Even after all those mistakes and missteps, Gay kept her job, thanks to the support of the Harvard Corporation, one of two ruling bodies that oversee the university. Members of the board didn’t have the guts to fire a racial trailblazer. After all, it took Harvard nearly 400 years to appoint the first Black woman president after a long parade of White men. The school couldn’t really unceremoniously show her the door after less than six months on the job. Harvard was already being called antisemitic, it didn’t want to add racist to the list. Aside from the race issue, Gay’s job security was probably also helped along by the fact that the media accepted her narrative, that she was this kind of heroic warrior for free speech, as opposed to what she really was: A bureaucrat so focused on self-preservation that she was eager to avoid conflict. And that conflict avoidance meant not forcing students at America’s oldest university to conduct themselves in a respectful manner toward one another. That bizarre strategy almost cost Gay her job.

[Well, then who are we supposed to ‘blame’? Navarette is always worth a read (and a viewing, in this case), but this is an empty argument. Harvard issued Gay’s PhD, hired her for this job, and then refused to enforce its plagiarism policies on Gay, and explicitly stood behind her despite both her PR debacle and the chaos on campus that she has at least allowed if not endorsed. Gay’s poor leadership is a direct result of Harvard’s decision to prioritize its DEI values in the hiring process rather than look for someone with demonstrated effectiveness in leading a large university and promoting true academic values. Harvard has kept her in place even as Gay’s incompetence and academic fraud has been exposed. So who are we supposed to blame, if not Harvard? – Ed]