Harvard president’s fall isn’t a referendum on anything — except lazy punditry | Opinion
Everyone wants to dunk. Everyone craves a highlight-reel takedown. Everyone is so desperate for the screen to scream “Finish him!” – so hungry to strike the fatal, orgasmic blow against a hated enemy.
You know what? Everyone needs to knock it off, most of all pundits and opinionators. If they don’t, we should call it for what it is: opportunistic outrage-mongering — and then ignore it. We can call it a New Year’s resolution if it helps
In 2024, with a defining Presidential election on the horizon and civic tension seemingly at an all-time high, the best thing we can do — to a person, and particularly to a professional pontificator — is step back, just for a moment, and calm the (expletive) down.
A bit rich coming from a guy in the business? Maybe — but I don’t think so.
The game is eating us alive, even if we’re too strung out to admit it — even if the tribal adoration and white-hot online attention are intoxicating and lucrative.
The public debate surrounding the resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay — who has been undone over the last month by a searing national spotlight and mounting evidence of plagiarism in her work — has provided the most recent, high-profile proof of the societal affliction I’m describing.
You can see it in the predictable reactions espoused by hot-take hotshots and hacks, notable for the self-serving manipulation and the ideological contortion it requires to keep score.
If you somehow missed it, here’s a quick recap of where things stand:
For conservative-leaning pundits and influencers, what’s happened to Gay is stone-cold proof of liberal academia’s toxic infatuation with identity politics.
That Harvard’s first Black president rose so meteorically, despite a scant academic resume and questionable citations now uncovered in her work illustrates the deep injustice of the affirmative action movement and, more broadly, contemporary progressivism, the punditocracy says.
That Gay first came under fire for the tepid, mealy-mouthed response she provided to Congress when asked about antisemitism on campus simply underscores the rot.
Only intentional oversight or blind allegiance to reverse racism could explain a Harvard president whose curriculum vitae doesn’t seem to stack up, it’s suggested.
Only the feckless or bigoted would fail to condemn Hamas’ terror or a 19-year-old undergrad shouting support for Palestinian fighters into a bullhorn.
Got it? It’s all so simple: a battle between good and evil. It always is.
Of course, in other silos of thought the situation has been painted much differently.
That’s the trouble.
Among liberal commentators and the strident idealists who make up the left’s most vocal ranks Gay’s forced ouster represents a capitulation to conservative fascists on the march. Her resignation serves as a stinging defeat at the hands of a belligerent, anti-intellectual mob, we’ve been warned, intent on waging one contrived proxy battle at a time.
When Gay’s appointment was announced last year it was hailed as a watershed moment for the prestigious academic institution. The ascension of the daughter of Haitian immigrants was celebrated as a redefining moment for a storied university with direct ties to slavery and various flavors of white supremacy.
It was also a fitting honor for a budding and respected Black woman who had served as a professor at Harvard and dean of the university’s faculty of arts and sciences, university officials and many of Gay’s colleagues said at the time.
In other words? Forcing Gay to walk the plank is like letting the terrorists win.
It has nothing to do with academic standards or precedent. It was score-settling, plain and simple.
Gay’s public undoing is just the latest bloody battle in a perilous, existential culture war that’s increasingly at risk of being lost forever.
Geez.
When you put it like that …
So what’s the truth of Gay’s brief, tumultuous tenure as the head of the iviest of Ivy League schools?
In some ways, it’s complicated. That’s the only certainty in the haphazard chemistry that defines the human experience — as unsatisfying or politically complicated as it might be
Still, what if I told you it’s not a lock-solid, air-tight, black-and-white referendum on much of anything, besides the danger of fitting every headline and latest development into a partisan narrative?
What if all Gay’s saga illustrates is the folly of striving for political victory at all costs?
What if, in 2024, we apply a basic litmus test to the fraught partisan debates that increasingly consume us — to see how well they hold up and to reveal all the ways we’re being played by those who profit on our anger?
If five reasonable people of different backgrounds and experiences were to sit down and hash it out — removed from the keyboards, comment sections, cable news darlings and upstart podcasters — where might they land?
What legitimate questions would they have? What would raise their concern? Where might they be likely to find consensus?
In this case, I suspect common sense would quickly prevail.
Plagiarism is wrong and shouldn’t be rewarded, particularly by elite academic institutions. This isn’t hard.
The mistakes Gay made in her academic work appear to have been careless and lazy — even if they weren’t malicious or career-cratering — and a university of Harvard’s stature should have been embarrassed that it took public attention to bring them to light.
Gay’s resignation was warranted, as are questions regarding how and why she was chosen for the job. The same rigors that Harvard’s students adhere to should apply to the school’s president.
At the same time, the public debate that has ensued — and the strained connections many pundits have drawn to help give it shape — have been disproportionate and intentionally skewed.
You don’t have to support academic fraud to stand with efforts to elevate diverse scholars from diverse backgrounds, particularly at institutions like Harvard — just like supporting the intentional diversification of institutions and systems of power doesn’t require giving Gay a pass.
Gay’s transgressions don’t negate the inherent value of sincere efforts to improve diversity, equity and inclusion.
She isn’t an avatar or evil or righteousness, or an example of anyone’s deep-seated fears.
She’s just a person, now chewed up and spit out. A convenient, momentary lightning rod whose story was hijacked for the partisan cause — by all sides.
What does that make the rest of us?
Pawns.
The only road to something less hopeless and bleak in the coming year starts with rejecting bogus narratives designed only to enrage us.
Even if the threats seem to justify scorched earth tactics and the risk of giving an inch seems too much to bear.
Even if it requires folks like me to shut up for a minute — and think about the intellectual sincerity of our hot takes.
This story was originally published January 4, 2024 at 4:50 PM with the headline "Harvard president’s fall isn’t a referendum on anything — except lazy punditry | Opinion."
