Former U.S. President Barack Obama reportedly told the leadership of Harvard University not to fire President Claudine Gay over her testimony before Congress on antisemitic speech policies.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) had asked Gay if calling for the genocide of Jews is considered bullying and harassment by the school, to which Gay replied it depends on the “context.”
This sparked widespread outrage and incentivized some journalists to dig into Gay’s credentials, which led them to discover instances of plagiarism in at least three of her published articles. Despite an academic council confirming that her work constituted plagiarism, Gay was only forced to make corrections to the papers and was allowed to keep her leadership role. However, The Harvard Crimson implied that further disciplinary action against Gay for the instances of plagiarism, but not the antisemitic hate speech policies, might occur down the road.
Now it is being reported that Obama, who graduated from Harvard Law School in 1991, privately advised Harvard leadership to be lenient on Gay for the antisemitism comments. “It sounded like people were being asked to close ranks to keep the broader administration stable — including its composition,” an anonymous source told Jewish Insider. The source learned that Obama had reached out to Harvard in the days leading up to the decision to fire Gay, and that he “lobbied on [her] behalf.” It is not clear if Obama also came to Gay’s defense regarding the plagiarism scandal.
Harvard controversy casts spotlight on Penny Pritzker, former Obama official atop university board, @matthewkassel reports.https://t.co/QDfwo3tc1W
— Jewish Insider (@J_Insider) December 22, 2023
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Obama did not respond to Jewish Insider’s request for comment. It is also noteworthy that the former Secretary of Commerce who served under Obama during his second term, Penny Pritzker, is a senior fellow on the Harvard Corporation, the governing body that made the decision to keep Gay.
Pritzker, a billionaire heiress to a Chicago hotel fortune (and the sister of Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker), made a donation of $100 million to Harvard before she was elected to the fellowship. Pritzker was in charge of the search committee that appointed Gay to the presidency in Dec. 2022. At the time, she praised Gay as “a remarkable leader who is profoundly devoted to sustaining and enhancing Harvard’s academic excellence.”
According to author Wesley Yang, Claudine Gay was aggressively promoted through the ranks of academia because of her well-documented adherence to progressive ideology.
Carol Swain grew up in a shack without running water with 11 brothers and sisters. She was much feted in academia upon her emergence but quickly engaged in heterodoxies that got her blackballed and went on to become an evangelical Christian and a Trump supporter. That's why her…
— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) December 22, 2023
Other Black academics who excelled far more at scholarship than Gay, such as Carol M. Swain (the Christian conservative that Gay plagiarized) and Roland Fryer, were passed over. In fact, Gay punished Fryer with a year’s suspension for sexual harassment accusations just after he published a paper on how police officers are more likely to shoot White citizens than Black citizens. The best friend of Fryer’s accuser claimed that she was the “typical instigator” of the sexual banter that led to the harassment allegations.
Yang also claims that Gay has an elite background: her family is one of the richest in Haiti and she attended famed preparatory school Philips Exeter Academy. At Exeter, Yang continued, Gay learned the ultra-progressive rhetoric and philosophy that ensured her success in the administrative politics of academia — despite the fact that she has only published 11 papers and zero books, which is a shockingly poor record for an academic at her stage of their career, especially for the President of Harvard.
“Gay is a child of privilege who learned how to play the game among other elites — she stole from Swain and shut down Fryer on her path to the presidency,” Yang concluded.
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