MARRITZ: Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America. The governing board calls itself the oldest corporation in the western hemisphere. If Harvard were a human being, its endowment alone would make it the 18th richest billionaire on the Forbes list.

I spent a year at Harvard as a visiting journalist on a fellowship.

 

From the moment I arrived, I kept noticing how much people at Harvard think about power. Analyzing it. Quantifying it. Forming the people who will hold it. Just this past semester, the course catalog included more than 250 classes with the word “leadership” in their description. “Leadership,” as I eventually figured out, is Harvard speak for “power.”

 

When I first got there in the fall of 2023, I’d go to the main library and roam the stacks inhaling the scent of old books. And on my way back out, I’d pause at the top of the granite steps, and look across the yard, crisscrossed by footpaths. Workers were hanging banners, building a stage for a big party. Harvard was about to inaugurate a new president.

  

Nobody knew then that the aftermath of that celebration would be a spectacular torching of Harvard’s reputation. That Harvard’s own assumptions about how power works, its own blind spots, would be used against it. By a bunch of Harvard grads.

 

And then, one Friday in September, the brass band struck up a tune and the celebration began.

GROYSMAN: I think no one expected, uh, that it's gonna be so rainy.

 

MARRITZ: This is my friend Sonya Groysman. She’s a journalist from Russia. She and I went to the inauguration together.

 

We sat on folding chairs, as it started to drizzle. 

 

GROYSMAN: And I remember us saying something like, oh, it's like at Harry Potter. Remember?

 

MARRITZ: It really did look like Hogwarts, with all these professors in colorful robes and mortarboard caps passing by.

 

When Harvard’s new president, Claudine Gay, swept past, I snapped a photo. I still have it on my phone. Here is a Black woman, with short hair, in chunky glasses. Smiling, waving. Her body language says:  thank you for throwing me this party, you really shouldn’t have. 

 

If her inauguration had a one-word theme it was….FINALLY.

 

MATOS-RODRIGUEZ: This community is thrilled by her historic appointment as Harvard's first black leader and its only second woman president. 

 

MARRITZ: Gay’s parents immigrated to the United States from Haiti.

 

SADLAK: Many students felt that this moment called us to repair past harms and actively step into a more just future.

 

MARRITZ: One speaker after another talked about this event as historic, as a kind of correction.

 

SADLAK: Many look to our next president to guide us through this reckoning. We are lucky enough to have found that person in President Gay.

APPLAUSE

 

MARRITZ: As a scholar, Gay studied Black participation in politics. Later, she became an administrator, the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences. 

 

So here was change, grafted on to tradition.

HODGES: I invite President Emeritus Lawrence Summers to present two silver keys, which represent the opening of Doors to Knowledge and Truth. 

MARRITZ: For much of the ceremony, Larry Summers, 

 

APPLAUSE

 

probably the most famous living former Harvard president, was sitting with his fingertips pressed together, looking grim. Now he rose to give Gay a pair of very oversized keys on a ring, and she held them up for everyone to see.

 

There is something about this moment. It’s not only the visual of a new president, who looks different from her predecessors. It’s also the timing.

 

Harvard had just lost a major legal challenge to its admissions policies that went all the way to the Supreme Court. At stake, the future of race-based affirmative action. 

 

JUSTICE ROBERTS: We’ll hear argument next in case 20-11-99, Students For Fair admissions versus The President and Fellows of Harvard College. Mr Norris?

 

MARRITZ: The court ruled against the university, overturning almost five decades of precedent. The ruling would set the guidelines not only for Harvard, but for nearly all colleges and universities.

PRITZKER: Madam president. The chair is yours. 

GAY: Right. Thank you. And thank you for soldiering through the rain. 

The theme of Gay’s inaugural speech was courage. The courage to ask why, why not? The courage to pose the questions that lead to research breakthroughs, and great insights. Without directly addressing the Supreme Court, Gay said Harvard has a commitment...

 

GAY: ...to draw from a deeper pool of talent and provide our institution with the excellence it deserves and our diverse society with the leaders it needs and expects. 

 

MARRITZ: But what really stands out, watching it now, after everything that’s happened, is that Claudine Gay’s speech kind of anticipates what’s to come. 

 

GAY: We are in a moment of declining trust in institutions of all kinds of endless access to information, but doubts and conflict about who and what to believe. Of political polarization so extreme that gridlock is preferred to pragmatic collaboration.

