Yesterday, I wrote about the likelihood that Penn’s president, Liz Magill, will be replaced sometime soon, as support for her has essentially collapsed in the wake of her testimony before Congress in which she refused to denounce calls for the genocide of Jews by students clearly.

Well, it is becoming clear that Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president, will follow her out the door shortly after.

I have no inside knowledge, of course. It turns out that the Ivies don’t share their plans with me for some reason. But the political and financial pressure on the institutions is building so fast that it is hard to imagine that the boards of these corporations–and they are corporations, not just educational institutions–can fulfill their fiduciary responsibilities and maintain their support for their presidents.

These schools are facing reputational collapse, and reputation is what they sell at a very high price indeed.

Breaking – UPenn donor Ross Stevens, CEO of Stone Ridge Asset Management, pulls a $100 million donation to the school.

We commend Ross Stevens and urge other donors from Penn, Harvard, MIT, Yale, Cornell, et al to follow suit.

Enough is enough! pic.twitter.com/XSQ0Z5Lp5D

— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) December 7, 2023

Magill was in the spotlight yesterday because Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro blasted her right between the eyes with a rhetorical shotgun, and nobody, including Magill, could find a way to defend her. She released a hostage video in which she tried to save her reputation. No dice.

She is gone. There will be some attempt to help her save face, but she is toast.

Harvard’s Gay is in deep doo-doo as well.

David Wolpe, a Rabbi who is a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Divinity School, had been recruited to help Harvard save its reputation by participating in a committee tasked with advising the university on how to deal with antisemitism. It was a lame move, but Harvard has a deep well of goodwill to draw on, and the reputational hits just came coming. They had to do something, and Wolpe was there to help.

He just threw in the towel. He loves Harvard, but the task is just too big.

2/3

However, 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…

— David Wolpe (@RabbiWolpe) December 7, 2023

Wolpe resigned with the nicest words for the institution, but some tasks are too large to accomplish and repulsive to try. Saving Harvard’s reputation after the fiasco we saw on Tuesday was not achievable and not worth it.

The basic problem is not that Harvard is defending vile speech because that is what academic institutions sometimes must do; Harvard is fine with punishing people for saying the most obviously true things because saying them would make some emotionally incontinent activist cry. Harvard is so into creating “safe spaces” that it ranked dead last in FIRE’s ranking of academic freedom.

The problem is this: Harvard wants to carve out a “safe space” exception when it comes to calling for the death of Jews. Call it the antisemitism exception to suppressing speech.

At Harvard, "fatphobia" constitutes violence.
But "globalize the intifada" requires context.

WATCH: pic.twitter.com/tEvg9IVVXS

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 7, 2023

It’s an indefensible position on its face. Calling a man a man is punishable speech if he chooses to object, but calling a Jew a target for murder is free speech?

Defend that if you must. I won’t try.

Gay is also burdened by the fact that Harvard has a long history of not just tolerating but embracing antisemitism. My father, whose mother was a non-practicing Jew, was admitted to Harvard at a time when the university had quotas that limited the number of Jews who could attend. He had a higher bar to clear than other students. My sister, when she went, no longer suffered under that burden, but she was so ridiculously smart and accomplished that clearing it would not have been a problem. She was 15 when she went.

Would she get accepted today? Maybe, maybe not. Discrimination is back with a vengeance at the school. This time it would be her skin color, not her tenuous relationship to Judaism that would have hampered her acceptance.

New video drop👇
As former managing director of @HarvardHillel I call on alumni, philanthropists, prospective parents and corporate recruiters to boycott @Harvard. Don’t donate. Don’t apply. Don’t hire from Harvard.

Boycott, Divest, and Sanction #Harvard. #BDSHarvard pic.twitter.com/1PkZphkyHq

— ShipofTheseus (@JewishSpaceLazr) December 7, 2023

There is a certain bizarre fittingness that it is the issue of antisemitism that is likely to bring down Gay because she should have been fired long ago for being an opponent of free speech. That it took defending calls to genocide to bring her down, assuming my prediction is correct, tells you everything you need to know about how far gone elite academia is.

The DEI Queen can’t condemn calls to genocide. What universe are we living in?

These shirts kinda bang @Harvard pic.twitter.com/JeHYcFuoq6

— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) December 6, 2023

I take no small amount of pleasure in the fact that the much-vilified Harvard grad Elise Stefanik will have delivered the death blow to these moral midgets. She has taken more than her share of insults, including ones aimed at her intelligence.

In this case, I think we can safely say that she outsmarted the “best and the brightest.”