Claudine Gay, Antisemitism, and the De-legitimization of the Elite
Universities, homes to liberal power yet replete with problematic ideological battles, aren't prepared for the coordinated effort to strip their legitimacy and public trust
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On January 2nd, Claudine Gay resigned from her post as president of Harvard after repeated allegations of plagiarism coupled with a disastrous congressional hearing where she was unable to resolutely defend the safety of Jewish students on Harvard’s campus.
I will say this outright: I believe she inadequately led Harvard in a moment where not only Harvard, but Harvard as a symbol of the academy’s intellectual and moral excellence, needed a different kind of leadership in the face of rising antisemitism and illiberalism. I also know that the attacks lobbed at her are part of a larger and right-wing strategy that extends far beyond Israel/Palestine aimed at culturally delegitimizing elite institutions — be they education or media — where liberals and the left hold power.
This is a coordinated political effort that universities are truly not prepared for, as evidenced by the congressional hearing. This will have downstream political ramifications for our democracy—in part by exacerbating the diploma divide and the trust most Americans have placed in our most symbolically powerful and allegedly meritocratic institutions. But top-tier universities are also not guiltless in failing to create a campus environment that can sustain dissonance, intellectual debate, mutual respect, physical safety, and psycho-spiritual toughness to approach the often painful work of debate, scholarship, and inquiry into what constitutes “the good” in our democracy and world.
We pat our heads and rub our tummies all at once here at Failure to Communicate!
This is a cultural strategy. As such, we must also consider cultural responses. And culture, if you have been here on my substack for a while, is messy and squishy.
Many Truths, Everywhere, All at Once
There are many factors at play here that can all be true at once.
Antisemitism: Gay’s remarks at the congressional hearing were inadequate in defending Jews against hate speech on college campuses which could alone prove her inadequate leadership in a highly contentious moment where campus antisemitism is on the rise in an ugly way, and where there were examples of physical assault of Jews on her campus. As a Jewish person and as an academic, I felt failed by her testimony and the other two university presidents (who all had the same law firm prep them by the way. I would want my money back!)
Free Speech vs. Speech as Harm: Gay’s congressional testimony was actually nuanced and, in isolation, could have been a moment to defend campus free speech — albeit uncomfortable. However, after years of a campus dynamic that upheld “microaggressions” and certain kinds of speech as a form of harm or violence, as described and punishable in codes of conduct, it appears that this principle was unequally deployed when it came to Jewish students (on this point see Jon Haidt and Ilya Shapiro).
Plagiarism: Gay appears to have engaged in varying degrees of plagiarism in about half of her peer reviewed articles, not all of which amount to academic misconduct. Not plagiarizing is sacrosanct in academia — academic leaders have resigned for less. These allegations against Gay have been circulating long before this hearing. To a trained eye (and I have a PhD), many of these are unfortunate duplications of technical language poorly cited but — debatedly — not existential lifting of ideas. However, is this excellence? That is the real question and problem.
Coordianted Right-Wing Attacks: The attacks on Gay’s scholarship are part of a larger coordinated effort by right-wing actors to delegitimize institutions where the left or liberals harbor cultural and social power. Some of those attacks have gross racial and gender based prejudices at play. These actors may not care specifically about Jews or plagiarism, but they do care about seizing power vis-à-vis culture, see Gramsci as quoted by Breitbart: “Politics is downstream from culture.”
So let’s unpack this a bit more.
A Coordinated Attack
I think many Jewish folks would like to think that Gay stepped down (or was encouraged to do so) because of the way she has handled campus antisemitism. Sadly, this is not fully true.
As one very smart friend pointed out, you can’t take down antisemitism by crying antisemitism — you have to go after something else because, as the logic goes among many Jews in this moment of pain, most non-Jews don’t care about the consequences of antisemitism.
What Gay’s critics did was go after something more powerful and vulnerable: the legitimacy of Harvard’s brand of excellence.
The attack on Gay’s scholarship fixated on her plagiarism — essentially her lack of academic excellence. Harvard’s brand entirely resides on being perceived as excellent. The best of the best. Absent this, it loses its cultural power and cachet.
