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Commentary
Ousting Claudine Gay from Harvard was always about the money
Make no mistake: This is about the money.
Claudine Gay is no longer the president of Harvard University because powerful donors vowed to withhold millions of dollars from the Cambridge colossus on the Charles. Their threats had nothing to do with some sloppy citations in Gay’s 37-year-old doctoral dissertation and everything to do with her defense of campus free speech four weeks ago to a congressional committee that right-wing ideologues hijacked for their own purposes.
Had Professor Gay’s demise been driven by genuine doubts about her abhorrence of antisemitism or her academic integrity, she would not now be returning to teaching duties at the self-styled World’s Greatest University. This crisis was never about plagiarism or antisemitism. It is about the corporatization of American higher education and the collapse of free speech on college campuses.
Only the delusional — or those who have been away from a college campus for a very long time — doubt that university presidents are valued in the 21st century for their fundraising prowess, not for the number or quality of their scholarly publications. Even with an endowment valued at close to $50 billion, Harvard’s governing body would have been hard-pressed to ignore the threats by self-important plutocrats, including Len Blavatnik and Bill Ackman, to close their checkbooks. Blavatnik and his family foundation have donated more than $270 million to the university. Ackman has donated tens of millions.
This crisis was never about plagiarism or antisemitism. It is about the corporatization of American higher education and the collapse of free speech on college campuses.
The toxic influence exerted by big donors on university policy and governance comes at a time when respect for free expression on too many campuses ends where any serious difference of opinion begins. That combination promises to undermine what is left of academic freedom.
Gay was pilloried for testimony on Dec. 5 before the House Education and Workforce Committee that critics deemed insufficiently vigorous in its denunciation of antisemitism, even as she condemned calls for the genocide of Jews as “personally abhorrent” and “at odds with the values of Harvard.” Her presidency-ending error was to acknowledge that Harvard — like the U.S. Constitution — gives “a wide berth to free expression, even of views that are objectionable,” and takes action “when speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies” governing bullying, harassment or intimidation.
Liz Magill, who resigned her post as the president of the University of Pennsylvania last month under similar pressure from Penn’s wealthy donor class, was no less clear in her testimony before the same panel, condemning the horrific terrorist attack by Hamas on Israelis on Oct. 7 and calling antisemitism “a pernicious, viral evil.”
Her career-ending mistake was to note that hate has many targets and multiple manifestations, including:
“... rising harassment, intimidation, doxing, and threats toward students, faculty, and staff based on their identity or perceived identity as Muslim, Palestinian, or Arab. Some have lost family members in this war, and many are worried about the safety of their loved ones in the region. Many are also afraid for their own safety, and the horrifying shooting of three Palestinian students in Vermont has only deepened their fears.”
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), herself a Harvard graduate, has been crowing on social media about the credit she is due for destroying the careers of two Ivy League administrators by trying to bully them into a simplistic condemnation of provocative chants on their campuses. “Yes or no,” she barked at them when they tried in vain to distinguish ugly, antisemitic speech from violent conduct. “Yes or no.”
The toxic influence exerted by big donors on university policy and governance comes at a time when respect for free expression on too many campuses ends where any serious difference of opinion begins.
It has been 46 years since a group of American Nazi provocateurs planned a march through the Village of Skokie, Illinois, a Jewish community outside Chicago where many Holocaust survivors had settled after World War II. Opposition to the march was as swift as it was misguided. Lawsuits ensued with the Nazis’ constitutional right to assemble defended, to the horror of many liberals, by the American Civil Liberties Union.
As the Skokie case demonstrated, the First Amendment does not exist to protect the speech we applaud; it exists, in the words of the late free speech scholar Anthony Lewis, to preserve “freedom for the thought that we hate.” Court case after case in 1978 upheld the right of the loathsome Skokie group to assemble and to march, recognizing that offending those Holocaust survivors with their chants was not the same as attacking them with their fists.
In the end, the Nazis chose to hold their small, forgettable rally in downtown Chicago, but the case is worth remembering today when offensive speech is too often being described as an act of “violence” and when the careers of thoughtful women educators can be ruined because some rich men never bothered to read the Constitution.
