I’m going to begin this examination of the disgraced ex-Harvard president’s reprehensible op-ed in the Times by arguably “poisoning the well.” I am stating up front that her essay, titled “What Just Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me,” is one of the most self-damning public statements I have ever encountered. Right now I can think of only two examples from the past that even approach it: Richard Nixon’s angry and pitiful “You won’t have Richard Nixon to kick around any more” attack on the press when he lost his 1962 bid to become Governor of California, and Hillary Clinton’s deliberate disinformation in defense of her lying husband, when she told Today’s Matt Lauer in 1998 that the Lewinsky scandal was the fault of a “politically motivated” prosecutor allied with a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” But Gay’s op-ed is worse, far worse, than either of those. Just a few days ago, I felt sorry for Gay: I imagined her stunning fall to feel like Jackie Robinson would have felt if he had become the trailblazing black man who broke through baseball’s apartheid, only bat .176 and field so poorly that the Dodgers shipped him to the low minor leagues. Gay’s op-ed, however, in its attempt to claim victim and martyr status and to refuse to accept personal responsibility, is the equivalent of that alternate-reality Jackie claiming that the umpires, fans and sportswriters conspired against him. It stands as a decisive indictment not just of her own poor character, but of the ideology and the movement she represents. I have no sympathy with her at all, and Harvard’s selection of her is decisively proven irresponsible and incompetent by her own words.

I’m going to go through the entire, ugly thing, making observations as I try to keep my gorge down. Ready or not, here it comes…

“On Tuesday, I made the wrenching but necessary decision to resign as Harvard’s president. For weeks, both I and the institution to which I’ve devoted my professional life have been under attack. My character and intelligence have been impugned. My commitment to fighting antisemitism has been questioned. My inbox has been flooded with invective, including death threats. I’ve been called the N-word more times than I care to count.”

Observation: Gay begins by implying that the “attacks”—in fact, legitimate criticism— were not justified by her own high profile words and conduct. Her own words impugned her character, just as her ope-ed does. Her intelligence was implicated by her dead-headed responses to Rep. Stefanik in the Congressional hearing—I talked to many fellow Harvard alums who expressed their shock that a Harvard president couldn’t handle herself with more dignity, skill and articulateness than Gay did—and her lame “apology” afterwards. Her commitment to fighting antisemitism was questioned because she didn’t do anything to fight antisemitism, and when questioned about the acceptable nature of expressions of anti-semitism on the Harvard campus, she said it depended on the “context.” As for Gay’s inbox content and the alleged racial slurs, both are irrelevant to the matter at hand, and she knows it. She is appealing to emotion and racial distrust. Any prominent figure in the United States gets hate mail. Heck, I get hate mail.

“My hope is that by stepping down I will deny demagogues the opportunity to further weaponize my presidency in their campaign to undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth.”

Observation: She’s attempting to frame her resignation, almost certainly negotiated with Harvard’s leadership, as a voluntary and noble sacrifice. In truth, she had no choice. Some of her critics are demagogues, but being demagogues doesn’t make them wrong. Gay’s conduct and words are what undermined the ideals animating Harvard since its founding, not the legitimate criticism of them. Her scholarship was not sufficiently excellent to lead a great educational institution. She was not open about her sources and her use of the work of other scholars. She proved that, far from being independent, she was in thrall of ideological extremists. As for truth, her op-ed itself is a lie.

“As I depart, I must offer a few words of warning. The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader. This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda. But such campaigns don’t end there. 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. For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal.”

Observation: Gay, as you can see in that nauseating passage, accepts no responsibility for her own fate. Instead, she tries to frame it as proof of a ”vast right wing conspiracy,” despite the fact that prominent figures from all sides were calling for her resignation. Her deflections are as throbbing an example of the “It isn’t what it is” device, of late so popular among Gay’s compatriots, as we are likely to see. Harvard, as I have extensively (but still incompletely) documented for years, has unraveled public faith in higher education by its own behavior. Harvard and most of the rest of academia have been purveyors of propaganda, not the victims of it. Gay proved beyond a reasonable doubt that she had no “expertise” as a leader, and that her expertise as a scholar was fraudulently achieved. News organizations, which leftists like Gay admire because they are unethically committed to the same goals they are, are already distrusted because they have revealed themselves as untrustworthy. Like Gay, they have undermined their own credibility: the left-biased news media is undermining it further by its reporting of Gay’s demise. Cynicism has flourished because the Harvard Corporation debased itself and the institution it was obligated to protect by minimizing Gay’s academic misconduct in defiance of Harvrard’s own stated standards.

