On January 2, 2024, Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University in the United States, announced his resignation, which attracted global attention. In his resignation letter, Gay said that "it is in Harvard's best interest for me to resign" and that "doubts have been raised about my commitment to confronting hate and maintaining academic rigor — two fundamental values that are so important to me, and that the threats emanating from personal attacks and racial hatred are frightening."
Guy is destined to set multiple records in Harvard's history: She was the first black president in Harvard's nearly 400-year history, and the shortest-serving president, having only been in that position for just over half a year. And the "personal attacks", "racial hatred" and "academic rigor" mentioned in her resignation letter are the key words that have lingered in the layers of controversy that have haunted Gay himself and Harvard University after the resumption of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Gaye's resignation is not the result of an isolated incident, it all stems from a new round of Palestinian-Israeli conflict that restarted on October 7, 2023. On October 11, 34 student groups at Harvard University issued a joint statement arguing that Hamas's attacks were "not gratuitous" and that "the Israeli regime should be held fully responsible for all the violence that is taking place." This statement sparked outrage in the United States, and Harvard's Jewish alumni announced the withdrawal of alumni donations. In the face of the surging voices of skepticism, Guy's first response was to "respect freedom of speech".
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has caused a growing split on American university campuses, with many left-wing students openly shouting outright genocidal slogans such as "send Jews to gas chambers", but university presidents have been indifferent. The U.S. Congress held a hearing on December 5 to do so. The presidents of Penn, Harvard, and MIT, including Gay, have been reluctant to say "yes or no" to the question of "whether claiming genocide against the Jews is against school rules?" and have instead repeated the testimony that "it depends."
The performance of the hearing caused a national uproar, and the president of Penn resigned under pressure. In comparison, Guy's "resistance to pressure" is not insignificant. Harvard's Board of Trustees issued a statement on December 12 supporting Guy's continued presidency, and she has the support of Harvard's staff and student body. But Guy was accused of plagiarism in her 1997 doctoral dissertation, some of which "plagiarized" the other two scholars' articles "almost word for word," and even the appendices.
The suspicion of academic misconduct continued to ferment, and finally became the last straw that overwhelmed Guy, and it was also the "racial hatred" and "academic rigor" that her resignation statement referred to. In fact, looking at this turmoil, Guy has many chances to get through. It is not even difficult to imagine that as long as the "link setting" in this series of events after the resumption of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on October 7 is slightly different, Gay can really "land safely".
For no other reason, Guy's aura of political correctness is too great, "black + female" makes her the so-called "diversity principal", which is simply an existence that can be "ignored and attacked" in American society, and her appointment is also a product of the "DEI" (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) policy.
Throughout her academic career, Guy has published 11 papers over the past 30 years, and all of them are on "politically correct" topics such as "blackness, gender, and race", and compared with the six history monographs of Harvard's first female president, Gilpin Foster, and the 150 economic papers of Summers, the former president, who stepped down for "discrimination against women", it is completely unconvincing to say that Guy is at the helm of Harvard University with such dismal academic ability purely by academic standards. It can be said that even if she does not plagiarize, her academic ability is not qualified.
Thus, Gay's resignation does not mean that "academic ethics has triumphed over political correctness this time", but only that "one political correctness has lost in the face of greater political correctness." Guy copied another black female professor, which meant that her first "shield" failed, and Guy's reluctance to simply "call for genocide of Jews is a violation of Harvard rules" also made his second "shield" a failure.
Since the end of World War II and the atrocities of the Nazi Holocaust, Jews have also occupied a high position in the politically correct hierarchical order of the world, and anti-Semitism is definitely a high-voltage line in the United States. The deep reason why Guy had to resign this time: black + female political correctness met a higher level of Jewish political correctness.
In fact, American Jews are also on the left, most of them support the Democratic Party and the leftist political correctness, and they have also criticized Israel in the past Palestinian-Israeli conflicts, and even there are "anti-Israel" Jews like Soros, and the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has an ambiguous attitude in this "hearing turmoil", is also Jewish. After the images of Hamas's torture and kidnapping spread all over the world, American Jews fought back with all their might, and the ambiguous attitude of Guy and others was quickly surrounded and suppressed.
On American college campuses today, those who say that there are only two genders in the world will be expelled from the classroom, and those who publish "hate speech" that discriminates against black people will definitely be expelled. In contrast, the rhetoric of "calling for robbery of Asians" and "hating whites" has been unimpeded. And once the principals were vague about the "call for genocide against the Jews," the results of the "magic bombardment" seemed to indicate a higher level of political correctness for the Jews.
It is not difficult to imagine that if Guy had not copied another black female professor, and if Guy had provoked not Jews but whites, Asians, or even Latinos, then she would have been able to continue in office and turn all doubts into "personal attacks, racial hatred" in her resignation letter. Therefore, Gay's resignation does not mean the ebb and flow of left-wing ideology, and the status quo on American college campuses is still that left-wing political correctness can run rampant, only this time involving the "higher mountain" of Jews.
Martin Luther King Jr., in his famous speech "I Have a Dream," once passionately expressed the hope that one day his four children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by their conduct. This sentence is so simple and universal, but the reality under the political correctness of the American left today is that "a person is judged by the color of his skin, not his character." Guy's fundamental question of academic integrity, which is about character, remains a plausible question of "race" or "who is more politically correct," which is a betrayal of Martin Luther King's dream.
Wang Jing
Editor-in-charge: Chen Bin