Big news: Harvard University’s President Claudine Gay resigned Tuesday afternoon. As a Harvard grad, this is a sad day to have a president’s resignation after such a short time in office. But it’s a moment of justice because Ms. Gay had been reluctant to forcefully condemn anti-Semitism on campus after the slaughter of innocent Israelis on Oct. 7. Troublingly, she also has a pattern of persistent plagiarism allegations and was forced to revise her work in light of renewed scrutiny of her scholarship.
October 7th is doing for college academia what COVID did for K-12 education: exposing its true extremist nature to the world. The only silver lining about all of this is that big donors are finally waking up and demanding that anti-Semitism stop. What’s sad is this anti-Semitism is the logical extension of the Critical Theory and Critical Race Theory that has infected campuses nationwide.
When I was a Master’s of Public Policy student in 2008-2010, the Harvard Shorenstein Center funded my journalism work under the The Lithgow Internship Fund to spend my Harvard Kennedy School 2009 summer in Jerusalem as a reporter for The Jerusalem Post covering the Israeli parliament. I am listed on the Shorenstein website here.
With the HKS funding I was also able to travel to the West Bank and also Jordan, Egypt, Qatar and Turkey through additional support via the Middle East Journalism Bootcamp that Harvard participated in partnership with USAID and Qatar University. I’m grateful that Harvard gave me a well-rounded look at the Middle East–I was glad they were open to me working as a correspondent with Harvard funding. I recently shared a post with some thoughts on my time in Israel.
I do wish that Harvard spoke out more forcefully to condemn the Hamas invasion, however I do know that Harvard Kennedy School Dean Elmendorf, who is Jewish (though stepping down after this school year), is committed to respectful exchange of ideas. I have spoken at NYU Law school and before the State Financial Officers Foundation defending Israel against the BDS movement (which I covered for Forbes and New York Post), which I believe set the groundwork for this toxic sentiment we see against Jewish people on some college campuses. Unfortunately, Harvard was culpable in allowing the BDS movement to spread unchecked, and there’s much to do to stop this dangerous movement.
My recommendation is her replacement is the brilliant Carol Swain, whose work Ms. Gay allegedly plagiarized from. Carol is a breath of fresh air and would bring common sense back to Harvard.