A Gay Fisking

Claudine tells the truth but doesn't realize it

Claudine “DEI Hire” Gay had a weepy self-pitying editorial published in the NY Slimes (archive) which is more or less what you’d expect from her whiny resignation letter. What I find somewhat amusing is that she accidentally tells the truth in spots, so I think it is worth going over the piece and giving it a thorough fisking.

Let’s start with the headline to the editorial

Claudine Gay: What Just Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me

This headline is correct. It is bigger than her. She is just the lucky person who rode the DEI wave to the top just as it smashed up against the rocks of reality.

On Tuesday, I made the wrenching but necessary decision to resign as Harvard’s president. For weeks, both I and the institution to which I’ve devoted my professional life have been under attack. My character and intelligence have been impugned. My commitment to fighting antisemitism has been questioned. My inbox has been flooded with invective, including death threats. I’ve been called the N-word more times than I care to count.

Again, it is true that she and Harvard have been under attack for weeks. That’s what happens when people see on their phones and TVs just what kind of a place Harvard has become under a leadership that seems to have put DEI and other wokery ahead of actual scholarly activity and that is willing to tolerate behavior against jews that it does not tolerate in other contexts to coin a phrase.

Gay’s character and intelligence have been attacked because her public appearences have made it look like she has the character and intelligence of a worm. Her commitment to fighting antisemitism has been questioned because she failed to come out and fight antisemitism before she was forced to after trying to weasel around it and put it in context.

I’m sad that she’s been insulted with racial epithets and received death threats, but one can’t help but think that if she’d acted decisively and in a timely manner when jewish students at her university were insulted with racial epithets and received death threats then she wouldn’t be in this mess.

My hope is that by stepping down I will deny demagogues the opportunity to further weaponize my presidency in their campaign to undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth.

I can not of course speak for all demagogues but most of the critics of Gay and Harvard are all in favor of “excellence, openness, independence, truth”, they just feel that Harvard itself no longer is and that Gay’s actions as FAS Dean and then President have been some of the causes for Harvard’s failures regarding those ideals

As I depart, I must offer a few words of warning. The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader.

Completely correct.

This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda. But such campaigns don’t end there.

Gay is of course well aware of this as she has herself attacked education and expertise. The examples of Roland Fryer, Ronald Sullivan and Carole Hooven come to mind as John Cochrane points out in his substack article

Argue Honesty in the Claudine Gay Affair

Why do I think Gay should go? Because she persecuted Roland Fryer, the brilliant Black economist who inconveniently found the “wrong” results in a classic study of race and policing. Because she fired Ronald Sullivan, also incidentally Black, who had the temerity to provide legal counsel to Harvey Weinstein, from his faculty dean position. The great defender of free speech and academic freedom before Congress found that the mere act of having provided Weinstein legal counsel made students feel “unsafe.” She forced Carole Hooven to resign, for teaching that sex is “binary and biological” in a biology class. She led efforts to expand “teaching in the broad domain of ethnicity, indigeneity, and migration.” (Two Blacks and a woman. If you hadn’t figured it out, this is about politics, not race).

Anyway back to Gay’s words

Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organizations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility. For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal.

The coordinated attempts are only coordinated in that the various people criticizing these institutions are moved to point out that the institutions are biased and/or lying. Their leaders have lost their credibility by blatantly misleading the population and/or by acting either incompetently, maliciously or both. Anthony Fauci being the poster geriatric old man of this

And yes we want these institutions to be reformed because we have absolutely no trust in them at present, and that includes Harvard even with Gay no longer as president.

Yes, I made mistakes. In my initial response to the atrocities of Oct. 7, I should have stated more forcefully what all people of good conscience know: Hamas is a terrorist organization that seeks to eradicate the Jewish state. And at a congressional hearing last month, I fell into a well-laid trap. I neglected to clearly articulate that calls for the genocide of Jewish people are abhorrent and unacceptable and that I would use every tool at my disposal to protect students from that kind of hate.

Here Gay shows she totally misunderstands what mistakes were made. It wasn’t whether she stated or not that Hamass is a terror organization, it was that she failed utterly to stop antisemitic physical and verbal attacks on her campus after Oct. 7. And she only fell into a “well laid trap” because she was, even then, unable to speak in clear definitive sentences. If she had said at the hearing something like “I was too hesitant in condemning the antisemitism on display at Harvard and the administration is now looking to visit sanctions including explusion for those who are found to have comitted antisemitic acts” she’d still have a job. She could even have stuck in a free-speech bit at the end if she wanted to appear like she believed in freedom of expression. But that’s not what she did and not what she said. In fact it is unclear to me what exactly she has done in the last month “to protect students from that kind of hate”, and I suspect the answer is very little.

Most recently, the attacks have focused on my scholarship. My critics found instances in my academic writings where some material duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution. I believe all scholars deserve full and appropriate credit for their work. When I learned of these errors, I promptly requested corrections from the journals in which the flagged articles were published, consistent with how I have seen similar faculty cases handled at Harvard.

“When I learned of these errors” is a funny way to say “when I was caught plagiarizing” because many of “these errors” were made back in the time before google scholar and the like made most papers available online. Gay learned of these errors when she typed in the text from the printed paper copies of the articles she was plagiarizing.

It is also notable she says this is “consistent with how I have seen similar faculty cases handled at Harvard” which is an interesting admission because it suggests that non-faculty might be handled differently. Perhaps in fact non-faculty are expected to subscribe to the Harvard code and not plagiarize while faculty are allowed to play fast and loose with the rules, particularly (one suspects) if the faculty is a favored member in good standing with the DEI enforcement brigades.

