Harvard President Claudine Gay is facing vigorous condemnation and calls to resign for her equivocation over whether Harvard students are permitted to call for genocide against the Jewish community. She was even criticized by Joe Biden’s White House. Additionally, 74 members of Congress — including two Democrats — have issued a public letter demanding that Gay be fired.
Gay’s refusal to deem genocidal calls to be a violation of Harvard’s code of conduct was grounded upon her entrenchment in the ideology of critical race theory, which finds its practical implementation in the policies of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Critical race theory divides people into a hierarchical system in which each person is designated either as an oppressor or as someone who is oppressed. In this ideological framework, Jewish people are classified as “white” privileged oppressors and Israel is cast as an oppressive “settler colonial” state.
The aftermath of the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks against Israeli citizens by Hamas made this perspective evident. As one example, the “Critical Race and Ethnic Studies” department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, released a statement that read, “What we are witnessing needs to be understood in the context of 75 years of settler colonial displacement, military occupation, and enclosure.” In 2022, Lori Lowenthal Marcus and Jesse M. Fried of the Wall Street Journal noted that radical ethnic studies has always been anti-Semitic in nature. “[T]he ethnic-studies movement has never been about representation or justice,” they explained. “A creature of 1960s radical left-wing activism, ethnic studies was from the start about attacking the U.S., capitalism and Zionism.”
Gay, though she repeatedly said during her congressional testimony that this “type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me,” was careful to leave an opening to allow genocidal calls against Jews to take place at Harvard, as she knows that a large and powerful contingent at Harvard subscribes to the ideas that Jewish people are privileged “white” oppressors, Israel is a “settler colonial” state, and Palestinians are an oppressed people who should rise up against their supposed colonial subjugators.
Harvard students have in recent years gone all-in on the narrative that Israel is inherently oppressive. Just last year, on April 29, 2022, the editorial board of the Harvard Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, upheld the “boycott, divest, and sanctions movement” — which has as its aim the international isolation of Israel — and “Palestinian liberation.” The editorial board gave a full-throated endorsement of the Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee, the group that would later publish a letter on Oct. 7, 2023, accusing the “Israeli regime” of being “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” As it stated in April 2022, the Harvard Crimson editorial board “is broadly and proudly supportive of PSC’s mission and activism.”
In November, Harvard sophomore Kojo Acheampong led students in chanting, “Long live Palestine; long live the intifada; intifada, intifada; globalize the intifada.” Acheampong is the co-founder of the African and African American Resistance Organization, or AFRO, a group that was formed in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling that affirmative action is illegal racial discrimination. According to Acheampong, the students chant because “[w]e need liberation everywhere.” “[T]hat’s what the intifada means,” he explained. “The intifada means Palestine will be free.”
Gay’s entire career is founded upon the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” movement. Not only is it the lens through which she studies politics in every one of her published works, but she also led Harvard’s total entrenchment in the ideology following the death of George Floyd. “This moment offers a profound opportunity for institutional change that should not and cannot be squandered,” Gay said alongside her 2020 announcement of Harvard’s initiatives to “address racial and ethnic equality.” Bill Ackman, a billionaire who has been outspoken about the anti-Semitism on Harvard’s campus, explained last week on X that an anonymous person told him that Harvard’s presidential search committee, which selected Gay, only considered candidates who met the “criteria” of Harvard’s DEI office.
The ugly anti-Semitism and racism inherent in “diversity, equity, and inclusion” was laid bare for all to see through Claudine Gay’s testimony — as well as the similar witness of the University of Pennsylvania’s Elizabeth Magill and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sally Kornbluth. Magill was forced to tender her resignation as a result of the backlash after even Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro described her testimony before Congress as “a failure of leadership.” (RELATED: The Left’s Systemic Anti-Semitism: It Isn’t Just the UPenn President)
The left-wing criticism went all the way to a commentator on CNN. On Sunday, Fareed Zakaria pinned the blame for Gay’s equivocation on Harvard’s agenda for diversity, equity, and inclusion. “[T]o understand their performance,” said Zaharia, “we have to understand the broad shift that has taken place at elite universities, which have gone from being centers of excellence to institutions pushing political agendas.”
Zakaria explained that “American universities have been neglecting a core focus on excellence in order to pursue a variety of agendas — many of them clustered around diversity and inclusion.” He asserted that this began with “the best of intentions,” but that those intentions have “morphed into a dogmatic ideology.” As a result of the total adoption of this ideology, “university administrators found themselves squirming, unable to explain why certain groups (Jews, Asians) don’t seem to count in these conversations.”
David French likewise argued in the New York Times that reform at Harvard to solve the problem of anti-Semitism “means disempowering a diversity, equity and inclusion apparatus that is itself all too often an engine of censorship and extreme political bias.”
Harvard faculty members sense that backlash against Gay is an indictment against critical race theory, and, for this reason, they have rushed to defend her. Hundreds — many of whose work rests entirely on the ideological framework of critical race theory — have signed letters affirming their support for Gay. One of these letters, from black faculty members, explicitly pushed back against efforts to connect Gay with the ideology of diversity, equity, and inclusion. “[A]ny suggestion that her selection as president was the result of a process that elevated an unqualified person based on considerations of race and gender are specious and politically motivated,” the letter said. The New York Times reported that backlash against Gay for her testimony was sparse on campus, stating, “The congressional exchange appears to have generated far more intense reactions among donors and alumni than among current faculty and students.”
As Gay contends with all of this backlash, she also faces a new scandal: She is accused of committing plagiarism. She has denied the claims.
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