 

MARRITZ: Her read on this is pretty precise. But her ideas for rebuilding trust are hazy.

 

GAY: It lies partly in our courage to face our imperfections and mistakes, to turn outward with a fresh and open spirit, meeting a doubtful and restless society with audacious and uplifting ambitions, present … 

 

MARRITZ: It was Friday, September 29, 2023. 

 

MOORE: President Gay. You got this. 

 

MARRITZ: Anything seemed possible.

 

MOORE: And we got you. [CHEERS] 

MARRITZ: This series is about what happened next. About the very strange, very fast sequence of events that led to the premature end of Claudine Gay’s presidency, and a pretty major change of direction across American institutions. The same institutions Gay worried were losing public trust. More university presidents quit. More companies backed off of efforts aimed at diversity and racial reconciliation.

MARRITZ: The thing that set it all off: a letter from a group hardly anyone had  no one had heard of, about a war thousands of miles away.

FELDMAN: Imagine that you came from Mars and said, I'm trying to learn about you strange people on Earth.

MARRITZ: Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman. 

 

FELDMAN: And I know that on October 7th, Hamas attacked Israel. And I know that three months later, give or take, Claudine Gay resigned the presidency. And I know there's some connection. But what was it again? It would take a whole podcast or a whole book to try to explain it, and even then the Martian would still say, probably, gosh, you people, you're living in a very strange and complicated world.

MARRITZ: Most of the voices you're going to hear in this series come with advanced degrees, many of them Harvard degrees.

These denizens of the success factory have much in common, but this crisis divides them.

KENNEDY: I was deeply saddened. I still am deeply saddened by it. I thought that she was mistreated… 

ACKMAN: I wanted her to be fired, because of failures of leadership, failure to stop an emergence of antisemitism on campus.

HOLLEY: Because of gender and race you don’t get any credits. All those credits you think you've been building up for years, the credits are always at zero.  

MARRITZ: Before I came to Harvard, I covered Donald Trump and extremism and the fraying of democratic institutions. I went to do this fellowship, and go back to college, to get away from all that. But it felt like those same forces followed me to the university. They became impossible to ignore. And so I got work trying to understand what the heck just happened. 

BURNS: So it was over the weekend. It was Saturday night. They published the letter.

MARRITZ: This is my Globe colleague Hilary Burns, who covers higher education.

BURNS: I was in Vermont, you know, not working, but obviously the news of October 7th was all over the news. 

MARRITZ: Within hours, Hilary Burns heard that a Harvard student group had put out a letter that was getting noticed.

BURNS: I remember thinking people were going to be very angry about this

MARRITZ: The letter was written by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and originally co-signed by 33 other Harvard student organizations and it blamed Israel, entirely, for the attack. Quote; “Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” the statement reads. “For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison....In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel’s violence. The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”

BURNS: I knew that this issue in particular had been so divisive and contentious over the years before this. And it caused a lot of rifts at Harvard in the past. 

MARRITZ: By Monday, the letter had gone viral.  Some people said it was antisemitic.

BURNS: I mean, there were members of Congress, Larry Summers, prominent alumni, tweeting – it, it was making international headlines. 

NEWSREEL: Tonight there is growing backlash to a letter signed by nearly 3 dozen student groups at Harvard…

NEWSREEL: …now executives in finance and tech want the students blacklisted, several students have already apologized … 

BURNS: ...and at that point Monday during the work hours, Harvard administration had not yet put out a statement at all. 

MARRITZ: Claudine Gay spent the previous night at Hillel - the Jewish student center on campus. The place was packed. Some students demanded that Harvard respond to the letter from the Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee with some kind of official condemnation. Gay told them that in her view, statements don’t bring healing. Showing up in person can.

The next day, seeing no public statement, former Harvard President Larry Summers — the man who gave Gay the ceremonial keys to knowledge and truth — took to X to criticize the university for its silence.  

An official statement signed by Claudine Gay and the university’s deans appeared later that day. Harvard leadership had in fact spent much of the weekend hashing out the wording. 

Summers responded on Bloomberg TV.

SUMMERS: In the same way that previous leaders flew the Ukrainian flag over Harvard yard after Putin’s invasion I thought it was appropriate for there to be a strong Harvard statement condemning in the strongest possible terms Hamas terrorism.

