Gay failed on both fronts. She proved herself to be both a plagiarist and, if not a Jew hater, then a facilitator of Jew hatred on campus.

Six months, though, was one month too long. And plagiarism was the wrong reason. Early last month, New York Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, herself a Harvard graduate, asked Gay what seemed to be a softball — no, a beachball — of a question: “Calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard’s code of conduct, correct?”

To which Gay replied with a contemptuous smirk, “It depends on the context.”

Context dependent? We wonder: Would, say, hanging a noose from a tree in Harvard Yard be “context dependent”?

Gay later apologized for her answer, but she couldn’t put the Jew-hating toothpaste back in the anti-Semitic tube. She should’ve followed University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill out the door at that point. But she didn’t. And since the Harvard board had circled the wagons against firing Gay for anti-Semitism, her critics shifted to the target-rich topic of academic dishonesty — a topic that ultimately did her in.

But it wasn’t, say, the crack journalists at The Boston Globe or The New York Times or The Washington Post who uncovered and publicized Gay’s fast-and-loose treatment of other people’s work; it was The Washington Free Beacon. Which tells you everything you need to know about the agenda of our mainstream media.

In the end, money forced Harvard’s hand. “Harvard’s just like a hedge fund that happens to teach a few classes,” noted Fox News’s Jesse Waters. “They have a $50 billion endowment, and she just lost them $1 billion in 10 days.” He added, “Harvard can lose its reputation, but it can’t lose its money.”

Gay proceeded to play the part of the victim. “It has been distressing,” Gay wrote in her letter of resignation, “to have doubt case on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.”

Say what? Orwell himself couldn’t have dreamed up two more galling inversions of the truth. Gay was given the gate precisely because she didn’t confront hate and uphold scholarly rigor.

But the racism card is getting old, isn’t it? As The King of Late Night, Greg Gutfeld, quipped: “Sorry, babe, you weren’t fired because of racism. You were hired because of racism.” Gutfeld went on to suggest that, behind the scenes, Barack Obama was helping to keep Gay from being defenestrated. Alas, the pressure became too great for even Obama. Gutfeld added that any white person with her pedigree “wouldn’t be running a school of fish.”

Gay’s complaint about “racial animus” is especially telling. What a weird blind spot, what a lack of empathy she showed for Harvard’s fearful Jewish students who themselves had come under attack on the campus for which she was responsible.

The Harvard Corporation — yes, it’s a corporation — must’ve been relieved to have Gay out of the way, all the better to get back to the serious business of fundraising. But not before noting that Gay “has shown remarkable resilience in the face of deeply personal and sustained attacks.” And just think: None of those “deeply personal” attacks would’ve been launched in the first place if she hadn’t blurted out such a vile response to a simple question about Harvard’s policy toward Jew hatred.

Instead, Gay promoted cultural Marxism, which pits American against American as victim versus victimizer, oppressed versus oppressor. She resigned bitterly, not nobly, and she didn’t apologize for her transgressions, didn’t acknowledge her twin failures of moral leadership and academic integrity. Indeed, the plagiarist president stole nearly 50 excerpts throughout her very limited body of academic work.

At Harvard, if you plagiarize, you’re expelled. Unless you’re the university’s first-ever black female president.

As Stefanik put it last night: “There is a reason that the testimony of the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT made history as the most viewed [congressional] testimony ever with over 1 billion views, and that’s because their testimony was morally bankrupt and pathetic. … It is unacceptable that it took Harvard a month to demand the resignation of Claudine Gay.”

Hear, hear.

Yet no high-profile firing of a black leftist would be complete without a word from Al Charlatan Sharpton. Said the pride of MSNBC and the instigator of 1991’s Crown Heights pogrom: “This is an attack on every black woman in this country who’s put a crack in the glass ceiling. It’s an assault on the health, strength, and future of diversity, equity, and inclusion — at a time when Corporate America is trying to back out of billions of dollars in commitments.”

Did you catch that last part about “billions of dollars in commitments”? In journalism, that’s called burying the lede. Because those billions in race-based graft are all Al Sharpton is really concerned about.

“What we see here is an example of the final corruption of our most elite institutions,” said former Reagan Education Secretary Bill Bennett. “Can Harvard recover?” he asked rhetorically. “Yes. Will it recover? No. These problems are too ingrained.”