Harvard President’s Resignation: The Phrase That Undid Claudine Homosexual

Looking back, Claudine Homosexual’s destiny was sealed by a single phrase. (She resigned the presidency of Harvard on Tuesday, simply six months into her tenure.) It wasn’t “plagiarism” or “genocide” — the fearsome combating phrases most publicly related together with her case — however fairly a cautious, impartial piece of language that struck some listeners as outrageous for exactly that cause: an try at anti-inflammatory rhetoric that had the other impact. The phrase was “context.”

Testifying at a congressional listening to in early December with two different college presidents — solely one among whom, Sally Kornbluth of M.I.T., nonetheless has her job — she was requested by Consultant Elise Stefanik (Republican of New York; Harvard ’06) whether or not “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated “Harvard’s guidelines of bullying and harassment.” Dr. Homosexual replied that it’d, “relying on the context,” a formulation she reiterated when Ms. Stefanik rephrased the query. Dr. Homosexual later apologized for these remarks, however that they had already entered the media bloodstream, making her and her fellow witnesses an in a single day meme representing the insensitivity and cluelessness of elite educational management.

Now that Dr. Homosexual is out (following M. Elizabeth Magill of the College of Pennsylvania, who resigned shortly after the listening to), there’s greater than sufficient context to go round. Her profession, till final July a gradual, brisk climb by way of school and administrative ranks to the top of American greater schooling, has grow to be a punditic bonanza and a culture-war Rorschach check.

Those that imagine that the fashionable college is tyrannized by left-wing ideology and undermined by range initiatives have been fast to raise Dr. Homosexual into an emblem of systemic dysfunction. For her defenders, she seems to be extra like a scapegoat, arguably essentially the most outstanding casualty in a protracted conservative campaign in opposition to the mental institution. Ms. Stefanik and Christopher Rufo, the right-wing activist who pushed the allegations of scholarly misconduct that lastly precipitated Dr. Homosexual’s exit, won’t disagree with that evaluation. “I’ll at all times ship outcomes,” Ms. Stefanik stated in an announcement on Tuesday, promising to proceed her efforts to “expose the rot” in America’s main universities.

The Israel-Hamas battle and American election-year politics will not be the one salient context right here. Academia appears to be within the grip of a multidimensional disaster that goes past ideology, and likewise past Harvard. Larger studying is affected by opaque admissions insurance policies; runaway tuition costs; administrative bloat; grade inflation; helicopter mother and father; cancel tradition. The record goes on. An assiduous scholar may join these phenomena with latest occasions in Harvard Yard. An enterprising author may weave the entire thing right into a bristling campus novel, one thing worthy of Paul Beatty or Mary McCarthy.

As a substitute, for now, we should make do with Dr. Homosexual’s letter of resignation — emailed to college students, school, alumni and others with the topic line “Private Information” — and the message from the Harvard Company (the college’s secretive governing physique) about her departure.