There were two major stories with ethics implications that arrived last evening after I had closed down Ethics Alarms for the night. Both involved institutions that involve lifetime connections for me. I’d prefer to write about the astounding $700,000,000 contract baseball’s biggest star Shohei Otahni signed—and will—but first I must again deal with another Harvard issue.

Late yesterday,the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill, resigned, and the school’s chairman of the board followed with his own resignation a couple of hours later. Magill was one of three elite college presidents who embarrassed themselves and their employers with offensive, legalistic answers to pointed questions from Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) regarding their school’s tolerance of anti-Semitism on their campus in the wake of the October Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, and their weak responses to demonstrations on their campuses that could fairly be called threatening to Jewish students.

UPenn’s situation became critical when alumnus Ross Stevens announced that he was withdrawing a gift worth around $100 million. That would be a significant loss even for Harvard, whose endowment exceeds the treasuries of many nations. The resignation immediately focused attention on Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president of just a couple of months, whose responses to Stefanik’s withering cross-examination in the Congressional hearing were extremely similar to Magill’s. The resignation of all three women was called for in an unusual letter signed by 72 members of Congress, many of them Democrats.

MIT President Sally A. Kornbluth, the third inept president, had performed slightly better than her two counterparts at the Ivy League schools, though not by much. MIT leadership quickly gave her a public vote of confidence, reflecting, I think, the school’s calculation that its non-humanities and non-social sciences focus as well as its traditional position as only the second most famous university in Cambridge, Mass. would allow the controversy there to calm down sufficiently so it could get back to what the institution really cares about: technology, ones and zeros, and engineering. It is a cynical response, but a safe one.

Harvard has the opposite situation. Whatever the various arbitrary rating systems say, it is the most famous and prestigious U.S. university, and it relies on that status continuing in perpetuity. Harvard has survived scandals, conflicts and missteps before, but the past few years have been filled with more than than most centuries have held for the school. In addition, it has become more extreme politically and ideologically committed to the far Left than at any other time in its history. Harvard was recently slapped down by the U.S. Supreme Court, which (accurately) told it that its admissions policies illegally discriminated against Asians and whites. Gay’s hesitant, rote answers to Stefanik’s angry questioning went viral on YouTube; this was literally the last thing Harvard needed.

With Magill so quickly resigning, the obvious questions are whether Gay should leave as well, and will she. The first is very easy to answer: she should resign. She has, as documented in earlier posts here, revealed total incompetence and a lack of ethical clarity in her responses to the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas, pro- Palestinian advocacy at Harvard. She tried three times to get it right before her failure in Washington. After the uproar over her responses to Stefanik, she issued a weak, leftist buzzwords-marred apology. That’s…let’s see… strike five?

Gay was selected to replace outgoing president Bacow to send the defiant message that Harvard would not back down in its dedication to DEI orthodoxy despite the SCOTUS ban on affirmative action. She is a lifetime devotee of the movement, performing research and producing scholarly works about systemic racism, social justice and compensatory policies to elevate minority communities long before the George Floyd Freakout. For an “equity” expert to appear to condone racist and genocidal advocacy on her campus is likely to permanently hobble her credibility and influence, making Gay, as president, an anchor on Harvard’s standing on the public’s cognitive dissonance scale for as long as she’s in that position.

For Harvard, that’s a catastrophe. If Gay is courageous, principled, loyal to the institution she has already served as a dean and able to perceive the hopelessness of her dilemma, she will resign before the benefactors start backing out. If Harvard’s leadership was competent and could accept that it made a terrible error in selecting her in the first place, it would tell her that the choice is to resign gracefully or fired.

But the answer to the second question, whether Gay will leave either on her own or after being dismissed, is almost certainly “no.”

The Harvard Crimson (which has published opinion pieces critical of Israel in the last month) finds that the lack of an MIT-style vote of confidence from the Board of Trustees supporting Gay is an ominous sign for her future. I don’t. Gay has issued too many ineffective walk-backs, apologies and “what I really meant to say was” statements already. She is probably deep in meetings with university leadership, deans and influential alumni regarding next steps as I write this.

Harvard will not fire Gay, and I will be stunned if she resigns. Already, the Harvard network is engaged in deflections and spin: I see its fingerprints all over the New York Times piece yesterday that blames the lawyers who prepped Gay for her testimony. (The same law firm, WilmerHale. prepped both Gay and Magill, which explains the similarity in their words. Good job!) Harvard’s The Harvard Corporation — the University’s highest governing body, is led by Penny S. Pritzker. The “old girls network” these days is at least as insular and powerful as the Old Boy’s Network of yore: unless there’s another Gay gaffe, Pritzger’s not going to turn on one of her own. As I mentioned in a previous post, Gay is also black, the first black Harvard president, and, like another prominent affirmative action hire, the Vice-President, would have to be caught running a child sex ring or something of equivalent evil to get herself fired. Harvard loudly cheered itself for this “historic” move. Then there’s this: she’s not gay, but most people, including Harvard alums, think she is. Her attire is unisex, her head is shaved, and she’s named “Gay.”

The main reason the right thing—Gay’s removal—won’t occur, however, is that bias makes Harvard stupid, and arrogance makes Harvard really stupid. The culture of the university now is so thoroughly woke and left wing that it can’t perceive that Gay’s comments in Congress were wrong. The problem, as Harvard sees it, is that those evil conservatives trapped poor Claudine: Republican pounced. The only alumni who are upset because of what she said are dinosaurs, and Harvard doesn’t care what they think. They’re on “the wrong side of history,” after all. Donations? Ha! Harvard could spend the winter burning cash to warm the dorms in Harvard Yard. This is Harvard, the GOAT of universities. Like AT&T in Lily Tomlin’s “Ernestine” sketches, they don’t care because they don’t have to care.

Harvard really thinks like that, and it’s worked for over 400 years. Why would they change now?

I am certain that this time, that approach will prove to be a terrible mistake.