Filling in for Chris Hayes on Tuesday’s episode of “All In,” MSNBC contributor Jason Johnson, a professor of global journalism and communication at Morgan State University, said that Harvard has “bowed to right wing pressure” after the university’s President, Claudine Gay, resigned.
Johnson pointed to the “bad faith” campaign against Gay and other university leaders, spearheaded by congressional Republicans like Elise Stefanik and right wing activist Christopher Rufo, declaring that “Republicans want America’s elite institutions to remain run by conservatives and conservatives that they like. Period. And they’ll come up with any phony controversy to achieve that end.”
“Harvard’s first black president, a woman named Claudine Gay, resigned her position. The move comes after conservatives and Republicans have been telegraphing their goal to have her fired for weeks,” Johnson said. “Everything from a bad faith hearing on campus antisemitism to unfounded plagiarism charges were thrown at her.”
Johnson noted that Gay’s resignation comes a month after the congressional hearings on antisemitism at American colleges, organized by Stefanik, which already led to the ouster of UPenn President Elizabeth Magill, and that Stefanik celebrated Gay’s resignation by implying it wouldn’t be the last such act.
Johnson also noted, correctly, that Stefanik has a well-documented history of supporting antisemitic politicians. “She backed buffalo developer Carl Paladino for a house seat, despite audio of him saying that Adolf Hitler was and I quote, ‘the kind of leader we need today.’ And Stefanik has also forcefully endorsed Donald Trump, a man who as President of the United States, accused American Jews of being disloyal when they vote for Democrats, and who as a candidate has retweeted antisemitic memes and all but cites ‘Mein Kampf’ at his 2024 campaign rallies.”
“Now, here’s the thing. If Harvard decided that it no longer wanted Claudine Gay as its president that’s the university’s business. It can change presidents as it pleases. But they never found her to have committed plagiarism. And as recently as Christmas, the Harvard Foundation gave their support. It is disappointing that Harvard has bowed to right wing pressure,” Johnson continued.
Comparing Republicans to “writers from bad 80s teen films who think that the only colleges in America are Harvard, Yale, MIT and a few Ivies,” Johnson said they are “obsessed” with America’s top universities. “But I went to University of Virginia, I teach at Morgan State University. America is filled with brilliant qualified people at a Michigan State University of Akron and Spelman and Emory and UC Santa Barbara.”
Johnson dismissed claims that Republicans actually care about antisemitism or any other issue, arguing that “Republicans want America’s elite institutions to remain run by conservatives and conservatives that they like. Period. And they’ll come up with any phony controversy to achieve that end.”
Harvard, Johnson continued, “definitely damaged [Gay’s] career by doing the bidding of the American right. Hopefully other colleges will stand more firm in the future.”
Gay resigned on Tuesday, just under a month after testifying during Stefanik’s antisemitism hearing alongside the presidents of MIT and UPenn. While the hearing was replete with numerous examples of obvious bad faith by congressional Republicans, who quite transparently were attempting to create gotcha moments regardless of context, the three presidents did themselves no favors either.
Their testimony was quite often incoherently academic and noncommittally legalistic — even in response to simple questions about “pro-genocide” speech. While the three women never once endorsed or defended antisemitism in any way, their responses were criticized even by supporters. Unlike Upenn, where one of the school’s largest donors threatened to withdrawl all funding unless they fired Magill, Harvard initially stood by Gay.
However, right wing activists then publicized what they said were instances of plagiarism in her 1997 dissertation. The university later acknowledged there were some issues involving sloppy citations and using cliche phrases contained in other work, though it denied any plagiaristic intention and as recently as Christmas continued to back Gay.
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