Despite reported pressure from Barack Obama to save her job, Harvard’s embattled “woke” president, Claudine Gay, finally resigned from her position.
The resignation is a rare example of accountability for powerful bureaucrats protected by affirmative action.
Obama reportedly went to bat for Gay behind the scenes in an attempt to keep her in the university’s top role.
However, he has been silent since the resignation announcement ignited a firestorm on social media.
A confidential source familiar with the matter told Jewish Insider in late December that Obama, a Harvard graduate, had privately lobbied on Gay’s behalf after her congressional appearance about anti-Semitism and threats against Jewish students on the Ivy League campus.
“It sounded like people were being asked to close ranks to keep the broader administration stable, including its composition,” the source said of Obama’s involvement.
Obama’s push to save Gay’s job was an unsuccessful one, however,
On Tuesday, Gay announced Tuesday that she is stepping down as the school’s president but is staying on as a member of the faculty.
She will keep her $900,000 annual salary, despite resigning, nevertheless.
It’s a dramatic climax to a controversy over anti-Semitism and academic integrity that embarrassed Harvard, deepened divisions on the Left, and tested the power of the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” racket, which kept Gay in her position for weeks despite withering scrutiny of her resume.
The first black president of the prestigious school, Gay ended up staying six months on the job – the shortest tenure in Harvard’s history.
Gay landed Harvard in hot water in December after failing to clearly condemn calls for the genocide of Jews during a congressional hearing on campus protests against Israel’s war with Hamas.
Gay’s equivocal response was widely condemned and plunged Harvard into a major scandal.
The presidents of MIT and UPenn also faced backlash; the latter promptly resigned.
While Obama, a Harvard grad with ties to the university’s governing board, reportedly lobbied for Gay behind the scenes as the scandal escalated, Gay’s position grew more precarious as her academic record came under close scrutiny.
It soon became clear that her resume was lightweight and riddled with plagiarism.
Still, Harvard announced that she would keep her job – a development that was widely attributed to political pressures and Gay’s status as the first black president of the university.
In a stunning development, Gay announced her resignation Tuesday – blaming “racial animus” rather than her personal shortcomings.
“It has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor,” she said.
The news was celebrated by those who campaigned for her ouster, such as the prominent conservative journalist Christopher Rufio, New York’s Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik, billionaire Bill Ackman, and conservative political scientist Carol Swain, whose work Gay plagiarized.
Gay’s ouster has also led to furious backlash from progressives at Harvard and beyond.
Many on the Left, including the Associated Press, are calling Gay a well-qualified black woman who has become a “victim of weaponized racism.”
Gay doubled down with an essay in the New York Times casting herself as the victim of “obsessive scrutiny” of her academic record.
She called her ouster just one “skirmish” in a “broader war” to sow doubt in America’s elite institutions.
It’s clear that no lessons have been learned for Claudine Gay.
The question is whether her ouster signals a broader change, or if society will continue to reward charlatans like Gay based on skin color and gender.
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