“Yes, I made mistakes. In my initial response to the atrocities of Oct. 7, I should have stated more forcefully what all people of good conscience know: Hamas is a terrorist organization that seeks to eradicate the Jewish state. And at a congressional hearing last month, I fell into a well-laid trap. I neglected to clearly articulate that calls for the genocide of Jewish people are abhorrent and unacceptable and that I would use every tool at my disposal to protect students from that kind of hate.”

Observation: The question is not whether Gay “made mistakes,” but what she did right, which was virtually nothing. Mistakes is what George Santos admits to; Bill Clinton, Jeffery Epstein,Harvey Weinstein, Pete Rose: name the villain or failure, and they will admit to “mistakes.” And what a “trap”! She was asked to unequivocally declare that Harvard does not tolerate support for genocide and terrorism aimed at Jews and Jewish students on campus.

“Most recently, the attacks have focused on my scholarship. My critics found instances in my academic writings where some material duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution. I believe all scholars deserve full and appropriate credit for their work. When I learned of these errors, I promptly requested corrections from the journals in which the flagged articles were published, consistent with how I have seen similar faculty cases handled at Harvard. I have never misrepresented my research findings, nor have I ever claimed credit for the research of others. Moreover, the citation errors should not obscure a fundamental truth: I proudly stand by my work and its impact on the field.”

Observation: There we have what Gay calls ”excellence, openness—and truth.” The number of instances of plagiarism in her work have now approached 50. You know: “some.” The repeated conduct describes a pattern, and the pattern is carelessness, sloppiness, and intentional theft. Gay couldn’t even write her own introduction. And there she is with her “truth” again: we are supposed to ne impressed that she is “proud” of her shoddy work.

“Despite the obsessive scrutiny of my peer-reviewed writings, few have commented on the substance of my scholarship, which focuses on the significance of minority office holding in American politics. My research marshaled concrete evidence to show that when historically marginalized communities gain a meaningful voice in the halls of power, it signals an open door where before many saw only barriers. And that, in turn, strengthens our democracy.Throughout this work, I asked questions that had not been asked, used then-cutting-edge quantitative research methods and established a new understanding of representation in American politics. This work was published in the nation’s top political science journals and spawned important research by other scholars. “

Observation: Wait—what? Are we supposed to hold her to lower standards because the subject of her scholarly writing is so inherently virtuous? It should make no difference if her scholarship involved the brain chemistry of woodpeckers as a result of repeated head trauma. Plagiarism is plagiarism. The scrutiny of a Harvard president’s scholarly writing isn’t “obsessive”; the failure of those who hired her as a professor, a dean and president to apply such scrutiny was negligent.

Never did I imagine needing to defend decades-old and broadly respected research, but the past several weeks have laid waste to truth. Those who had relentlessly campaigned to oust me since the fall often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not reasoned argument. They recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament. They pushed a false narrative of indifference and incompetence.

Observation: Gay didn’t expect to have to defend her research because she thought she had gotten away with her short-cuts. She accuses her critics of ad hominem insults while calling her critics racists. How is the narrative of indifference and incompetence false, when she is displaying indifference to her academic misconduct in this very screed, and her incompetence as a university president is a matter of record?

“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. Someone who views diversity as a source of institutional strength and dynamism. Someone who has advocated a modern curriculum that spans from the frontier of quantum science to the long-neglected history of Asian Americans. Someone who believes that a daughter of Haitian immigrants has something to offer to the nation’s oldest university.”

