Why disgrace is unlikely to erode the allure of Harvard

livemint.com:

A few days ago, the president of Harvard University resigned in disgrace. There is a perception among cultural observers in America that the episode has eroded Harvard’s prestige. That cannot be true.

Disgrace does not diminish an exclusive club. That is not how prestige works. What ends prestige is, in fact, equality.

After Hamas slaughtered over a thousand Israelis in a single day, wounded over 3,400, and raped an unknowable number, there was widespread denouncement across US universities. Not of Hamas, but of Israel. In political turmoil, university students tend to back the poorer player when their own stakes in the region are very low.

But their timing was atrocious. Their protests against Israel began just hours after the massacre. There was another factor at play.

Humanitarians have invented sustainable ways to disguise hatred. On American campuses, a dislike for Jews, who have an outsized political influence, can masquerade as love for Palestinians. All this was in full flow in the Ivy League, including Harvard University, whose president Claudine Gay failed to stop extreme posturing against Israel.

Influential Jews responded by hitting where it hurts most—donations. They also levelled charges of “anti-Semitism" against some varsities. In a Congressional hearing, when Gay was asked whether calls for genocide against Jews on Harvard’s campus violated its rules on bullying and harassment, she said it depends on “the context." As the face of Harvard, her testimony was a disaster.

But she somehow kept her job. Oddly, what brought her stint to an end was the less grave charge that many years ago, in her scholarly works, she had lifted whole paragraphs from the works of other people. Not just Gay, Harvard too has