After months of mounting pressure and scandals, Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned.
Gay made the move official on Tuesday with a resignation letter addressed to “members of the Harvard Community” in which she lamented being “subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.”
On Wednesday’s show, Megyn was joined by the hosts of The Fifth Column – Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch – to discuss Gay’s departure and the knee jerk reaction from those on the left to make the situation about race.
Claudine Gay Resigns
Nearly a month after former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill resigned from her post following an ill-fated grilling about on-campus antisemitism before Congress, her Harvard counterpart was forced into a similar fate. Gay, who was Harvard’s first black president, also became its shortest tenured leader. She lasted just six months in the role.
In the wake of the October 7 attacks in Israel, Gay came under fire for her response to a statement signed by a coalition of student groups at Harvard that blamed Israel for the terrorism. She appeared before Congress with Magill and MIT President Sally Kornbluth in early December, where she failed to give a clear answer to a question from Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) about whether calls for the genocide of Jews would violate Harvard policy.
All the while, her academic record came under increasing scrutiny. According to Washington Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium, six new charges of plagiarism were filed in a complaint on Monday – bringing the total number of allegations to nearly 50.
In her resignation letter, Gay did not directly address the plagiarism accusations or the congressional hearing. She will reportedly remain a Harvard faculty member and retain her $900,000 annual salary.
Blaming ‘Racism’
In the wake of the resignation, Megyn noted that “many on the woke left” wasted no time blaming Gay’s exit on racism and she called the backlash “magnificent.”
On X, Ibram X. Kendi wrote, in part, that “racist mobs won’t stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism.” He went on from there. “The question is whether all these people would have investigated, surveilled, harassed, written about, and attacked her in the same way if the Harvard president in this case would have been White,” he tweeted. “I. Think. Not.”
Author Celeste Ng struck a similar note on X, writing: “So what we’ve learned is: Bad-faith bigots pretending they’re concerned about antisemitism will happily use women of color — especially Black women — as a scapegoat and lightning rod for large systemic issues,” she wrote. “And that people invested in maintaining those systemic issues will comply.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones of the 1619 Project, meanwhile, decried that “academic freedom” and “racial justice programs” are “under attack” and “Black women will be made to pay.”
The takeaway? “It is the fault of systemic racism and its allies in the media who too often go along with the narrative,” Megyn surmised. “Not to mention bad actors like Chris Rufo, who is getting blamed for all the reporting he did on this, and right wing conservatives, who seized an opportunity, et cetera, et cetera.”
Moynihan said these reactions fail to address the actual allegations at play. “I’m somebody who’s written a lot about [plagiarism], and I actually am very tough on some of these plagiarism allegations and will say, ‘Well, I don’t think that meets the standards,'” he said. “This met the standards 10 times over and it keeps on going.”
Foster said what led to Gay’s ultimate undoing – allegations of plagiarism – is a controversy entirely of her own making. “The only conclusion you can reach at the end of this is to let her go if you actually want to be taken seriously when you’re censoring students, expelling students regularly for engaging in the same kind of conduct that Ms. Gay is now being slammed for,” he concluded. “It’s not a white supremacist cabal. There’s no secret conspiracy here.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with The Fifth Column by tuning in to episode 694 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.