[ April 17, 2026 ]
In his article below Victor Davis Hanson asks some pertinent questions about Harvard’s future, the fate of its governing board, Claudine Gay’s shoulder-shrugging indifference to shockingly high and obvious levels of anti-Semitism on Harvard’s campus, her intellectual dishonesty, her mediocrity as a scholar as well as what might be her eventual fate despite the anxious intercession of Barak Obama on her behalf with Harvard’s Board of Governors.
Afraid of being exposed for hiring someone as Harvard’s president who was woefully inadequate to hold such a lofty position and afraid of being accused of racism if it dismissed Claudine Gay based on her inability or, worse still, her unwillingness to act in defense of Jewish students at Harvard being subjected to frighteningly aggressive demonstrations of anti-Semitism and Hamas flag waving on campus, Harvard’s governing board permitted her to resign after more than 40 instances of plagiarism had been discovered in her papers.
Many of us popped the cork on the champagne we had been saving for just such an eventuality, but the effervescence began to fizzle when we realized that Ms. Gay would remain as a professor at Harvard with a salary of over $900,000.00 per year. Based on recent revelations about her being an academic fraud it comes as no surprise that most parents now consider having her teach their children for free would be far too expensive.
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Nevertheless, Ms. Gay can now frisk about in the faculty common room with failed mayors Bill de Blasio and Lori Lightfoot together with failed CNN news anchor Brian Stelter all of whom Harvard has employed as lecturers.
Failing upwards is a cherished prerogative of leftocrats. After all, we have a serial plagiarist taking up space in the White House. The difference between stupidity and genius, Einstein is alleged to have observed, is that genius has its limits which makes one wonder where Kalamity Harris will land. The prospects are limitless. We are dealing with people who would have promoted Captain Bligh to an admiral of the fleet.
It is an enormous relief to see Ms. Gay clear out of the president’s office at Harvard, but it was disappointing to read her letter of resignation where somewhat inevitably for a “diversity hire” she played the race card, admitted to no culpability and failed to apologize for her divisive stewardship. On December 8th., wearing spectacles that looked as if they had kidnapped her face, Ms. Gay did apologize for her remarks at the end of her testimony before a congressional committee. Her apology reminded me of the husband who came home with a bouquet of flowers after a late night of carousing but failed to understand that the flowers didn’t matter if he wasn’t wearing his pants.
Few, if any, will miss Claudine Gay at the helm of Harvard, but many think allowing her to resign over plagiarism instead of being dismissed for her abject moral failure to confront and enforce penalties for blatant anti-Semitism and against Harvard’s supporters of Hamas is a bit like Al Capone being convicted of tax fraud instead of numerous murders. I suspect this was an attempt by Harvard’s governing board to seek absolution without forsaking its original sin of embracing the destructive absurdities of D.E.I. in the very first place.
Harvard—Out the Frying Pan Into the Fire
ADVERTISEMENTVictor Davis Hanson
American GreatnessHarvard may assume the forced resignation of its president, Claudine Gay, has finally ended its month-long scandal over her tenure.
Gay stepped down, remember, amid serious allegations of serial plagiarism—without refuting the charges. She proved either unable or unwilling to discipline those on her campus who were defiantly anti-Semitic in speech and action.
But Gay’s removal is not the end of Harvard’s dilemma. Rather, it is the beginning.
In the respective press releases from both Gay and the Harvard Corporation, racial animus was cited as a reason for her removal.
Gay did not even refer to her failure to stop anti-Semitism on her campus or her own record of blatant plagiarism.
Yet playing the race card reflects poorly on both and for a variety of reasons.
ADVERTISEMENTOne, Gay’s meager publication record—a mere eleven articles without a single published book of her own—had somehow earned her a prior Harvard full professorship and presidency. Such a thin resume leading to academic stardom is unprecedented.
Two, the University of Pennsylvania forced the resignation of its president, Liz Magill. She sat next to Gay during that now-infamous congressional hearing in which they both claimed they were unable to discipline blatant anti-Semitism on their campuses.
Instead, both plead “free speech” and “context” considerations.
Such excuses were blatantly amoral and untrue. In truth, ivy-league campuses routinely sanction, punish, or remove staff, faculty, or students deemed culpable for speech or behavior deemed hurtful to protected minorities—except apparently white males and Jews.
Yet Magill was immediately forced to resign, and Gay was not. Also noteworthy was Magill’s far more impressive and extensive administrative experience, along with a more prestigious scholarship that was free of even a suggestion of plagiarism.
Academia’s immediate firing of a white woman while trying desperately to save the career of a less qualified and ethically challenged black woman will be seen not as a case of racial bias but more likely of racial preference.
Indeed, to keep Gay’s job and to defend her from plagiarism charges, both Harvard and Gay herself were willing to say things that were simply absurd, if not patently untrue.
Harvard invented a new phrase “duplicative language” to euphemize the reality of Gay’s intellectual theft.
Even after Gay resigned, Harvard jumped the shark by further downplaying her plagiarism by dubbing it as mere “missteps.”
Harvard and its supporters further embarrassed themselves by alleging that if the victims of Gay’s plagiarism didn’t object, then why did her expropriation matter that much?
Are we then to assume that plagiarism is not a serious violation of the entire ethos of scholarship, quite in addition to the aggrieved plagiarized party?
The university descended even further by suggesting that if the complaints were lodged by anonymous scholars, they were somehow less serious.
Has Harvard ever heard of the reasons why whistleblowers are often protected from retribution by grants of anonymity?
Liberal Harvard, through its lawyers, even threatened the New York Post with legal action if it aired charges of Gay’s plagiarism.
Yet only days later, the university was swamped by further proof of Gay’s scholarly misconduct, involving improper use of data and more plagiarism extending back even to her dissertation.
Harvard, remember, claimed that it had conducted a thorough investigation that had cleared her of actionable plagiarism—even as more charges arose of her prior culpability.
But more importantly, what happens to ex-president Gay now?
Does resigning from the Harvard presidency and returning to a full professorship mean that charges of plagiarism disappear?
Would any other Harvard professors continue to be employed without addressing over two dozen separate charges of plagiarism lodged against them?
Do Gay, the Harvard Corporation, and the more than 700 Harvard professors who closed ranks and wrote a letter supporting Gay now argue that plagiarism is no longer a serious offense at the nation’s supposedly most preeminent university?
Will students who emulate Gay’s habit of copy-and-paste, failure-to-footnote, and misuse-of-data now be exempt from dismissal or suspension?
After Gay’s embarrassing December 5 congressional testimony and her resignation, what now is the Harvard policy toward anti-Semitism?
If next week, anti-Israel students once again call for the destruction of the Jewish people in Israel all the way “from the river to the sea,” or if they again storm Harvard’s Widener library, screaming support for the October 7 massacre and intimidating Jewish students, what will the new—or old—Harvard do?
Again nothing?
Finally, Harvard insinuated that Gay was fired by racist outside pressure—despite the fact that many of her critics were large donors furious about the diminution of the reputation of their alma mater.
Is Harvard suggesting that its own mega-donors are racists?
What then might come next?
The resignation of the entire board of the Harvard Corporation that is the ultimate cause of Harvard’s descent into mediocrity.
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