Scott Tibbs
Come down off the cross, Claudine Gay. You are not a victim.
By Scott Tibbs, January 19, 2024
Claudine Gay was not fired because of a "racist" or "white supremacist" attack on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs. She was not fired as part of an attack on "uppity" Black women, despite a
New York Times columnist
pretending that "as Black women have raised their profiles, they’ve raised some right-wing hackles, making them targets of political aggression." Claudine Gay was fired because of her own behavior.
It is possible to believe that the attacks on Gay, and the plagiarism scandal that ended her tenure as Harvard's president, were made in bad faith. One could argue that this is an example of scalp-collecting by the Right. We can have a discussion about that. But academic integrity has been taken seriously at institutions of higher learning for a very long time, and Gay broke those standards. If she had not made serious ethical errors in her "scholarship," she would not have been vulnerable to attacks, whether made in "bad faith" or not.
The plagiarism scandal might have never been exposed if Gay had not petulantly refused to apply Harvard's standards on student conduct to people openly calling for the genocide of Jews when asked about it in a Congressional hearing. The hypocrisy was obvious: Harvard has long had restrictive speech codes, and no one thought that people screaming for the death of Jews would go unpunished if they were white supremacists. Gay made herself a target - not because she is Black, but because she is a virulent anti-Semite.
Some of this is because of the rancid "never back down, never compromise, never apologize" mentality that has poisoned our politics. Gay, faced with an indignant Republican member of Congress, could not stomach giving a "win" to a political opponent and refused to agree with her. But the reality is that sometimes the opposite political party does make reasonable points. It poisons our political culture when both Republicans and Democrats petulantly refuse to admit when the other side is clearly right. We have far too many people putting partisanship over principle.
Claudine Gay is not a martyr. It is time for Gay and her hyper-partisan defenders to come down off the cross. They beclowned themselves by climbing up there to begin with, and continuing to cry "racism" and "persecution" only makes them look worse. The best thing to do when you make these kinds of blunders is to recognize and apologize, rather than triple down on it.
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