Following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent military response, reports have documented increasing antisemitism on elite college campuses, including Harvard. Dr. Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president, faced accusations of failing to discipline student protesters who advocated for the genocide of Jews. Calls for her resignation intensified after a lackluster performance on Capitol Hill. Gay later walked back some of her testimony, clarifying that “calls for violence against our Jewish community have no place at Harvard.”
Straight Arrow News contributor Ruben Navarrette contends that Dr. Gay, Harvard’s first Black female president, has inadequately managed the esteemed institution through the controversy. He suggests not solely blaming Harvard, however, but its weak leaders, who may be overly eager to avoid conflict and preserve their positions.
Harvard has been under fire lately, and understandably so, given how my alma mater, which once had, as part of a shameful chapter, blatant admissions quotas to keep out Jews in the 1930s — how my school now appears to have gone back in time and become once again a hotbed of antisemitism.
“The fish rots from the head,” as goes the old Yiddish saying, and so if antisemitism has indeed taken root on the river Charles, it happened with an assist from spineless Harvard administrators, who had been way too lenient with ill-mannered students who stormed through campus calling for an intifada, aka the mass slaughter of Jews.
Meanwhile, the liberal media worked overtime to provide an assist of its own to Dr. Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first Black president. Gay narrowly escaped getting canned, despite the fact that she flunked the leadership test and failed Jewish students on campus. And if that wasn’t bad enough, she then doubled down on failure by turning in a pathetic performance before Congress, where she couldn’t even summon the moral clarity to say that calling for the killing of Jews violated Harvard’s code of conduct. Even after all those mistakes and missteps, Gay kept her job.
