What Harvard Wants
Claudine Gay isn't the disease—she's merely the symptom
Yesterday, after the news broke that Harvard’s governing board stood squarely behind Claudine Gay, the university’s beleaguered president, I posed this note on Substack:
Note by Thomas M Gregg on Substack: "So now we know that Havard is comfortable with a president who is (a) an enabler of violent antisemitism and (b) a serial plagiarist. Useful information!”
Among the replies was this comment:
“Overstated, but Gay is not the inspiring leader Harvard needs at the moment.”
Now whether I overstated the case against Claudine Gay is an arguable point. But I’m in full agreement with the proposition that she’s not the “inspiring leader Harvard needs at the moment.” Here’s the thing, though: What Harvard needs at the moment is not at all what Harvard wants at the moment.
Let it be stipulated that Gay is not an inspiring leader, nor a distinguished academic. Indeed, it’s obvious that she possesses none of the qualities once thought necessary to serve as the president of Harvard University, supposedly one of this country’s most distinguished institutions of higher learning. Gay is merely an administrator, an apparatchik. She’s what used to be called an affirmative-action hire, who got where she is by harping on the strings of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. All those other administrators and faculty members who’ve rallied to her support are people like her. Her glassy stare, her smirk, her robotic repetition of second-hand talking points, mark her out as exactly the kind of president that Harvard wants.
But Claudine Gay is not the disease. Her appearance at the top of Harvard’s greasy pole is merely a symptom of the moral and intellectual rot that’s been eating away at the foundations of American higher education since the Sixties. The horrifying outburst of antisemitism on university campuses since October 7 just didn’t happen. Its seeds were planted long ago and have been lovingly nurtured by an ideological cabal, calling itself progressive, based in higher education, that resembles nothing so much as Nineteen Eighty-four’s Inner Party.
Postmodern progressivism, to give it its proper name, is radically relative, irrational, and nihilistic. It demands the eradication of all existing institutions and values—family, religion, liberal democracy, human equality, individual rights and liberties—and their replacement by some ill-defined hierarchical collective. In its guise as a champion of “transgender rights,” it even rejects fundamental biological truths. As events since October 7 have made plain, it’s a form of fascism, refurbished for the twenty-first century yet retaining certain traditional features, such as eliminationist antisemitism.
If Harvard were ever to acquire an inspiring leader, a man or woman dedicated to the university’s salvation, that’s the ideological phalanx he or she would face. But of course, no such leader is conceivable. The Harvard community wants to see itself reflected in the person of its president. Even if outside pressure makes it necessary to defenestrate Claudine Gay, her replacement will be someone who fits the Harvard community’s malign ideological template.
There’s a lot of ruin in an institution with a $53 billion endowment; that sense of security may partly explain Harvard’s self-destructive antics. It’s great fun, after all, to play the norms-shattering, transgressive intellectual—especially if outside doners are picking up the tab. But someday, though the buildings will still be there in Cambridge, hard by the Charles River, and though plenty of cash will remain in the till, the animating spirit will have fled.
That tragedy is unfolding before our eyes.
Beautifully written. What a tragedy to see what's become of the universities that gave me so much.
The animating spirit is already gone and is not likely to come back any time soon.
Claudine Gray and what she represents started becoming entrenched in university life in the 1990s. Before that, there had been Boomers as *students*, but not running these places. That started after 1990, when another Boomer, Bill Clinton, became president. In the 80s, as I remember, some of these slogans and ideas were around, but were quite marginal.
The key sign of this was the explosion of administrative bureaucracy, which began around the time of the 1990 recession. At the same, tuition began its gallup, outpacing household income and almost every other cost in the economy. It's the ballooning bureaucracy that is the main driver of the grotesquely inflated cost structure of academia today. (The other is the cost of buildings and facilities, but that's for another day.)
Each decade has featured its special theme. In the 1990s, it was speech codes and sexual harassment, which even then, were often used in questionable ways to target unpopular persons and groups. In the 2000s, the themes were "student services" and "student conduct," leading to star chamber and probably illegal disciplinary proceedings against students and faculty, the basic idea being that universities had the right to set themselves up as quasi-police and quasi-judicial authorities -- which in fact, they do not. The last decade, the 2010s, climaxed with the rise of DEI as an ideology and a bureaucracy.
Each decade has laid down a new layer, DEI being just the latest. First point of business: academia has to slash administration back to where it was in the early 1990s, when American colleges and universities actually were the best in world, rather than just imagining that they were.