For three minutes and twenty-eight seconds on Dec. 5, Claudine Gay was thrust into the limelight in my hearing room.
She may not have known it at the time, but the embattled ex-president revealed her unfitness as a university leader at the witness table. The clip of her catastrophic answer to a routine question amassed hundreds of millions of views online. Soon after, nearly 50 instances of plagiarism were revealed from her past works, and thereafter she found herself submitting a farewell op-ed to The New York Times.
After a month of reflection, her swan song to NYT readers punctuates her career with one last fraud: attempting to reaffirm the sanctity of her academic work despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.
Doubling down on one last lie seems fitting — ironic even, as she portrays her resignation as the ultimate act of martyrdom for truth. Gay’s closing sentence reads, “Universities must remain independent venues where courage and reason unite to advance truth, no matter what forces set against them.”
Gay’s choice to center her farewell essay on the theme of truth is unmistakably brazen. Truth may be the translation of Harvard’s founding motto, Veritas, but it is the antithesis of the academic crime of which she is accused.
Gay insists in her final public act that her scholarship was unassailable. After debasing academic integrity through her obstinance, she counters that she was victimized by racist outside political forces attempting to destroy public faith in the university. After lifting entire paragraphs from other scholars, she can seek comfort in her $900,000 per year sinecure.
The truth is this: Gay’s plagiarism was an offense that Harvard students are subject to expulsion and suspension for. Confronted with a crisis of antisemitism on her campus, Gay failed to do her duty to protect Harvard’s Jewish students. And the undermining of educational institutions and scholarly expertise has come not from elite universities’ critics in and outside of Congress, but at the hands of administrators and bureaucrats like her, who have turned this country’s great universities into bastions of ideological conformity where dissenting views are not tolerated, double standards reign, and sound scholarship has taken a backseat to the furtherance of a progressive activist agenda.
No single person has done more to destroy public faith in universities than Claudine Gay over the past few months. As for her departure, I say good riddance.
While Gay’s presence — or absence — at the head of Harvard was immaterial to the goal of the Committee on Education and the Workforce when we sat down for testimony on Dec. 5, her farewell essay embodies the issues that we seek to address through legislative work.
The issues are not limited to antisemitism or DEI. The issue isn’t even Harvard itself. It is the political and bureaucratic elements of the whole of academia that subvert the university mission of pursuing truth. In that regard, Gay was the worst offender.
Politics have taken over college campuses and done great institutional damage to universities like Harvard. Look no further than dogmatic defense of Gay by the Harvard Corporation and other academics. They were hellbent on refusing to concede a cultural victory to conservatives despite the mounting evidence against her.
There must be a realignment of university incentives with truth-seeking values. Accountability is needed now more than ever to ensure postsecondary education lives up to its promise.
The Committee has a bold vision for accountability. The structure we are building ensures universities are open and transparent about foreign funding, focused on increasing student outcomes and lowering costs, improving speech policies on campus, and other contributing factors to the decline in public faith in universities.
Universities also have a role to play moving forward. While invariably a national restoration of university culture will take congressional effort, academics and administrators must learn from their disgraced colleague at Harvard. Where Claudine Gay was divisive, they must be tolerant. Where she was dishonest, they must be truth-seeking. Where she was self-serving, they must serve the national interest.
Only then can America reclaim the mantle as the best postsecondary educator in the world.
Virginia Foxx has represented North Carolina’s 5th Congressional District since 2005.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.