MARRITZ: Harvard’s statement on the Hamas attack actually came out faster than Harvard’s earlier condemnations of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or the killing of George Floyd. But: those letters showed passion, moral clarity. This was much more…removed. Some saw it as anti-Israel, for not mentioning the hostages, not using the word terrorism, and for drawing a kind of grammatical equivalence between Israel and Hamas. 

The following day, under pressure, Claudine Gay put out another statement aimed at diffusing the outrage. Take two is short and clear, and signed only by her.

BURNS: She said that that statement does not speak for Harvard. It really separated her from that student's statement that had angered so many people.

If that was supposed to close the book on the episode, now trucks had started circling campus displaying the names and headshots of students with the words “Harvard’s leading anti-semites.” 

NEWSREEL: A digital billboard parked right outside of Harvard University  is attracting a lot of attention – the names and faces of Harvard students are displayed under the title Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.

MARRITZ: Some of the students being called out hadn’t signed the letter, or even known about it.

BURNS: Students were really freaked out and afraid. And at that point, we were seeing alumni on Twitter and including hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman doubling down on this and saying, you know, Harvard needs to release the names of students affiliated with this statement, so we know on Wall Street not to hire them. Some students did lose job offers.

WOLPE: Um, she called me.

MARRITZ: Around this time, Rabbi David Wolpe received a phone call. Wolpe was a visiting scholar at Harvard’s divinity school. But before that he led a large, diverse congregation in Los Angeles. In that role, he had to be attuned to potential disputes, and balance the wishes of more liberal American-born members with those of more conservative Iranian-born congregants. BLM lawn sign — no. Gay marriages? — yes.

So, Rabbi Wolpe’s phone was ringing. He picked up.

WOLPE: She said, this is Claudine Gay. She said, she realized that the campus was, you know, exploding with this and this was not her expertise. 

MARRITZ: More acutely than the content of the call Wolpe remembers this —

WOLPE: she was clearly deeply shaken. I mean, she was very emotional on the call. She was having a hard time. And who wouldn't in her position? 

MARRITZ: Gay asked Rabbi Wolpe to join a task force on anti-semitism. He said yes, of course. She also asked him for a reading list. 

WOLPE: Books that would give her both the history of the conflict and also some deeper understanding of Jewish history and why Jews feel the way they do in response to what's been going on. So I made a suggestion of a couple of books. I don't know that she ever got the time to read them, but I did make the suggestions. 

MARRITZ: It's hard to imagine now, but that October, and into November, it was still possible to kind of ignore the noise. I didn’t really notice any protests. The students in my classes just wanted to get ahead. Still, things were happening. 

BURNS: there were a couple of incidents that were very high profile, 

MARRITZ: The Globe’s Hilary Burns

BURNS: including the one at the business school where there was a peaceful die in where people were just lying on the ground, holding, holding signs, calling for a cease fire. And a student came out walked through the crowd like filming students and some kind of altercation happened. 

MARRITZ: In this video that was posted online, a person who has been identified as an Israeli student is kind of mobbed by a big group of people holding up keffiyehs, shouting what sounds like “shame!”

Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! 

BURNS: We don't really know what to make of what happened. The prosecution of two pro Palestinian graduate students who were charged with assault and battery and a civil rights violation is still playing out in the courts.

MARRITZ: For some Harvard alumni this incident and others were a tipping point. 

MARRITZ: What is the Mark connection? You guys were friends at Harvard or what? 

LESSIN: we were - friends would be an overstatement. We knew each other. 

MARRITZ: Sam Lessin class of 2005, is a tech executive who has worked at Facebook. He was there at the same time as Mark Zuckerberg (who did not graduate.)

LESSIN: We knew each other in college. We became close years later. 

MARRITZ: Lessin had been hearing murmurs about bad things happening at Harvard for a while. But he didn’t buy it.

LESSIN: I started hearing like everyone else for the trigger warnings and then I'm like, wow, there are trigger warnings? Like we talked about some crazy stuff. and so you kind of get a sense that things are changing here or there. You know, people worry about antisemitism. They worry about what can and can't be said, what does and doesn't happen on campus. You know disinvited speakers. You kind of see this drumbeat. But again, I, pre ten- seven in the last fall really was the one who defended the university pretty consistently in my friend group being like, yup, look, this stuff is complicated. 

