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Harvard may assume the forced resignation of its president, Claudine Gay, has finally ended its month-long scandal over her tenure.
Gay stepped down, remember, amid serious allegations of serial plagiarism -- without refuting the charges. She proved either unable or unwilling to discipline those on her campus who were defiantly antisemitic in speech and action.
But Gay's removal is not the end of Harvard's dilemma. Rather, it is the beginning.
In the respective press releases from both Gay and the Harvard Corporation, racial animus was cited as a reason for her removal.
Gay did not even refer to her failure to stop antisemitism on her campus or herown record of blatant plagiarism.
Yet playing the race card reflects poorly on both and for a variety of reasons.
One, Gay's meager publication record -- a mere eleven articles without a single published book of her own -- had somehow earned her a prior Harvard full professorship and presidency. Such a thin resume leading to academic stardom is unprecedented.
Two, the University of Pennsylvania forced the resignation of its president, Liz Magill. She sat next to Gay during that now-infamous congressional hearing in which they both claimed they were unable to discipline blatant antisemitism on their campuses.
Instead, both pleaded "free speech" and "context" considerations. Such excuses were blatantly amoral and untrue. In truth, ivy-league campuses routinely sanction, punish, or remove staff, faculty, or students deemed culpable for speech or behavior deemed hurtful to protected minorities -- except apparently white males and Jews.
Yet Magill was immediately forced to resign, and Gay was not. Also noteworthy was Magill's far more impressive and extensive administrative experience, along with a more prestigious scholarship that was free of even a suggestion of plagiarism.
Academia's immediate firing of a white woman while trying desperately to save the career of a less qualified and ethically challenged Black woman will be seen not as a case of racial bias but more likely of racial preference.
Indeed, to keep Gay's job and to defend her from plagiarism charges, both Harvard and Gay herself were willing to say things that were simply absurd, if not patently untrue. Harvard invented a new phrase "duplicative language" to euphemize the reality of Gay's intellectual theft.