Harvard’s Next Course

The resignation of Claudine Gay as president of Harvard is likely to prove the beginning rather than the culmination of the scandal that has rocked America’s oldest university. That is the word from Congresswoman Elise Stefanik. It was she who asked the questions that exposed Ms. Gay as unable to reply “yes” to a question as to whether cheering the mass murder of Jews violated Harvard’s code of conduct. Two other top-tier college presidents flunked the test.We are not here to further tarnish the reputation of Ms. Gay. We are as concerned about plagiarism as any other ink-stained scrivener, but that being the final straw in this matter is a little like Al Capone landing in the big house on a tax rap. The far bigger problem at Harvard is the ideology — call it DEI, wokeness, what you will — that muted Ms. Gay’s ability to denounce Hamas’s depravity. Ideology turned Harvard into a perilous place for Jews. We write all this in sadness, without schadenfreude. This newspaper’s history, after all, is riddled with reporters and editors who never forgot — or never will forget —what Harvard did for them. Yet even as it became evident that Ms. Gay is not the person to lead that university, purging her is not, alone, the cure. What of the other members of the Harvard Corporation who, only a year ago, hired her? What about Harvard’s senior fellow, Penny Pritzker?President Gay’s departure, in other words, is necessary but far from sufficient. Healing Harvard will take more. A good start would be to implement without weaseling the Supreme Court’s ruling that the school’s use of racial preferences violates constitutional equal protection principles. Ms. Gay called that a “difficult day.” In our view, an institution that ought to have known better refused to face up to the school’s own bigotry against Asian Americans.Ms. Gay was not president when the case was decided. Harvard’s next president, in any event, would do well to thank the plaintiffs in that case, Students for Fair Admissions, for standing up for constitutional basics. We’d like to think Harvard will be more forthcoming in the hearings in respect of the university that Congresswoman Stefanik is promising. Ms. Stefanik tells our M.J. Koch that the resignation of Ms. Gay is but the tip of the iceberg.Our guess — it’s only such — is that the investigation is going to discover a long train of powder. What role has Middle Eastern money played in the changing environment at Harvard and other top schools in America? What is the explanation for the staggering drop in the percentage of Jewish students on campus, though it is still higher than the percentage of Jews in the population? On this front too, Ms. Gay had no answers.The first step of Harvard’s comeback, though, is acknowledging the scale of the problem. Vanishing ideological diversity, shrinking freedom of speech, sprouting antisemitism, all point to an institution — among America’s greatest — that requires not merely a resignation but a historic reform of the governance, the curriculum, the faculty, the financing, and the spirit and ethos, the vision and the veritas. We wish Fair Harvard well.

Harvard’s Next Course

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