Don’t blame Harvard for Claudine Gay’s poor leadership

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, thanks to the support of the Harvard Corporation, one of two ruling bodies that oversee the university. Members of the board didn’t have the guts to fire a racial trailblazer. After all, it took Harvard nearly 400 years to appoint the first Black woman president after a long parade of White men. The school couldn’t really unceremoniously show her the door after less than six months on the job. Harvard was already being called antisemitic, it didn’t want to add racist to the list. Aside from the race issue, Gay’s job security was probably also helped along by the fact that the media accepted her narrative, that she was this kind of heroic warrior for free speech, as opposed to what she really was: A bureaucrat so focused on self-preservation that she was eager to avoid conflict. And that conflict avoidance meant not forcing students at America’s oldest university to conduct themselves in a respectful manner toward one another. That bizarre strategy almost cost Gay her job. It also subjected Harvard to a national ridicule and accusations of, don’t laugh, mind control. I spent the last few weeks being told by people who never went to Harvard that Harvard brainwashes its students and indoctrinates young people to think alike. That’s news to me. And I’m sure it will be news to other Harvard alumni. So you get a handful of my tribe together and you’ll get 30 or 40 or 50 different opinions, a lot of argument, maybe even a few fistfights. Just look at our political class. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a Democrat, went to Harvard, but so did his predecessor, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. They don’t agree on a whole lot. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, went to Harvard. And so did Texas Democrat Julian Castro. They’ve both been friends of mine for more than 20 years, and I can tell you this much: Those two fellas have completely different worldviews. Finally, look at the Supreme Court, where the current lineup of justices includes four graduates of Harvard Law School: Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan on the left, Neil Gorsuch on the right, and John Roberts somewhere in the center. As someone with two Harvard degrees, believe me when I tell you this, there is no brainwashing going on here. Harvard doesn’t tell you what to think. It never, has never will. It’s content if it manages to get you to actually think, and maybe to think critically. What you do from there is on you. President Gay should now think long and hard about what she’s been through these past few weeks, and sadly, what she put Harvard through, and then she should resolve to do much better going forward.