Given that I wrote about Claudine Gay’s resignation as President of Harvard just yesterday, it may seem like piling on to add two more takes. But these are from people who are eloquent as well as straightforward: British author and political commentator Douglas Murray, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, needs no introduction here. First I’ll show you Murray’s Torygraph piece on Gay’s resignation, followed by an eleven-minute video discussion between him and Ayaan about the same thing.
Click below to access the Torygraph, which is likely paywalled; you can find the article archived here for free:
As I said, the most striking thing about Gay’s letter of resignation, and especially about her op-ed in the New York Times giving her take on the situation, is her claim of victimhood. She was, she said, a victim not just of racism, but also of unnamed “demagogues” (apparently the antiwoke + Republicans + conspiracy theorists), all sworn to destroy the values of Harvard. Presumably the resignation of Liz Magill, the white president of Penn, was due to other factors. Were there demagogues set out to destroy the values of Penn?
Murray, however, notes not only Gay’s own claims, but others who have bought into Gay’s “victimhood” narrative, when in fact she had to resign because the accusations of her scholarly plagiarism had become overwhelming, rendering her ineffective.
Murray:
Claudine Gay might have weathered the storm because she had the protective cover of being Harvard’s first black female president, and in an age of identity politics that puts her very close to the top of the oppression Olympics that now dominate everything in American public life. You can be rich, privileged and the president of Harvard. But it transpires that you can still claim to be a victim if you are Claudine Gay.
That is what she tried to claim in her resignation statement on Tuesday. She said that there had been “racial animus” in the attacks on her. In fact, the attacks started because of her glaring inability to stand up to racism, followed by allegations that Gay’s distinctly meagre academic work, included a significant amount of plagiarism. The plagiarism story had been around for a while, but after her Congressional embarrassment, a larger number of people – including Leftist media – started to look into these serious allegations.
At first, Harvard tried to ignore them. Its board embarrassed itself by repeatedly expressing its full support for her. Ordinarily, basic academic failings like seeming to lift whole chunks of work – including acknowledgements – from the works of others would have seen a student censured. But not the Harvard president, apparently.
Finally it became too much. Gay’s resignation letter on Tuesday could have confessed to her failings and apologised. But it did no such thing. She went out the same way she had got in: on a blizzard of victimhood.
Others joined in her defence. Ibram X Kendi (author of the mistitled bestseller How To Be an Antiracist) claimed that “Racist mobs won’t stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism.” Nikole Hannah-Jones (who initiated the New York Times’s lamentably ahistorical “1619 Project”) claimed something similar. She said in the wake of Gay’s resignation that “Academic freedom is under attack. Racial justice programs are under attack. Black women will be made to pay.”
In its coverage of Gay’s resignation, even the BBC claimed that the embattled former president had been a victim of America’s “campus culture wars”. The broadcaster also said that “For her Right-wing critics, Dr Gay – who is black – represents much of what they loathe about modern American higher education, which they view as being dominated by a Left-wing ideology that places a greater emphasis on ethnic and gender diversity than on academic rigour.”
Which is a typical BBC smear. Note the way in which the report implies that Gay being black was the problem here. And that the idea that identity politics trumps academic rigour is some kind of phantasm from the fevered imagination of the Right. The trouble is that identity politics does trump academic rigour in the modern American academy. Gay’s own appointment last year was testimony to this. Although in her bitter resignation statement she claimed that academic excellence and standards are central to who she is, they have never been obviously so. She herself is almost entirely without academic distinction.
Murray then notes, as I did, Gay’s thin record of scholarship—only 11 published articles and one book that she edited—and the fact that, now demoted to her original job as a professor of sociology and black studies, she will continue to pull down her Presidential salary of $900,000 per year. That’s truly obscene, but I guess Gay, who had her own lawyer, cut some kind of deal with Harvard agreeing that, for all that dosh, she’d go gentle into that good professorship. As Murray says at the end of his piece, “It was high time she went. But nobody should feel sorry for her. This already very privileged woman is going to remain on the teaching faculty of Harvard with a nice pay package of around $900,000 a year. Victimhood turns out to be nice work if you can get it.”
