Last week, Jews everywhere rejoiced in the news that Claudine Gay, the President of Harvard, had been removed from her post. Gay’s troubles began when she could not categorically state that calling for the genocide of Jews in Harvard was against the school’s student code of conduct. While Harvard stood by her, this opened the floodgates for scrutiny, as her detractors went on a crusade to find the over 50 instances of plagiarism in her “scholarly” works. As the number of uncredited sources mounted, Harvard was no longer able to defend their president, and Gay was removed from her post. While her inability to denounce genocide was not the ultimate reason for her departure, it certainly opened the door to it.
However, it is the reaction of her backers that should cause us all to pause. In a debate between Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Reihan Salam, Kara Swisher, and Jonah Goldberg, we found out that the fact that Gay was a plagiarist does not matter, because as Swisher put it, the reason we even found out that this was an issue was because of a racially-motivated attack. Regardless of there being no proof to that, Goldberg fired back that it does not change the fact that she plagiarized. To this, there was no response.
And that is the point. How are we supposed to criticize someone who deserves criticism if the response is, “You’re only saying that because this person is a minority.” In other words, if there’s a person who absolutely deserves criticism, how can this person be criticized fairly? Here you have a person who by all accounts has done something bad. Her actions were objectively wrong. How can we present this criticism in a way that it appears has nothing to do with her race? The answer is: We can’t.
The reason we can’t is due to how Claudine Gay is presented. If you look at all of the headlines prior to her testimony, there is a glaringly obvious way in which she was presented:
Harvard Crimson: “Claudine Gay Takes Office, Officially Becoming Harvard’s First Black President”
New York Times: “Harvard Names a New President, an Insider and Historic First”
Yahoo News: “Claudine Gay named as Harvard’s first Black president”
The list goes on and on. Gay was always tied to her race. Therefore, she was always set up as representing all black people. If you criticize her, you are criticizing what she represents. That makes you a racist. It is a no-win situation. She is above reproach simply for the color of her skin.
The criticism of Gay is highly reminiscent of another criticism we have to deal with today: Israel. Now wait, wait. Don’t hurt my family; they have nothing to do with this. But this question of how can we criticize without seeming racist is the exact thing that critics of Israel have been asking for decades. And the answer to that is simple: Nobody has ever claimed that Israel is above reproach. All you have to do is hold Israel to the same standards that you hold the rest of the world to. Israel should not be treated any differently. If you are going to examine human rights violations in Israel, make sure you examine Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, Venezuela, and every other country the same way. If you are not going to do that, and in fact, hold Israel to a different standard, then yeah, you’re racist.
Now let’s look at how other universities have handled similar situations to the one in which Gay placed Harvard. First, on the anti-Semitism side, two other universities, Penn and MIT, also had their presidents testify in front of Congress, and each gave equally terrible answers. Liz Magill’s answers were bad enough for the University of Pennsylvania to fire her within the week. She even took Penn’s Chairman of the Board with her. Gay was able to last a month until her ouster. Clearly, there does not seem to be any favoritism shown to the white president of Penn over the black president of Harvard. But I hear you saying, “Sally Kornbluth is still at MIT!” We’ll get to her.
The next step is to determine if Gay is being mistreated on the plagiarism charge because she is black. So let’s look at other recent instances of university presidents who have been accused of plagiarism. In 2021, Bob Caslen was forced to resign from the University of South Carolina amidst a controversy where he was accused of plagiarizing parts of his commencement speech in 2021. That’s right - not a published work, not the paper he used to obtain his doctorate, but his commencement speech. In 2023, Stanford University accepted the resignation of its president, Mark Tessier-Lavigne, after allegations of falsifying data in several papers he co-authored. The false data on the five papers in question could not be linked to Tessier-Lavigne, but his name was on the papers, so out he went. You can use your imagination to determine the race of these two individuals.
In fact, Gay was given a longer leash than most would. She started with 16 allegations, of which Harvard cleared her of any wrongdoing. It was not until the number ballooned to fifty (FIFTY!) and counting that the university felt it had no choice.
And what about Sally Kornbluth? Well just this week, billionaire Bill Ackman, disgusted that Kornbluth still has a job, announced his investment into looking through the MIT President’s published works to see if there are any improprieties in her citations. That is because one’s bad actions welcome scrutiny into all areas of life - and it don’t matter if you’re black or white.
Izzo Zwiren works in healthcare administration, constantly concerning himself with the state of healthcare politics. The topic of healthcare has led Izzo to become passionate about a variety of political issues affecting our country today. Aside from politics, Izzo is a fan of trivia, stand-up comedy, and the New York Giants. Izzo lives on Long Island with his wife and two adorable, hilarious daughters.
