In the wake of Harvard’s DEI president having to resign in disgrace, conservatives are taking a victory lap, progressives are whining or making asses of themselves, and Harvard’s students are breathing a sigh if relief, as their future degrees were being devalued like bitcoin. But before we get to all that, let’s make Barack Obama put his money where is mouth is…

Let’s draft Barack Obama to take over Harvard. Does Obama have the courage of his convictions? Does he possess loyalty to the people and institution who got him where he is today? Is he capable of embarrassment? We can determine all of this and more if the clamor for Obama to be Claudine Gay’s successor becomes loud enough to attract media attention.

Obama has this job for the asking. The Harvard Corporation, which now is seeing its DEI aspirations crumbling before their eyes, is in ethics zugzwang. Their own credibility is shot, as their much-ballyhooed appointment of Gay, already a dean at Harvard, as the first black president there and only the second woman, now looks careless and incompetent. She almost immediately proved that the promotion was the Peter Principle in action, and worse, Harvard’s blue ribbon search committee never vetted her scholarship, which was paltry, inadequate, and sloppy. She is a serial plagiarist. Yesterday it was not only clear that the students were turning against her (and they are a least as leftist as their university overseers), but those mean conservatives at the Washington Free Beacon published evidence of even more plagiarism by Gay after Harvard’s leadership had taken a “Harvard presidents can get away with plagiarism that students can’t” position that was both cowardly and dishonest.

So Gay resigned, proving herself to be an unethical hack in the process by virtually ignoring the academic misconduct issue and blaming her self-fueled ejection on racism. The Harvard leadership then provided an amusing “It isn’t what it is” coda, saying goodbye with a letter calling her all the things she clearly wasn’t, like an effective leader.

Back to the ethics zugzwang: Who can Harvard recruit to succeed Gay that won’t cause more controversy and criticism? Essentially nobody. Harvard faces a challenge to its woke priorities (ideological indoctrination, not superior education, is its mission now, as Ethics Alarms has been pointing for years) flowing from the Supreme Court finding that Old Ivy was discriminating against whites and Asians, so it is almost forced to find another diversity hire like Gay to fight the good fight. Marc Lamont Hill, himself a diversity hire but with the wrong chromosomes, made this clear with a tweet any legitimate scholar would be embarrassed to post (5.5 thousand followers loved it, the morons):

Yet any black woman who is appointed to succeed Gay will look even more like someone hired because of race and gender than Gay did, and worse, she will also be tarred with the rank of second best—to a bad choice. If Harvard appoints a white academic or established leader…

…or, heaven forbid, a Jewish one, Harvard will be seen as a traitor to the cause.

There is only one way out of this mess, and it is delicious: the new Harvard president has to be Barack Obama. Hear me out, now.

I am far from an Obama admirer, as he was a feckless, incompetent and divisive U.S. President. However, leading a major U.S. university, even one under the microscope as much as Harvard, is a lot easier and straightforward than being in the White House. The skills and advantages Obama has—speaking, political wiliness, government connections, an extreme progressive orientation, gravitas, presumed competence by having had the Big Job, and the unshakable admiration and fealty of the Left will all work to the former President’s advantage in Cambridge. He is also black, obviously. That he isn’t a female (or handicapped, unless we regard toxic narcissism as a disability) won’t matter, because Harvard having the only black President installed in Massachusetts Hall is even better.

Obama would increase Harvard”s prestige. Two Ivy League schools have had U.S. Presidents reign there—Princeton (Wilson) and Columbia (Eisenhower), but in both cases the men were on the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, not coming from there. Obama would be aces at fundraising. He would have the instant approval of virtually all Harvard students, alumni and faculty. He would surely be able to navigate skillfully the kinds of problems and challenges—like tough questioning from a Republican at a Congressional hearing—that caused Gay to whiff.

In short, he’s perfect. (Stop talking up Michelle Obama: her Harvard Law degree isn’t enough to qualify her. She is not a scholar —at least Barack pretended to be—and she has little leadership experience. Harvard has to appoint someone with at least as strong a resume as Claudine Gay.)

Here’s “the beauty part”: if Obama is president of Harvard, he won’t be able to be the Wizard of Oz during the 2024 election cycle, pulling the strings and levers behind the curtain. What will also discourage him from taking the job is money—Obama has devoted his retirement to cashing in. Yet if he has any sense of responsibility to Harvard, he should make this sacrifice. Harvard Law School admitted him as an affirmative action student; this can be safely assumed because of how scrupulously his academic record has been kept from public view. Harvard played a large role in his assent. Moreover, Obama’s fingerprints were all over Gay’s appointment, and he lobbied to keep her in the job after she fell flat on her face before Congress. The Harvard Corporation board is stuffed with his cronies.

Barack got Harvard into this hole, and he is obligated to get the school out of it.

I set up a Change.Org petition to see if enough people will sign it to make some noise. I know it’s a long-shot: thousands will have to sign to qualify as newsworthy. But you never know. I want Obama to show the country just how committed he is to the values he claims to embrace.

The link to the petition is here.