Dr. Tom Woods had weighed in on the Claudine Gay saga. Dr. Woods is saying out loud for everyone to hear what most of us have at least been thinking.
Claudine Gay may have resigned in disgrace as president of Harvard University, but she is in no way chastened by the experience, and in fact took to the pages of the New York Times to portray herself as (what else?) the victim.
The result illustrates the extraordinary lack of self-awareness that all our elites share, but which is especially striking coming from Claudine Gay.
For instance, if you can believe it, the former Harvard president writes, “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.”
In Harvard the forces against the exposition of the truth started in President Gay’s office. How many members of Gay’s staff were conservatives who believe in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as expressed in our founding documents? How many were moderates? How many such individual students on campus were afraid to express their opinions? Where was the diversity of opinion that is supposed to be so valued in college life?
Gay… presided over an institution whose intellectual life is one of stultifying intellectual conformity and who politicized hiring, admissions, and even which portraits were to hang inside campus buildings.
She says people who “relentlessly campaigned to oust me since the fall often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not reasoned argument.”
Oh, really? So when your defenders said the campaign against you was based on “white supremacy,” you considered that a “reasoned argument”?
And then of course it’s time for the boo-hoo-I’m-a-black-woman-and-that-scares-people speech:
“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.”
Actually Claudine Gay is the ideal canvas for what happens when someone who Is not qualified for a job winds up messing up royally. One of the functions of a college or university president is to ensure the flow of alumni donations to the entity in question. Harvard is currently facing a seven figure shortfall in that arena. In addition, early admission requests are down significantly. Apparently many parents are recognizing that Harvard may not be the place for their youngsters.
Dr. Woods continues:
And it is not lost on the rest of us, Claudine, that had you belonged to a different race you wouldn’t have been president of Harvard in the first place. The reign of terror whereby people feared stating the obvious like this is rapidly coming to an end.
Then this whopper:
“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.”
As you return to “scholarship,” Claudine? You mean the grand total of 11 articles over two decades, all of them about race and gender, topics by which so many mediocrities make their careers? How about the 50+ examples of plagiarism, which don’t even merit a mention in your apologia?
And who exactly is seeking to “undermine” the university? Could it be people who hire only those who are ideological clones of themselves, people who reject academically outstanding students so that far weaker ones can take their places, and people who consistently want to throw out objective tests?
The best part of all, though, is her “warning” that the campaign against her was part of a larger strategy to “unravel public faith in pillars of American society…. 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.”
You’re darn right, Claudine. We fully intend to do just that, because we shouldn’t have trusted these institutions to begin with — especially”public health agencies,” which have been doing the work of undermining themselves for us since 2020.
Bravo, Dr. Woods!