I have largely stayed out of any discussion of the attacks on Harvard President Claudine Gay, mostly because I don’t feel like spending my precious sobriety and dwindling brainpower defending a university administrator. My colleague Stephen Voss, however, has surprisingly become part of the fray:
I had to push back, given this one-sided characterization. I tried for a boring reply, hoping it would serve his tweet as a footnote noticed only by those who knew me.
No such luck. Rufo amplified my response at prime time the next day. Approximately 1.8 million devices eventually encountered it, sending me down a rabbit hole that was the most eye-opening part of the adventure.
I found myself surrounded by an electronic lynch mob calling for Claudine’s head — with the most vocal participants furious at me for supporting her.
Anyway, this ain’t really my thing. Rufo and his mob are obviously making these attacks in bad faith, although it would be harder for them to make these bad faith attacks stick if there wasn’t some obvious sloppiness. That said, if someone dug through the enormity of my own public writings I’d be sensibly worried that they might find some sloppiness that slipped through various waves of editing and revision, and that the sloppiness could be weaponized against me. Long story short, try not to be sloppy when folks come gunning for you.
A final aside: while I’d never equate the two, I do find the “why aren’t faculty standing by Gay?” whinging from the university administrative class more than a bit clueless. I’ll have a lot more on this later, but how many Steve Salaita-Erika López Prater incidents do we have to recount to explain why faculty should never treat administrators as allies, and should not even consider going to the mattresses on the behalf of a beleaguered university president? Generally speaking, university administrators are the means through which right wing hate mobs go after faculty that they loathe; deans and provosts and presidents are more often the instruments of the mob than the targets of it, and should not expect that faculty will have their backs when they so rarely display any courage in the face of such attacks.
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