MARRITZ: Lessin had given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Harvard in the past. But now he was questioning that. 

LESSIN: I'm like, my God, I'm the one who's wrong here. And that sucks. 

ACKMAN: I went up to campus and I met with hundreds of students in small groups and larger groups and they’re like Bill, why is the president doing nothing? Why is the administration doing nothing? And that was really the beginning.  

MARRITZ: This is tape from the Lex Fridman podcast - the guest is Bill Ackman, Harvard college class of ‘88, MBA 1992, who’d given Harvard millions. He was on his own, parallel journey.  

Ackman is a wildly successful hedge fund manager known for picking big public fights with companies he thinks are mismanaged. He once successfully browbeat Wendy’s into selling off the Tim Horton’s chain of donut shops. Reaching out to Harvard’s leadership —

ACKMAN: It reminded me of, you know, like early days of activism where I couldn't get the CEO of Wendy's to return my call. I couldn't get the CEO, CEO of Harvard, you know, take a meeting. 

MARRITZ: Bill Ackman bailed on an interview with us, last minute. Like Sam Lessin, he experienced a kind of awakening about Harvard. 

ACKMAN: They started talking to me about this oppressor-oppressed, uh, framework. I had not even heard of this. Basically they're like, look, Israel is deemed an oppressor and the Palestinians are deemed the oppressed.

MARRITZ: Many of Harvard’s critics once considered themselves liberal or center left. But the crisis at Harvard worked like a wedge, you could see it prying off a segment of rich and influential supporters, in real time.  

The story was reaching critical mass, and Congress got interested. Specifically, the Republican-controlled House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Near the end of November, Claudine Gay and two other college presidents agreed to testify in a hearing on anti-semitism at colleges. Rabbi Wolpe, the guy who had sent Gay the reading list? He texted her with an offer.

WOLPE: I knew that she was going into the hearings, and I thought I could help. And so I tried to persuade her to let me supply her with quotes from the Bible or the Talmud or the Jewish sages, something that would show that she was taking this seriously

MARRITZ: Wolpe wanted Gay to succeed, but he had serious doubts about how Harvard was responding to the crisis. He had joined the advisory group on anti-semitism, which brought him face to face with a number of university leaders. Where Wolpe saw a five alarm fire, he says Harvard just didn’t.

WOLPE: I don't want to speak specifically for President Gay, but, I mean, it was from everything that we heard, some of it official, some of it unofficial, the corporation, which is the board that oversees Harvard. The deans, everybody thought that it was going to eventually peter out and go away, in part because they saw, which was true, that many students were not involved and didn't care and just came to class and so on. And I don't think they realized that for the students who were involved, this was an epochal event. 

Still, Wolpe thought Gay would be well served to quote from a holy book when she went before Congress, to show she was simpatico with the Jewish people, and attuned to Jewish suffering.

MARRITZ: Did you have a specific quotation citation in mind?

WOLPE: I think I had a couple that I thought of, but I don't really remember now what they were. But it's easy to find, you know, relevant citations for peaceful, you know, interaction for learned debate or whatever. I don't know what I would have come up with. 

MARRITZ: What did she say? 

WOLPE: She thanked me very much. 

MARRITZ: She said, thank you for the suggestion, and that's it. 

WOLPE: Yeah, basically.

GAY: During these difficult days, I have felt the bonds of our community strain. In response, I have sought to confront hate while preserving free expression. This is difficult work, and I know that I have not always gotten it right.

 

MARRITZ: When the day comes, and the CSPAN camera is on her, Gay does not cite the torah or the talmud. She talks like the administrator she is.

 

GAY: We at Harvard reject anti Semitism and denounce any trace of it on our campus or within our community. Anti Semitism is a symptom of ignorance, and the cure for ignorance is knowledge. Harvard must model what it means to preserve free expression while combating prejudice and preserving the security of our community.

 

MARRITZ: For a hearing in which members profess to be alarmed about rising anti-semitism, there is shockingly little fact-finding. Hatred of Jews is construed broadly, to include contested terms, like Intifada. Members of Congress don’t want to hear about the fine points of balancing free expression with the need for public safety.

 

For the three college presidents, it’s a ritual beating, lasting more than five hours. 

 

STEFANIK: Dr. Kornbluth. 

 

KORNBLUTH: Yes. 