There are a lot of people with differing interests who had the same goal in removing Gay. Plagiarism allegations lobbed by right-wing education reform activist and culture warrior Chris Rufo, amplified by Elon Musk’s X, and koshered/backed by Harvard board member and activist investor Bill Ackman together create a powerful machine with varied stakes. Gay’s presidency represents conscious and thoughtful efforts to equitably promote minorities and women to compensate for systemic racial and gender-based inequities — but some of the attitudes or approaches to this work have sometimes come at the expense of liberalism, free speech, and the welfare of other interest groups. Like it or not, these groups compose our society and democracy as well. Some lob overtly racist critiques — which Claudine Gay wrote about in her post-resignation NYT op-ed. Yet to just totalize the critiques of Gay’s leadership into racism is missing another point. There are factions that are tired of feeling like they cannot respectfully explore their point of view without reprisal in academic spaces. This poses a huge opportunity for the realignment of strategic interests and their layman articulation.
Critiquing elites is where the “populist right” shines. Trump, DeSantis, Ramaswamy, or Vance claim to be anti-elite, while also coming from elite institutions and are fighting for representation in or the reclamation of those institutions. Americans increasingly look suspiciously at the value of higher education — sometimes literally in its pricetag! — and the leadership it produces at the most elite levels, partially because of narratives developed by the right but also by lived experience. This is a crack that can be exploited in the public zeitgeist (and given the shape of our “public” online which rewards transgressivity, emotionalism, and outrage, often privileged actors calling themselves “underdogs” can exploit that fissure more effectively than others.)
The attacks on Gay and Harvard are meant to delegitimize the power and brands of institutions that hold cultural power — something that the right has longed for and increasingly lost in the 20th century. A few decades ago, from the sidelines of “centrist consensus,” a set of self-identified conservatives decided to create alternative think tanks, media outlets, universities, and cultural institutions to compete with the grip the center left had on leading institutions of American life since the New Deal and again during the 1960s “cultural revolution.” As I note in my dissertation, before accepting President Richard Nixon’s nomination to the Supreme Court, conservative lawyer Louis Powell penned the Powell Memorandum (1971), which became a blueprint for the conservative movement’s creation of a labyrinth of think tanks and lobbying outfits, which would later include recognizable names like the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Alternative media was also heavily funded. This latest iteration of attacks on universities — showing some serious weaknesses in upholding liberal values and pluralist debate — is a huge opportunity to simultaneously attack but also potentially seize power.
The desire to seize cultural institutions, delegitimize them, or even replace them has been the project of the MAGA-right and its network of conservative media influencers for the better part of a decade now. Culture change is the playbook for a movement defined by its alternative media and opposition to legacy media (and if this point appeals to you, read the rest of my substack and work and subscribe now!)
As much as conservatives love to say that they don’t have power on campus or mainstream media, the truth is they do—they just aren’t always the majority in those spaces. Turning Point USA’s campus organizing has as recognizable a brand as “BDS” or "DSA” chapters, but with even more coordination. Chris Rufo, the Manhattan Institute fellow and media ninja who perpetrated the attacks on Gay, is not some fringe person with no access to powerful legacy institutions—he has had a New York Times op-ed ffs!
These attacks are working. Public trust in universities is sharply down: 36% have confidence in higher education versus 57% in 2015. From left to right, Americans love to hate on Harvard—as its former president Derek Bok wrote. It is an institution with a $49 BILLION endowment (literally more than the national debt of Argentina), producing some of the most powerful leaders in America. Naturally, it is a kind of crown jewel — a symbolic American meritocratic monarchy— and the decisions it makes have downstream effects. “The Left” wants to see the academy do better by students of color and elevate them equitably, while fighting certain longstanding campus injustices (sexism and assault, racial disparities in enrollment, unionizing). “The Right” accuses these institutions of killing free speech, indoctrinating students with progressivism and marxism, or paying undue or unfair attention to the welfare of certain minorities but not others — such as religious minorities. Of course, these are not rigid categories and there is often overlap of individuals, but this is where the battle lines have been drawn.
Feel what you may about her, Gay alone did not create the conditions that have caused the explosions on Harvard Yard. She alone is not responsible for trends in campus life that have swung a pendulum towards safetyism (based on very real failures to keep women or minorities safe and respected on campus), instead of perhaps trying to create an environment where hard intellectual debates happen and students are given the tools — intellectual, emotional, spiritual — to have them at the highest levels.