In the 11-minute video below, Murray discusses GayGate with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. He first adds Al Sharpton to the panoply of people attributing Gay’s resignation to racism. Hirsi Ali responds that the case is “not all about race, it’s about the mediocrity and mafia that he represents so well, and that he has profited from for so many years. And I think it’s time that we ditch this diversity, equity, and inclusion movement that is really all about dismantling and degrading our institutions, about expunging our history, about indoctrinating kids at school. It started at universities and goes beyond that.” She adds that DEI has spread “everywhere in America”, and we need to be aware of that.
Both Douglas and Hirsi Ali discuss Gay’s thin academic record and apparent plagiarism, with Hirsi Ali hurling the zinger, “My grandmother would not trust Claudine Gay to herd her goats.” She then calls Ibram Kendi (see above) a “racist” who has used that term to benefit personally, though she thinks this form of “antiracism” is on the way out. (I’m not so sure, but Kendi is probably on the way out, but still has his millions.) The “mediocre mafia”, she says, “will disappear.”
The discussion goes into how Gay’s resignation may create a space in which merit rather than ethnicity can return as a criterion for advancement, with Ayaan arguing that the decline in merit has been promoted only by a loud vocal minority.
Hirsi Ali offers her own solution to America’s racial disparities that has left some people behind: “The way to lift up the people who are left behind is to make them a part of the values that make us come ahead: the values of hard work, the values of community, the values of commitment, responsibility, of getting up in the morning, of lifting yourself up by your bootstraps. That, I think, is for me what America is all about. And we can do that without degrading the standards of what has lifted up everyone out of poverty.”
But of course how does one do that? She offers no suggestions, but there was no time for them—if she had any.
Murray finally brings up the “young white men who nobody is speaking up for,” though that, to me, sounds a bit whiny.
In the end, Hirsi Ali expresses a hope that l’affaire Gay marks the ending of woke ideology but a beginning of a real way to address disparities without a victimhood narrative. Murray ends by saying, “Who would have thought that Harvard would be the place where DEI went to die?”
But I think DEI is far more entrenched in universities than either of them think. To get rid of it would entail either firing a ton of people or putting them in new jobs where they can’t work their mischief. No, DEI is here to say—for a long time. It is not about diversity or inclusion, but aims solely at “equity”, or proportional representation regardless of merit. DEI is indeed responsible fot hte decline of merit, which is the greatest mischief. They might as well call the program just “E.”
I gotta say, I love the phrase “mediocrity mafia”. 🙂 I think I’ll start using it.
900K a year after 50+ instances of plagiarism is obscene. It’s vulgar, it’s vile. Claudine Gay must (truly) believe she did no wrong. The ability to self-reflect is entirely absent.
And yes, how does one pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps? In many cases, disenfranchisement runs so deep that it’s virtually impossible to “life oneself up”.
I’m not opposed to a form of affirmative action that is based on class + merit – NOT on sex and/or pigmentation.
Joy Reid/MSNBC announced (paraphrasing): “there’s a movement against black excellence”. Maybe, but Claudine Gay isn’t excellent.
DEI must die.
“DEI must die.”
Yes, but let’s beware of a Dialectical Synthesis of Dialectical Epistemic Inversion into something even worse.
also known as :
“… a moment of reawakening”
-Claudine Gay
But Rosemary, how can affirmative action be based on class and merit both? If based on merit, that’s what we used to do and the top positions went to whites, Asians, and Jews even in the face of active discrimination in some times and places against the latter two. That doesn’t meet the standard definition of affirmative action which is to use criteria other than merit or fitness for the job for hiring or admission to competitive schools.
And what would class-based AA look like? Why should a poor person get hired over a middle-class applicant unless the talent-spotting system was able to pick out high talent and potential for achievement buried in the poor-culture ground clutter? In other words, back to merit. You’re just being more diligent to find it in unlikely places, which is good.
But here is the rub. If you announce a class-based AA plan, there is going to be pressure for results: a lot of black bums in seats (not just poor bums — this is America, remember.). How far down into the barrel of poor people does Harvard or UCLA (or U of Toronto) have to dig to get enough poor people who can cope at university that the black portion of it looks like a credible effort to reduce racial disparity? Because this is always going to be the goal, not to settle for reducing class disparity. How many better-qualified applicants have to be rejected to get in enough poor but barely adequate students that the class looks black enough?
My own bias is that I don’t care if none of the meds, dents, and engineering schools have any poor, black, or indigenous students at all. This disparity is not something that society needs to fix, except as talented high school students from those backgrounds devote themselves to the excellence needed to get in, competing not only with other excellent applicants but also with the toxicity in their own cultures that holds them back.