Observation: Isn’t that depressing? Her argument shows how crippling the black victim mentality that Gay has spent a career seeding and supporting can be. She cannot accept her own flaws. She cannot take responsibility for her own failure. She must frame it, indeed believe it to be, the result of racism and revenge against an advocate for racial justice—even though it is beyond argument that the only reason Gay was selected as president was that she is black and spent her career advocated the DEI cant, and even though a white male Harvard president with her proven deficits not only would have been jettisoned, but would have had leave even more quickly than she did. Gay is deluded. She thinks she is a victim, even though she is going to still be allowed to teach at Harvard as a tenured professor with a massive salary, despite violating Harvard’s standards of scholarship.

“I still believe that. 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.”

Observation: Again: #64, Yoo’s Rationalization: It isn’t what it is. Gay is pronouncing herself courageosu, but her own words in the past three months have marked her as a coward. She did not have the courage and integrity to oppose the woke mob by clearly and assertively opposing anti-Semitism at Harvard. She did not have the courage to tell the truth in the House hearing, and she doesn’t have the courage and integrity now to say, “I’m sorry. I let everybody down, including Harvard and myself.”

“Having now seen how quickly the truth can become a casualty amid controversy, I’d urge a broader caution: At tense moments, every one of us must be more skeptical than ever of the loudest and most extreme voices in our culture, however well organized or well connected they might be. Too often they are pursuing self-serving agendas that should be met with more questions and less credulity.“

Observation: How can one react moderately and maturely to such stunning hypocrisy? “I’m rubber and you’re glue…”?

“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.”

Observation: That final paragraph is, at long last, something everyone can agree with. I would only add that campuses can only achieve this ideal if the participation of hacks and frauds like Claudine Gay is kept to a minimum.

Added: This is probably as close as the New York Times will ever come to calling “B.S.” on an op-ed. From Times Opinion Editor Kathleen Kingsbury:

“Harvard has often commanded outsized interest and curiosity from people across the United States and the world, including from many of us who never attended college there or lack direct ties to it. The reason was clear and uncontested for many decades: Harvard stood as one of America’s great institutions, a molder of many of the thinkers, leaders, artists and experts who shaped societies and global affairs. In more recent years, the interest in Harvard has become more complicated, and even problematized, as the campus has become a high-profile setting to watch some of society’s thorniest debates and tensions play out — a source of object lessons for some and a high-profile target for others. So it has been in recent months with arguments over the Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza, campus antisemitism, the principles and limits of free speech and, more recently, the leadership and record of its president, Claudine Gay, who resigned Tuesday facing fresh allegations of plagiarism in her academic work. On Wednesday evening, Times Opinion published a guest essay by Gay in which she laid out her most detailed account yet of her experiences since the Oct. 7 attacks — admitting fault and shortcomings in her reaction to the attacks, and saying she “fell into a well-laid trap” set by Republicans at a House hearing on antisemitism last month. She also acknowledged the accusations against her scholarly work. But the bulk of the essay — and what interested us most and led to our decision to publish it — was her argument that the criticism of her was not about one school, one leader or her past work, but “a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society.” As Opinion editor, I rarely express my own views publicly on guest essays we publish, but here it’s worth saying that, in the current conversation around Harvard, I’ve been more drawn to arguments made by others. Distance from a controversy can often offer a broader view and nuance, one of the reasons I’m circumspect about the personal essay as a genre. So I’d recommend reading Gay’s essay alongside John McWhorter’s call in December that she resign, Michelle Goldberg’s effort to break down what actually happened in those congressional hearings, or Bret Stephens’s column on the impact of social engineering on free thought. I’d also consider Ross Douthat’s thoughts on why Harvard let her go. “The Ivy League believes in its progressive doctrines, but not as much as it believes in its own indispensability, its permanent role as an incubator of privilege and influence,” Douthat writes. Still, I’d like to offer Gay the final word because, as we head into 2024, there’s no denying this particularly resonant insight from her essay: “At tense moments, every one of us must be more skeptical than ever of the loudest and most extreme voices in our culture, however well organized or well connected they might be.”

***

In Part 3, I’ll look at the reactions of some of Gay’s allies, enablers and supporters in academia.

[And do consider signing my petition to draft Barack Obama to be Gay’s replacement.]