How We Squeezed Harvard to Push Claudine Gay Out

The left has spent decades consolidating power across the institutions of American academic life. The crowning achievement of that effort was the diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy—constructed to perpetuate progressive dominance of higher education by keeping conservatives out of the professoriate. Claudine Gay was in some respects the apotheosis of this process. Last year, Ms. Gay, an African-American political scientist with a thin publishing history, became Harvard University’s 30th president. On Monday, following a sequence of scandals involving antisemitism and plagiarism, she resigned.

Many observers on both left and right had assumed that Ms. Gay was untouchable. Harvard, they thought, couldn’t possibly transgress a core tenet of modern progressive politics—the idea that a leader’s immutable qualities, such as race or sex, should matter more than character, merit and academic achievement.