+1
What society needs to do is provide schools with excellent curricula for everyone. Germany is going the American way, dumbing down schools for everyone in the hope that this will improve “equality”. I doesn’t. The ones this hurts most are the kids who do not have a home environment that can compensate what schools lack. Math used to be a strength of bright and/or willing children from immigrant backgrounds; now elementary schools have “progressive”, purportedly less offputting teaching methods that are a lot more verbal and with less practice and less possibility for implicit learning than the traditional methods, precisely when the children who don’t speak German at home have become a majority in many metropolitan schools.
I’m torn on the idea of class-based affirmative action because I’ve seen it from both sides. Growing up as a working-class kid, I was the first in my extended family to go past 16 in education. University seemed like an alien concept to me, as I lacked the confidence to mingle with the seemingly sophisticated ‘uni people’ and saw myself as dumber and inferior. It only changed when a great science teacher opened my eyes to the opportunities, boosting my self-belief and ambition. Without him, attending university wouldn’t have been on my radar.
Those from middle-class backgrounds have an advantage with familial knowledge of higher education and relevant role models. I only knew people in blue-collar jobs who never discussed university or ideas. Sociologists (rightly) often get a bad rap these days, but the ‘hidden curriculum’ they speak of is fundamental to understanding class discrepancies in university students and professionals. The effects of the ‘hidden curriculum’ left me feeling uni people were better, more polished, and smarter, and they always knew the right thing to say in polite company. Coming from a working-class background I felt massively inferior.
Fast forward 30 years, I’ve benefitted a lot from university, and I’m certainly no longer part of the working class, although I feel I am. However, I’m now a parent and I see the advantages my daughters have due to my education. They view university as a natural path, not a distant possibility like I did. They benefit from my ability to provide them with assistance; I know the ins and outs of academic applications, paper planning, literature searches, and statistics. They also have relevant role models in their lives and understand that high achievers are just like them. There’s no special sauce required.
The injustice remains. In September, my daughter started attending a selective and top-ranking UK university. When I was helping her move in I noticed there were no working-class families, AT ALL. Everyone had posh accents (apart from me!), all parents were well-to-do, and all drove expensive German cars. On top of this, about 30% of her fellow students attended private schools. This disparity infuriates me as it reveals the unfairness in the system: capable but poorer kids are overlooked while wealthier, less able students secure degrees from top universities.
Addressing this inequality without worsening the situation seems almost impossible. State interference nearly always leads to unintended consequences. But who will take its place? Is it even the state’s place to eliminate this inequality? Or are the student and their family the only ones responsible for their academic success and ambitions? I don’t know.
What can be done? I don’t have the answers, but I do know the current system in the UK (and US) is undeniably biased against those from less affluent backgrounds. In my opinion, that’s not right.
From your diction, Weatherjeff, I assume you are in the UK. You no doubt have a more cogent take on class as social class than I did, speaking in Canada and looking over the fence at the United States. Here in the Americas, class is a shibboleth for race. People who advocate for class-based affirmative action are really trying to get more black people in. They can’t admit they are giving racial preference because it has been found unconstitutional in the U.S. By contrast, race preference, and preference by sex, sexual orientation, gender expression, indigeneity, disability, and record of criminal offences, in hiring and admission to higher education are all perfectly legal in Canada and continue to be advocated vigorously by social reformers.
Social class barriers to prosperity are not widely acknowledged here as a social injustice. My own parents and the children of my wife’s working-class siblings are evidence that upward mobility really is a thing that sorts itself out. It would seem strange to organize a university system that explicitly sought to admit poor students ahead of well-off students just because they were poor. Here there would have to be a race angle to it before it made sense. If the take of poor people didn’t include enough black people, the initiative would be strangled in the crib.
“What would class-based AA look like?” – E.g. reduced tuition fees for low-income students in public universities (acceptance itself can be based on merit alone).
Murray : “author of the mistitled bestseller How To Be an Antiracist”
Ah, I hadn’t noticed that before – he’s right, the correct title is :
How To Be A Tyrannicist
Or just: “how to be a racist”
Can anyone direct me to a similar piece Murray has ever written about the ‘rot’ at the heart of the right wing? I have never heard the man utter a single word of criticism of Trump, Johnson etc- he is not a fair minded critic calling it as he sees it- he is a cynical mouth piece of the right
If what Murray says is true then does it matter who else he has criticized? What does Trump have to do with analysis of Claudine Gay or universities? How many conservatives does one have to criticize in order to qualify as a critic of identity politics?
