Ms. Gay's Resignation

Claudine Gay has resigned as president of Harvard. She has, she implies, succumbed to racist animus which has put unsustainable pressure on her and the Board of Directors.

Here's an excerpt from her resignation letter:

Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast 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.

Racism is, of course, the left's go-to response whenever a progressive black person is held to the same standard of conduct as everyone else, and although she may have received despicable emails or phone calls, it's absurd to think that that's what brought about her downfall.

Ms. Gay has been determined to have committed almost fifty acts of plagiarism in her scholarly publications, an offense for which lowly undergraduates are routinely suspended.

She also demonstrated an alarming degree of moral maladroitness when she was unable to condemn calls for genocide of Jews on her campus when asked to do so by a House committee.

The Fellows of Harvard College claimed to have accepted her resignation "with sorrow":

While President Gay has acknowledged missteps and has taken responsibility for them, it is also true that she has shown remarkable resilience in the face of deeply personal and sustained attacks.

While some of this has played out in the public domain, much of it has taken the form of repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol directed at her through disgraceful emails and phone calls. We condemn such attacks in the strongest possible terms.

That first line above presumably refers to her failure, when given the opportunity before a Congressional panel, to condemn antisemitic demonstrations among her student population during which some demonstrators called for the genocide of Jews.

Gay stated that she was caught up in a combative exchange with Congressional interrogators and "failed to convey what is my truth.”

That it's wrong to threaten students with violence is somehow her truth, as if someone else might legitimately have a different "truth," is a notion which should alone be enough to disqualify her from being the president of a college, but set that aside. Jim Geraghty at National Review asks,

Hey, who among us hasn’t gotten caught up in the moment and argued that calling for the genocide of Jews might be okay in certain contexts? Some of us might say that if you can stumble into telling Congress that, in certain circumstances, calling for genocide is acceptable, you really shouldn’t be running anything, much less the most prestigious university in the country.

“Is calling for genocide a form of harassment?” should be the sort of question they ask when they are trying to assess if you’ve had a concussion.

Geraghty goes on to write:

Here’s the thing: If you’ve done nothing wrong, are being falsely accused of rampant plagiarism, and all of your critics are racists or are gushing “racist vitriol” . . . why are you resigning? Why are the Harvard Fellows accepting your resignation?

The contention of Gay and the Harvard Fellows is that Gay did nothing seriously wrong, certainly nothing that warrants her resignation, but she’s resigning anyway, because a bunch of racists are demanding it.

Good point. Ms. Gay's massive breach of professional ethics and her moral and epistemic squishiness, not her race or gender, disqualify her from holding the position she did.