I have never misrepresented my research findings, nor have I ever claimed credit for the research of others. Moreover, the citation errors should not obscure a fundamental truth: I proudly stand by my work and its impact on the field.

Her work has, in fact, had very little impact on the field. Unlike, say, fellow Boston area university president, Sally Kornbluth of MIT, who is a named author in at least 100 papers which have been cited over 14000 times.

Despite the obsessive scrutiny of my peer-reviewed writings, few have commented on the substance of my scholarship, which focuses on the significance of minority office holding in American politics. My research marshaled concrete evidence to show that when historically marginalized communities gain a meaningful voice in the halls of power, it signals an open door where before many saw only barriers. And that, in turn, strengthens our democracy.

Well the few includes people vehemently complaining about the irreproducability of her results due to her lack of proper data archiving and her (mis)use of a statistical technique of dubious value in one of the papers used to achieve tenure.

These scholars asked Claudine Gay for her data. She said no.

Other than that no one bothered because it had all been said.

Throughout this work, I asked questions that had not been asked, used then-cutting-edge quantitative research methods and established a new understanding of representation in American politics. This work was published in the nation’s top political science journals and spawned important research by other scholars.

One of the important pieces of research was a debunking of the statistical technique she used. Unmentioned is the fact that when questions were asked about how to verify her results she failed to provide a helpful answer.

Never did I imagine needing to defend decades-old and broadly respected research, but the past several weeks have laid waste to truth. Those who had relentlessly campaigned to oust me since the fall often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not reasoned argument. They recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament. They pushed a false narrative of indifference and incompetence.

Actually the “narrative of indifference and incompetence” was more broadly directed at grievance studies scholars and Political Science in general and how unscientific it was. Gay could defend her decades old research by releasing the raw data so that others could reproduce it. This ought to be a simple thing unless she is in fact indifferent and incompetent.

It is not lost on me that I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses: a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution. Someone who views diversity as a source of institutional strength and dynamism. Someone who has advocated a modern curriculum that spans from the frontier of quantum science to the long-neglected history of Asian Americans. Someone who believes that a daughter of Haitian immigrants has something to offer to the nation’s oldest university.

The generational change is irrelevant. The problem of the demographic change is that the new demographic appears to be, how to put it, less academically gifted. And Gay is indeed an ideal canvas for projecting anxieties about “diversity” because she has done her best to enforce an intellectual monoculture of people with a variety of skin colors. The “long-neglected history of Asian Americans” should include the modern history where universities like Harvard under Gay explicitly discriminated against them in order to fill the place with intellectually less gifted minorities who then either drop out or have to be helped to achieve even a bare passing grade. Someone like, say, Claudine Gay. It shouldn’t matter whether a person is a daughter of Haitian immigrants, a daughter of Alabama sharecroppers, so long as they can handle the effort. Talking about it reminds me of this Heinlein quote:

This sad little lizard told me that he was a Brontosaurus on his mother’s side. I did not laugh; people who boast of ancestry often have little else to sustain them. Humoring them costs nothing and adds to happiness in a world in which happiness is in short supply.

Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) American writer

The fact that Gay has to mention this shows precisely why we wanted her out.

I still believe that. As I return to teaching and scholarship, I will continue to champion access and opportunity, and I will bring to my work the virtue I discussed in the speech I delivered at my presidential inauguration: courage. Because it is courage that has buoyed me throughout my career and it is courage that is needed to stand up to those who seek to undermine what makes universities unique in American life.

It takes courage to stand in front of a mob of wokeist students and tell them to stop being antisemitic or else. Gay didn’t do that. Gay has also entirely failed to defend her “scholarship” by doing simple things like providing the raw data and code. Courage is not needed to play the diversity card to get promotions and to stab people in the back career-wise from positions of authority.

Having now seen how quickly the truth can become a casualty amid controversy, I’d urge a broader caution: At tense moments, every one of us must be more skeptical than ever of the loudest and most extreme voices in our culture, however well organized or well connected they might be. Too often they are pursuing self-serving agendas that should be met with more questions and less credulity.

Pot, meet kettle. I mean seriously, Gay has just summed up the argument many of us have with “the loudest and most extreme voices” in the trans-activist and antifa groups.

College campuses in our country must remain places where students can learn, share and grow together, not spaces where proxy battles and political grandstanding take root. Universities must remain independent venues where courage and reason unite to advance truth, no matter what forces set against them.

Pot, meet kettle. Again. One of the many complaints against Gay is that she is often part of the forces set against truth, courage and reason. And she herself has indeed performed political grandstanding herself on a variety of subjects and arguably this editorial is one of them.

The reason Gay was “picked on” was not because of the color of her skin, the bits between her legs or her background. She was picked on because she has risen to the top without in fact producing any scholarship that anyone cares about except to poke holes in. Her main skills appear to be working the bureaucracy and maneuvering in the shadows to “fix” problems for herself and those she owes. I’m sure that people are looking at Sally Kornbluth’s tenure as president at MIT, and I’m fairly sure it’s not that pretty, but no one can seriously challenge her past as a productive resesarcher. Gay’s problem was that once she came to non-academic attention people could trivially challenge her past because she was a singularly unproductive resesarcher.

Now that Gay no longer has the burden of administration, I’m sure she’ll be right on defending her scholarship by making her data available for replication and writing numerous new research papers on more recent elections. Perhaps an analysis of the voting trends in the 2020 election?

No doubt she’ll be getting on that starting Monday, right?

PS if you haven’t read it, please read my other piece on Claudine Gay