Yes, Mike, absolutely. His “War on the West” is the best book I’ve read in years.
For the record – he is guardedly critical of Trump when asked (I watch/read a lot of him).
D.A.
NYC
Also his book “The strange death of Europe” he doesn’t spare, right, left, middle or don’t knows. I like his writing and podcasts. His Spectator articles are always good reading and he will accept and respond to criticism.
He’s definitely not a “mouthpiece”, he is his own man, even if you might disagree with him on lots.
Since you ask, here is a piece critical of Johnson. E.g. “British Prime Minister Boris Johnson resigned yesterday after a terrible two-and-a-half years in office.”
And here is an interview containing some criticism of Trump.
Sorry for piling on Mike but his specific criticism of Murray tends to blunt free speech and prevent exchange of views so I object to it.
Today in the NYT Tressie McMillan Cottom claims that “The Claudine Gay Debacle Was Never About Merit.” Check out how the top Reader Pick comments describe Cottom’s piece: “no mention of plagiarism”; “deeply out of touch”; “misdirection”; “disingenuous”; “as wrong as humanly possible.”
I don’t think the average NYT subscriber could be characterized as a cynical mouthpiece of the right. Or as a NYT commenter put it, “I greatly enjoy reading comments on articles in the Times. Its readership obviously leans very far to the left, and if an article or column is disagreed with by most readers and found to be too extremely to the left, it is really far left of the mainstream.”
Wikipedia has him listed, and all the links to writings. (Of possible “Douglas Murray”s he looks just like his small photo here.)
He’s right-wing for sure, but that doesn’t mean you should dismiss everything he says. After all, there are plenty of left-wing critics who have never said a GOOD word about Trump. Yes, he’s cynical, but there’s a lot of reasons to be in this day and age.
Mouthpiece is the wrong term, he clearly has his own opinions- and for the record a lot of his criticism of the excesses of the left is correct- however my impression of him is that (unlike say, Sam Harris) he is really only interested in criticising one side.
That is what I really like about Sam Harris. And I think if both sides are criticized by both sides of the political spectrum it would do a lot to reduce the power of the extremes.
While DEI is responsible for some (much?) of the current ‘decline of merit’, I think that began well before DEI, with grade inflation. I remember being stunned, more than 20 years ago when I saw a high school graduating 21 valedictorians (hope no one had to sit through 21 speeches). Even back in the 1980’s I was horrified by how many native english speaking university undergraduates could not write an intelligible paragraph.
It’s bad. 80% of Yalie undergrads got A’s in 2022-23 – a far higher proportion than ever before.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/nyregion/yale-grade-inflation.html#:~:text=At%20Harvard%2C%2079%20percent%20of,to%203.41%20in%202002%2D3.
Note: this is from Greg Mayer:
Harvard may have given Gay a special salary deal, but the $900,000 number seems to be based on no evidence whatsoever. I’ve tried to track down the $900,00 amount, and the oldest source I can find for it is a NY Post article that does not give a source. Outgoing Harvard Presidents have gotten big final payments in the past based on deferred compensation packages. Drew Gilpin Faust (two presidents ago but the most recent for which the data are available) was in office for 11 years, made $1.7 million her last full year, got over $3 million in her final year as president because of deferred compensation, and in 2021 made $450K as a professor. (Footnote: Harvard Presidents get the President’s house, whose use is valued in multiple $100K, so salary figures for the president need to distinguish between salary and compensation, which not all sources do.)
I would not be surprised if Gay’s 2023 compensation is higher than $900K (because of deferred compensation), but I would be surprised if her regular salary exceeds Faust’s by very much. If it does, Faust should renegotiate!
Except for football and basketball coaches, Harvard presidents are among the highest paid people in academia, and no one should mistake them for charity cases. But we just don’t know what Harvard will pay her as a professor.
GCM
I have read several articles, claiming with no proof, that she is going to draw $900,000 as professor. I appreciate you looked into this. The situation is bad enough and sad enough without adding unproven statements about her salary going forward.
