In hindsight, Claudine Gay's disastrous tenure as Harvard's shortest-ever serving president seemed doomed from the start. Given her wafer-thin academic records of zero books and a mere 11 journal articles to her name, it is more than obvious that Harvard elevated Gay due not just to her demography as a black woman but rather to her zealotry to the progressive religion that requires she never shuts up about it. After all, only a diversity, equity, and inclusion automaton could be both so uncreative as to rely on plagiarism in her academic record and unable to agree that calls to genocide the Jews are, yes, actually bad.
Harvard could learn a lesson here while also trying to rectify some of the great wrongs committed by Gay throughout her reign of terror at Harvard. Over on Twitter, billionaire Harvard donor-cum-critic has detailed the ivy's failures as a business, namely how DEI has served as a clever distraction from the fact that Harvard's class size has grown by less than 20% over 35 years while its tuition has grown by 7% or 8% annually. Harvard indeed needs a chief executive to justify the half-billion dollars it received from a federal government that, as evidenced by House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik's (R-NY) career-ending interrogation of Gay, is increasingly skeptical of continuing to fund these crazies on campus.
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While publicly preaching the gospel of DEI, Gay made her career stealing the intellectual property of some black scholars and championing witch hunts against others. Those black scholars deserve Harvard's consideration.
One of the black women Gay plagiarized is Carol Swain, who studied law at Yale and subsequently taught at Princeton and Vanderbilt. The book Gay stole from, Swain's Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress, was published by Harvard University Press in 1993, and she has since published eight books. Swain also served in advisory positions to former Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, seemingly a point for diversity at Harvard, where just 2% of professors identify as conservative.
Another candidate to replace Gay ought to be Ronald Sullivan, the first black faculty dean in the university's 388-year history. Recruited as a law professor to the university by future Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, Sullivan earned the support of 52 fellow Harvard Law Professors and the American Civil Liberties Union when he was criticized for joining the legal defense team of (since) convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein. Not Gay, however. The then-Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean fired Sullivan from his faculty post. Perhaps it's only fitting that Gay, then the first black president of Harvard, would go on to become its shortest-serving one.
Another scholar more than qualified for the top job is Roland Fryer, the brilliant economist who, at age 30, became the youngest black professor to ever be awarded tenure at Harvard. Fryer's work on racial achievement gaps is arguably rivaled only by Raj Chetty, and then-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg appointed Fryer as chief equality officer as he oversaw the radical Opportunity NYC program. But Fryer's heterodox finding that black people are no more likely than whites to be shot by police coincided with the heyday of the #MeToo movement. Despite an uncompelling cadre of allegations that he made lewd comments to various women — "Be safe tonight. Wear gloves if ur gonna have hand action," read one text to an assistant — Gay succeeded in suspending Fryer from campus for two years and shutting down his research lab. Unlike Gay, Harvard's board could at least trust that Fryer knows how to more wisely spend Harvard's $186 million operating surplus than on DEI.
For a bureaucrat who waxed so poetically about racial and gender solidarity, Gay was rather keen on stealing from fellow female academics and stoking student paranoia to spearhead witch hunts against fellow black scholars. The rivals she tried to displace in academia should be at the top of the short list should Harvard wish to pay penance for Gay's sins.