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…

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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.

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