 

STEFANIK: Does MIT does calling for the genocide of Jews violate MIT's code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment? Yes or no? 

 

MARRITZ: If there is one part of this story that is probably very familiar to you it’s the barrage of confrontational questions from New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik, Harvard College class of 2006. Currently the nominee for ambassador to the United Nations.

 

STEFANIK: Ms. Magill, at Penn, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's rules or code of conduct? Yes or no?

 

MAGILL: If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment, yes. 

 

STEFANIK: I am asking. Specifically calling for the genocide of Jews. Does that constitute bullying or harassment? 

 

MAGILL: If it is directed and severe or pervasive, it is harassment. 

 

STEFANIK: So the answer is yes.  

 

MAGILL: It is a context dependent decision, Congresswoman. - 

 

STEFANIK: It's a context dependent decision? That's your testimony today, calling for the genocide of Jews is depending upon the context. And Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?

 

GAY: It can be, depending on the context. 

 

STEFANIK: What's the context?  

 

GAY: Targeted as an individual, targeted at an individual. 

 

STEFANIK: It's targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals. Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them? Do you understand that dehumanization is part of antisemitism? I will ask you one more time. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?

ACKMAN: I was in the barber chair, if you will, getting a haircut. 

MARRITZ: Bill Ackman — remember, the hedge fund guy, class of ‘88 — was watching. And multi-tasking.

ACKMAN: And, I had a guy in my team send me the three minute section. I said, you know, cut that line of questioning. And I put out a little tweet on that. And, I call it my greatest hits of posts. Got something like 110 million views and, and, everyone looked at this and said, what is wrong with, you know, university campuses. 

MARRITZ: Rabbi Wolpe was watching too. And he too had a tweet. Before he hit send, he called Claudine Gay, to let her know he had decided to quit Harvard’s anti-semitism advisory group. Then he shared the letter on social. It happened to be the start of that year’s festival of lights.

WOLPE: Resigning: a Hanukkah message. 

MARRITZ: This tweet also went viral. Rabbi Wolpe read the letter to me.

WOLPE: I believe Claudine Gay to be both a kind and thoughtful person. Most of the students here wish only to get an education and a job, not prosecute ideological agendas. 

MARRITZ: But —

WOLPE: the system at Harvard, along with the ideology that grips far too many of the students and faculty, the ideology that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil. Ignoring Jewish suffering is evil. 

MARRITZ: Claudine Gay declined my invitation to do an interview. I ended up spending a lot of time talking with a different college president. 

 

HOLLEY: Hi. I'm Danielle Holley. Last name is H O L L E Y. I'm the 20th president of Mount Holyoke College. 

 

MARRITZ: Like Claudine Gay, Holley is a Black woman who attended Harvard in the late 1990s. Gay got a PhD. Holley went to the law school. And they have something else in common. They were both new on the job last year.

 

HOLLEY: I started on July 1st, 2023, the same day as Claudine Gay started.

 

MARRITZ: Holley watched the hearings with a growing sense of disbelief. All three presidents - like her - were at the beginning of their tenures. And yet —

HOLLEY: They were being accused of basically creating an atmosphere of hatred inside of universities that they had not led for years. So how could they, either one of them, be responsible, right, for the atmosphere inside of their universities? 

MARRITZ: And there was something in the particular discourse around Claudine Gay that felt familiar.  Holley says the scrutiny is intense if you’re a Black woman and a first.

HOLLEY: The jury is always out. Right, there's a sense that even though you hold that position, that it's really not yours. You are someone who is temporarily holding the reins, but you're still an outsider.

MARRITZ: Danielle Holley and Claudine Gay didn’t really know each other. They’d met once, on the  side-lines of a one-week summer camp that Harvard runs for new college presidents. I know. I had no idea.

What’s really interesting is that this seminar included an almost two-hour session on handling the kind of out-of-nowhere crises that can undermine a new president.

HOLLEY: crisis management, of course, in the summer of 2023 was mostly Covid related. We were thinking about what happens with the next pandemic, but we did not spend a lot of time thinking about kind of what happens in a crisis of the kind that we had over the last year in higher ed. 

An emotionally fraught social-media fueled bleep-storm where donors are in revolt and public statements are everything, just wasn’t on the radar. When that actually happened, Holley took an approach that was totally different from Harvard’s. She refused to say anything publicly, except to release a letter.

