The news arrived today in my inbox at 1:27 PM, in an email from Claudine Gay herself. She wrote me “to share that I will be stepping down as president” of Harvard. Fourteen minutes later, that email was followed by an official announcement to the same effect from the Harvard Corporation.

Of course, Ms. Gay took the opportunity to blame her downfall on racism of unnamed adversaries. “[I]t has been . . . frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.” What personal attacks and racial animus exactly, Ms. Gay? What I have seen (and contributed to) is plenty of fair criticism of the sort that everyone who operates at the level of President of Harvard must deal with every day. Since when is it a “personal attack,” let alone “racial animus,” simply to document a record of enforcing woke orthodoxy on campus, or of allowing anti-semitism to flourish, or of committing more than 40 instances of clear plagiarism in an already sparse record of academic publication?

Anyway, with Gay gone, the ball goes back to the board known as the Harvard Corporation to find a replacement as President. What can Harvard expect in the next round?

It was less than three weeks ago, December 5, when the name of Claudine Gay, President of Harvard University, suddenly burst into the news. That was the day that she, along with the Presidents of Penn and MIT, testified before Congress — and could not give a clear answer as to whether it was against the policy at their schools to call for the genocide of Jews. All three women attempted to use the occasion to paint themselves as defenders of free speech, particularly important in such extreme cases.

Manhattan Contrarian readers already knew that Ms. Gay was the opposite of a defender of free speech. In a post on December 16, 2022 with the title “Goodnight, Poor Harvard!” — written on the occasion of the announcement that Ms. Gay would become the next President of Harvard — I reviewed her record on the subject.

My conclusion, based on multiple examples mostly from the work of independent journalist Christopher Brunet, was that Ms. Gay was “the enforcer-in-chief of wokist orthodoxy at Harvard.”

In the few short weeks since December 5, the news as to Ms. Gay has gotten worse and worse, seemingly by the day.

In a post last week I marveled at the sudden discovery by the Presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT of the importance of freedom of speech when it involves demonstrators favoring elimination of Israel and slaughter of Jews. Yet somehow, at the same institutions, comparable principles just don’t seem to apply in the case of basic dissent from leftist political orthodoxy.

When the official party line gets questioned, all the elite universities have multiple tactics to diminish and banish the deviators, whether that be by demanding loyalty oaths (e.g., “diversity statements”) in hiring or admissions, holding mandatory “diversity” or “sensitivity” training sessions, disinviting speakers, conducting pretextual investigations of dissenters, funding the favored and denying tenure to the disfavored, and many other such methods.

So how bad is it out there on elite campuses, really?

The New Yorker is a magazine that I have barely noticed for decades. It is the epitome of the “New York groupthink” that I mention on my “About” page.

But the current issue has a long (10,000+ words) piece by a guy named Nathan Heller, titled “The End of the English Major,” that I thought might be worth a look. Perhaps here we might find some liberal introspection about how infesting everything you control with racialist and gender obsessions and Critical Race Theory might not be such a great idea.

Who was I trying to kid?