Columbia University professor and New York Times columnist John McWhorter thinks that Harvard should part ways with Claudine Gay.

He argues here that she personifies the growing problem of holding blacks to lower standards. He says the “tipping point” has come:

We must ask how a university president can expect to hold her head high, carry authority and inspire respect as a leader on a campus where students suffer grave consequences for doing even a fraction of what Dr. Gay has done.

Just how did we get to the point where the president of a top university can be a “scholar” of negligible accomplishment?

McWhorter continues:

If she stays in her job, the optics will be that a middling publication record and chronically lackadaisical attention to crediting sources is somehow OK for a university president if she is Black. . . . Are we to let pass a tacit idea that for Black scholars and administrators, the symbolism of our Blackness, . . . is what matters most about us? I am unclear where the Black pride (or antiracism) is in this.

Harvard (and most of American education) has chosen to allow standards to fall by the wayside in the quest for “diversity.” It seems fair to say that Gay got where she is not through excellent work, but just because she checks the right boxes and mouths all the platitudes of progressive ideology. Not uncommon in American higher education today.