DAN MCLAUGHLIN: 50 billion reasons why Harvard can afford to be bigoted – that’s the dollar-fortune that allows their shameless bosses to keep antisemitism-apologist and accused-plagiarist Claudine Gay

The mask has dropped. Harvard is circling the wagons around embattled university president Claudine Gay.

After UPenn’s Liz Magill was forced to resign for her part in last week’s shameful congressional testimony into on-campus anti-Jewish hate speech – appearing alongside Gay and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth – Harvard could have sent a similar message.

Instead, this most prestigious of American institutions is signaling to the world: Antisemitism is welcome here.

How rancid.

On Tuesday we learned President Gay has the unanimous backing of the university’s executive board, the Harvard Corporation. Some 700 faculty members have also signed a letter in support.

Proof then, if any were needed, that the ugly institutional rot runs far deeper than just the head.

The mask has dropped. Harvard is circling the wagons around embattled university president Claudine Gay.

At UPenn, pressure from one donor who allegedly threatened to withdraw $100 million in funding was eventually enough to see the axe wielded on Magill. Money talks.

But Harvard, with its swollen $50 billion endowment, is clearly rich enough to afford bigotry – even when it has reportedly lost as much as a billion dollars in donations in recent days.

The smug and blithely callous testimony of Gay, Magill and Kornbluth sparked international outrage. But I find it hard to believe their words were accidental.

All three of their respective universities have shown little sign of stamping out the post-October 7 explosion in anti-Israel protests, even those featuring pro-genocide rhetoric.

Meanwhile, these same universities have proudly rebranded themselves in recent years as free speech policemen – at least when it comes to the communities they deem worthy of protection, like black and trans students.

Watch what you say at Harvard, kids – unless, of course, you’re calling for violence against Israel and Jews!

As for Gay, her academic work in African-American studies is more activist than scholarly. She’s published fewer than a dozen peer-reviewed articles and nothing in the past seven years. She’s never written a book.

Working her way up the ranks, she campaigned avidly for the expansion of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ hires at the university – and hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, a Harvard alumnus, claims that multiple sources have told him that ‘the search committee that led to President Gay’s appointment excluded non-DEI eligible candidates from the process.’

Gay’s articles and her dissertation have come under fire in recent days for alleged plagiarism.

As The Harvard Crimson – the university’s student newspaper – reported, the offenses include ‘copying an entire paragraph of data description almost verbatim from another work without any citation.’

Critics have exposed multiple other potential violations in her work.

However, The Harvard Corporation said in a statement that while an investigation – which apparently started way before this whole sorry saga, back in October – ‘found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.’

How that chimes with Harvard’s plagiarism policy – which says scholars who ‘for whatever reason, submit work either not their own or without clear attribution to its sources will be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including requirement to withdraw from the College’ – is not clear.

At UPenn, pressure from one donor who threatened to withdraw $100 million in funding was eventually enough to see the axe wielded on Magill. Money talks.

Gay, naturally, denies any wrongdoing. But, if that is true, one wonders why her papers need fixing so many years later.

It seems clear that the Corporation and Harvard’s fat-cat donors who continue to pile money into its endowment – the largest in the world – have made their bed.

Instead of standing with the millions who were horrified by Gay, Magill and Kornbluth’s disgraceful testimonies, they’re siding with the uber-politicized campus climate, the degradation of academic standards down a leftist ideological mudslide.

Turns out a Harvard resume credential is more valuable than rocking the boat.

Just look at this pathetic array of nodding heads.

At the top of The Harvard Corporation – ultimately responsible for hiring Gay, and holding the power to fire her – sits senior fellow Penny Pritzker, a hotel billionaire who paid big donations to Barack Obama to leverage a role as his secretary of commerce from 2013-17. Her brother is the governor of Illinois.

There’s also former American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault, private equity boss Paul Finnegan, and the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar – alongside a fulsome laundry list of other Establishment elitists.

Money talks, indeed. And it also corrupts.

These people could act decisively if they wanted to. History might not remember their continued inaction kindly.

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