Public figures these days, no matter their race, are too often targets of invective and lies. Yet Ms. Gay brushed past the substantive criticism of her leadership and failure to punish antisemitism on campus. So did her bosses at the Harvard Corporation, which issued a statement Tuesday lauding her “insight, decisiveness, and empathy.” Jewish students at Harvard might disagree. (See nearby.)
Ms. Gay was correct in one respect: “The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader.” Her equivocation before Congress about whether calling for genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s code of conduct made her a symbol of the progressive group-think infecting higher education and American institutions more broadly.
Former New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet wrote in the Economist last month that his former newspaper “is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.” The same is true of other once-respected institutions.
Ms. Gay writes that the campaign against her “was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society” and that “trusted institutions of all types—from public health agencies to news organizations—will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility.”
She blames “opportunists” for “driving cynicism about our institutions.” But elite institutions—from the press to public-health agencies to social media and big business—have undermined their own credibility and fueled public cynicism.