HOLLEY: It's now become known around here. We call it the statement on statements 

MARRITZ: The letter explained that although past presidents of Mount Holyoke had weighed in on big issues of the day, starting now the school would only speak on subjects that directly concerned it.

 

This had been Holley’s own policy for a decade. Going back to her previous job as dean of the law school at Howard, a historically black university.

HOLLEY: I came to Howard July 1st of 2014, which was only a few weeks before Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson.   immediately people said, well, are you going to issue a statement on behalf of the law school about the killing of Michael Brown? I said, no, I'm not going to do that because my duty is to educate lawyers who will then turn around and make real transformation in the criminal law system. So I don't have time to write or do what I considered at the time to be performative statements. 

Like at Howard Law School, Holley’s no-statements rule at Mount Holyoke made some people angry. Students accused her of condoning genocide through her silence. There were complaints from alumni.

HOLLEY: If donors were not upset and didn't threaten to take money away, that would be a surprise. I think the question is how do you react, right? 

MARRITZ: What I learned from Danielle Holley is that when you’re a new president, you don’t get a lot of grace. The donors may not know you or trust you. It’s a fragile time, and you need the board to show a united front with its chosen president. For Holley, it’s like, Bear with me here.

MARRITZ: We are going to manage this crisis in a certain way. When we come out on the other side of the crisis,  I will come visit you and talk to you about not what happened this week, not what happened this month, but what happened over the course of a year or what happened over the course of 18 months. But that's easier to say when you're an experienced president.

Claudine Gay was five months into the job when she went before Congress. She, and the other two presidents gave almost identical answers on the question of whether a call for genocide violated university speech codes. The moment echoed across social media, open to wild interpretation.….and now, their jobs were at stake. 

Two days after the hearing, the MIT board put out a letter of support, full of praise for its president, Sally Kornbluth. She is still in the job today. 

At the University of Pennsylvania, it was clear that the board was done with President Liz Magill. She resigned. 

BOK: The world should know that Liz McGill is a very good person and a talented leader who was beloved by her team. She is not the slightest bit anti-Semitic. 

MARRITZ: This is Scott Bok. He was chair of the board of trustees at U Penn. He resigned that position, right after Liz Magill, and made this letter public.

BOK: Working with her was one of the great pleasures of my life. Worn down by months of relentless external attacks. She was not herself last Tuesday, overprepared and over lawyered. Given the hostile forum and high stakes, she provided a legalistic answer to a moral question, and that was wrong. It made for a dreadful 30 second sound bite. And what was more than five hours of testimony. I wish Liz well in her future endeavors. I believe that in the fullness of time, people will come to view the story of her presidency at Penn very differently than they do today. 

MARRITZ: As for Harvard, the Board was initially silent. Claudine Gay seemed to be alone. She apologized in the pages of the Harvard Crimson. “I am sorry,” she said. “Words matter.” It wasn’t totally clear what she was apologizing for though. She had been guided to give legally meticulous answers. The advice came from a trusted Harvard insider. Bill Lee, Harvard College class of 72.  Lee is a partner at a major law firm, and a former leader of the Harvard Corporation. He represented Harvard in the big affirmative action case it had just lost at the Supreme Court. As the crisis deepened, the Harvard Corporation increasingly turned to him - one person told me he was “like a field general.”

It’s possible that someone else - a fresh, outside voice - would have counseled Gay differently. Rabbi Wolpe - remember, he was the one who suggested that Gay quote from the Jewish sages - he was disappointed by the “lack of passion” she showed. A law professor told me Gay could have given the answers Congress wanted to hear, and then amended her testimony later, for the record.

But that’s not what happened. 

Bill Lee declined our requests for comment. So did the current first fellow of the Harvard Corporation, Penny Pritzker, class of 1981, who led the group that hired Gay.

After the hearing A full week passed before The Harvard Corporation made a statement in support of Claudine Gay. But by then, a new crisis was upon them.

Siberium (possible): // I just think it is newsworthy that the president of the most famous institute, university in the world plagiarized.

 

Newsreel: University says Claudine Gay has now asked that corrections be made to her 1998 dissertation because of what it called inadequate citations.

 

VOX: Harvard is committed to DEI and Claudine Gay’s race protectd her from losing her job it’s outrageous.

 

MARRITZ: That’s next time.