UPDATE!
It becomes increasingly clear that Dr (?) Claudine Gay has committed many small plagiarisms starting perhaps even earlier than her doctoral thesis. Each plagiarism event does not, in itself, seem very serious. But taken altogether they have a weight which makes it crystal clear that having plagiarised or not is just not relevant for being Harvard President. She is, after all, black and female.
If Claudine Gay was not black and female she would not be President of Harvard.
In my view, ethnicity and gender are perfectly valid criteria for selection of people for particular tasks and specific positions. I am surprised at the clamour of politically correct voices trying to claim that these were not the deciding factors in selecting Claudine Gay. It borders on stupid to deny common sense. I don’t see anything wrong either in choosing an administrative leader who fulfills the primary condition of being seen as politically correct. For whatever reason the Harvard search committee decided that it was necessary to have a female, black President. Fine. That is/was their prerogative. For many positions – and not least President of Harvard – the image projected by the incumbent may be paramount. There are many instances where style and form are more important than substance. Technical competence is of secondary concern when skilled subordinates are available. What I find quite ridiculous are the attempts to claim that Claudine Gay would have been chosen as President if she was not black and not female. There is nothing wrong in being selected for being black and female. The stupidity lies in denying that.
It seems the duties of the Harvard President are primarily administrative and for fund raising.
Recently, however, the job has become increasingly administrative, especially as fund-raising campaigns have taken on central importance in large institutions such as Harvard. Some have criticized this trend to the extent it has prevented the president from focusing on substantive issues in higher education.
Each president is professor in some department of the university and teaches from time to time.
Harvard’s current president is Claudine Gay, having become Harvard’s 30th president on July 1, 2023. She succeeded Lawrence Bacow who retired on June 30, 2023. – Wikipedia
Since only Professors are eligible to be selected as President, the available choices of black, female professors must have been fairly limited. Of course it could be critically important for the selected person to project the desired image and to be seen to be politically correct. I do not see any objection to using these as criteria for selection. Droupadi Murmu would not be the President of India if she was not a woman and belonging to the tribal community.
Claudine Gay may prove to be a very able administrator and brilliant at garnering funding. That would be a great bonus since she was selected for being black and female. She certainly was not chosen for her unimpressive research record. Her research publications consist of six while at Harvard according to Research Gate and up to 13 in total. (The titles are not very enticing and indicate rather mundane work. To me most of the abstracts read like sociological psycho-babble). This is rather a flimsy research record but this was not the guiding criterion for her selection. Now Claudine Gay has even been accused of plagiarism. It is a little more serious but seems not to be a major breach. Of course she is being judged much less harshly than a plagiarising student would be. So what? College Presidents are not students. Different standards tailored for different people sounds sensible, correct and perfectly logical to me. In any event, her few publications could not have been of any great significance in her selection. She has no great track record in administration either, but this probably does not matter very much when the Harvard President’s office has enough lackeys to administer the necessities. Clearly the primary target for the search committee was for a female, black professor who could project the right image and be politically attractive in the funding stakes.
Should she resign? Perhaps. Of course her recent inept congressional testimony was embarrassing. It demonstrated incompetence in the key task of representing the college. She is now a point of weakness in any future attacks on Harvard. She brings to a head the inherent conflict between “diversity” and competence. Only her future achievements may mitigate the general perception that she was selected for displaying “diversity” purposes rather than for any displayed competence. Her position – and Harvard’s – on condemning terrorism also seems very suspect. (My perception is that she along with most Harvard academics blindly condemn all Israel’s actions but are apologists for even the most heinous Hamas actions). Obviously she cannot provide any kind of unifying point between the Palestinian supporters and the Jewish community. In fact she will find it difficult to get away from her now self-established position that “calling for the genocide of certain people in certain contexts” is acceptable. She may herself find the heat not worth bearing and resign. But if the Harvard Corporation thinks she can still represent Harvard’s values and be a good President then they have no need to call for her resignation. Their unanimous support for Gay was announced yesterday and that now places them directly into the firing line. There are many allegations and accusations flying about. If the allegation turns out to be true that during “her tenure as Dean and now as president, Gay has squelched speech she disfavors while defending and thereby amplifying vile and threatening hate speech, exhibiting a remarkable double standard”, then the Corporation’s support may vanish. With the President and 11 Fellows the Corporation consists of 12 members. The Fellows can all now expect to face critical scrutiny themselves from nosy, hostile parties. They should all ensure that their tax returns are in order. I note that their letter does at least acknowledge that the University should have ‘immediately, directly and unequivocally’ condemned Hamas terrorism, but nobody is being held accountable for that imbecilic lapse.
There is no question that the selection criteria and her selection by Harvard were perfectly proper. Not very smart but perfectly proper. But let us not pretend that Claudine Gay would be President if she was not black and female.
The k2p blog 