To Luther’s thrashing of former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s galling attempt at self-exculpation in the New York Times, I have only this to add: It represents the logical endpoint of identity politics. Gay unintentionally makes this clear. The thoroughly compromised work that she “proudly” stands by, she explains, “focuses on the significance of minority office holding in American politics” and purports to “show that when historically marginalized communities gain a meaningful voice in the halls of power, it signals an open door where before many saw only barriers,” which, “in turn, strengthens our democracy.” That is, the work of Claudine Gay made the case that Claudine Gay should have power.

Leave aside that her background — which she downplays as “the child of Haitian immigrants” — afforded her privileges unavailable to the vast majority of Americans of any race: “the daughter of college-educated professionals who had the money and connections to see their daughter attend Phillips Exeter Academy (tuition $50,000+ in 2023), then Princeton for a year, then Stanford to wrap her undergrad,” as Luther put it. She would have us believe that the mere superficialities of her identity, and not even its more distinguishing particularities, make an automatic case for her self-advancement. And, when necessary, for her unjust victimization. Thus, she invokes the specter of racism:

It is not lost on me that I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses: a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution. Someone who views diversity as a source of institutional strength and dynamism. Someone who has advocated a modern curriculum that spans from the frontier of quantum science to the long-neglected history of Asian Americans. Someone who believes that a daughter of Haitian immigrants has something to offer to the nation’s oldest university.

This is the most vulgar solipsism, a desperate lashing out. It is also consistent with Gay’s unpersuasive apology, after the congressional testimony that began the end of her tenure as Harvard president. “What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged,” she told the Harvard Crimson. “Substantively, I failed to convey what is my truth.” The closest Gay can get to the truth is to invoke herself as the standard of reference.

This is a habit her career in academia has surely cultivated. That sector long ago lost its mooring in objective reality, settling on the logic of identity as a replacement. It is a defective replacement, however. Abandoning any kind of external reference point renders competing intellectual claims mere contests of will. It prevents the achievement of genuine knowledge that rises above the self, or the moment (all depends on the “context,” as she put it in the hearing on campus antisemitism). And, as Gay is now discovering, it provides a meager defense when one finds oneself on the wrong side of actual truth. “What Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me,” her op-ed’s title proclaims. The truth is that it has revealed how small her chosen way of looking at the world really is — no bigger than Claudine Gay herself.