Even with the best intentions to create a more equitable or just campus life, universities like Harvard must also confront some hard realities about how the next generation of elites is being trained and how this is being perceived by the country. Because with only 37.7% of Americans holding a bachelors degree, let alone one from the Ivy League, the Diploma Divide is increasingly creating a gap in our civics and our civic imagination.
My Words Are Violence, Your Violence is Speech
There are some failures of university culture that have led us to this moment of crisis… and opportunity as well. Universities have swung on a pendulum of callous intellectual debate (that may not have actually been all that diverse until recent decades) that could verge on cruelty … to a culture of “safetyism” that can create a perceived sense of “Oppression Olympics” or engineered hierarchies. This exists in a backdrop of difficult structural issues (intellectual ones aside), like the costs of student tuition, adjudicating campus sexual assault, racial and gender inequality, creating safe learning environments that aren’t feudally abusive, or paying graduate workers well.
But let’s go back to the Gay situation.
The crux of the matter in the congressional hearing was whether or not chanting for “From the River to the Sea” or “There is Only One Solution: Intifada! Revolution!” is a call for genocide. Of course, these phrases have been defended as liberatory or peaceful rallying cries, but should/could also be seen as a violent call— even in the words of Palestinian organizers or “Hamas Adjacent Left” — for the dismantling of the state of Israel, which despite all the kumbaya of collective liberation claims, looks like Jews would not get to live safely on that land as long as Hamas is at the forefront of resistance. Hamas has been explicit in their desire to not only destroy Israel but Jews worldwide. (But we can’t let off the hook Netanyahu, who’s leadership choices and failures pre-and-post October 7 are arguably not contributing to the long term safety of Israel and Jews either, to say nothing of the countless innocent Palestinians killed in Gaza and the West Bank — we can hold two truths here! For more on a Bibi-critical Zionist perspective, I refer you to Micah Sifry’s substack.) But I digress. Back to campus.
My point is this: if uncomfortable questions cannot be debated pertaining to other minorities without perceived/experience harm of “speech as violence,” that is punishable by a code of conduct, are codes of conduct fairly deployed? Also, what is the point of the academy then if we — scholars, of all people — cannot have these hard conversations?
Take the following argument. For all the talk of “safe spaces” and “equity” and “microaggressions” and “trigger warnings” (perhaps amplified in our culture the most by its right-wing critiques or by the most visible revolutionary left actors), where is the “safe space” for a population of people who still may have or remember a grandparent who survived the Holocaust… or know that 8 million+ of their grandparents generation were killed for being Jewish, when they hear this? They ask, is this not a “microaggression” too? Or must we be bought into a whole-hog embrace of a certain kind of revolutionary ideology for all of this to make sense?
I respect the desires of those who want to be addressed by a different pronoun or who need days off for their religious obligations. I see American destinies linked if there are groups of people unfairly targeted by police or state violence — “first they came for the socialists and I did not speak out” as it goes. Yet is there a similar concern or care in the other direction for Jews, grieving a pogrom? Can we do this on campuses while we simultaneously extend a similar human care for those impacted by the death in Gaza and the West Bank — while also doing our work as scholars, if we are students of foreign policy or military strategy or philosophy or law or religion, of debating and figuring out what to do?
Again, Heterdox Academy leader Jon Haidt — who has championed free speech on campuses— has quoted Andrew Sullivan in suggesting that identitarianism has captured college campuses. As such, it has captured the nation. Yes, identity concerns have always impacted us in many ways (hello Civil War, Civil Rights Movement…), but how can we split this difference? How can we live together? He suggests re-embracing a reinvigorated liberalism over identitarianism.
We can talk all we want about the nuances of the thinking behind these usually well-intentioned words and the systems of logic that produced the DEI frameworks lodged in so many institutions currently. The fact remains, however, that the general population beyond the academy is consuming ambient politics of equity-based language/systems, and asking the question of “Who gets a safe space? Do I also get rights? How does this framework impact me?” This is typically responded to with what sociologist Michele Lamont (of Harvard!) calls American working class “ordinary universalism:” we are all equal or at least should be in America.
Clearly this is a “crisi-tunity” — a crisis yielding an opportunity to reform. I pray, at least in the academy, we can call a truce, embrace America, and find a way to live with one another. Sounds crazy, I know! Quoting Lionel Trilling, perhaps we need to embrace that crazy, primal imagination of liberalism again: that our institutions should serve individual and collective human happiness. Our democracy depends on it.