The woke and their captive media have almost universally portrayed this as progressive DEI vs far-right conservatives. But the more interesting battleground is old-school progressives/liberals against woke progressives. To the woke, an old-school liberal (like you, Jerry) is tagged as “conservative” or “far-right” when you object to one of their tenets, but that dismissive strategy is starting to fail as people come to see the huge gap between liberal and woke views. Politico got this one right: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/05/claudine-gay-resignation-battle-column-00133820
I couldn’t agree more. I consider myself to be an “old-school liberal” and very few of my longtime friends (with whom I’ve always been politically in sync) are paying close attention to this woke crap. They look at me suspiciously when I discuss my outrage and more than a few of them have asked me if I’m planning on voting for Trump! I’ve been watching this strange convergence of the right and left wondering (worrying?) where it might take us.
My favorite aspect of this whole sorry affair was the idea that one can fix plagiarism simply by going back the documents in question and retrospectively adding some quotation marks where needed. Gay did this to a few of the documents and acted as though this fixed the problem. Kind of like a bank robber returning stolen money to the bank and thinking “It’s all good now”.
Well, this procedure was appropriate in Dr. Gay’s case because, as she explained,
she didn’t know how the quotation marks had been left out when the papers were written. This does raise a question: who writes her papers, if it is not her? Maybe “mediocre mafia” is the wrong term for what is actually an automaton mafia.
Hah. The typist left out the quotation marks. (Just like Nixon’s secretary accidentally erased his tapes.) And what happened to the citations the quotation marks pointed to?
The “accidentally left out the quotation marks” explanation doesn’t even fly, since in many of the suspect paragraphs she has changed the odd word here and there. Which you wouldn’t do if it were intended as a quotation.
Bruce, please, Gay didn’t just fix the citations, she “proactively” fixed them. Huge difference !
Indeed, she “proactively” fixed the citations after first getting her lawyers to tell the New York Post that the allegations of plagiarism were “demonstrably false” and threatening to sue them if they published anything on it. Even bigger difference!
She is the embodiment of militant mediocrity
I used to type other students’ papers for them, for cash, when I was in school. I don’t know what it’s like today but when I was in college it was a rare student that could type well. I had taken a class way back in 7th grade and the skill stuck, giving me a pretty easy way to make a few bucks.
But reading other peoples’ chicken scratch? That was the hardest part!
Note, I’m not saying this is a plausible excuse for Gay! Missing quotation marks and references many times? Over many papers? Over a span of years? Nope, not a remotely believable excuse.
I’m curious, why does a university president, an administrator, need to be highly published?
She started out as an academic and got tenure as an academic before she went into administration. Her record is very thin for a tenured academic at Harvard, and probably wouldn’t get her promoted even at Chicago.
At all the universities I know about the president must be eligible for an appointment as a faculty member in one of the degree-granting departments. S/he is a first among equals, and her equals have tenure and tend to be outspoken know-it-alls (like me and other commenters here), so s/he needs to command respect in order to lead. That respect normally comes from her status as a researcher and scholar. Without that respect s/he is just another apparatchik.
What? You mean the president of an institution of Higher Learning might be just another apparatchik? I am shocked, SHOCKED!
In reality, top administrators in the groves of academe have not infrequently ascended from administrative rather than strictly academic careers. The new wrinkle of the last few years is the inclusion of DEI in the administrative part of such typical resumés. Perhaps that is what they mean by Inclusion.
A thing I learned from looking at her CV:
In 2022 Gay was elected member of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences
https://www.amacad.org/person/claudine-gay
How come? Her scholarly record does not justify this.
We all know the answer: Equity and Kendian anti-racism !
There are so many book titles by Nietzsche that could serve as headlines or epigraphs for this affair — look them up! But ‘Zarathustra’ needs to be substituted by Pritzker.
Hirsi Ali’s phrase “the mediocre mafia” has a nice ring to it, and may be accurate in many cases. But it strikes me as a little too charitable. The mafia in question is no doubt helpful to mediocre academics who parrot the right clichés, but these clichés took hold through an academic enterprise that has been on display for at least 3 decades. Its standards of intellectual clarity are displayed, for example, in the writing of Judith Butler; its standards of intellectual rigor were revealed in the “scholarly” journals which accepted the hoax papers first by Alan Sokal and then by Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose; its standards of factuality are incessantly shown by assertions that a man who identifies as, say, a platypus is a platypus. This is something beyond mediocrity. Whether it (and its mafia) represents psychiatric disorder or just old-fashioned flim-flam, we must leave to analysis by clinicians.