Just remember: It took more than two days for an Ivy League president to come up with this apology. After touching off a firestorm of outrage over her dismissal of the tsunami of anti-Semitism at Harvard, Claudine Gay finally has offered an apology of sorts … at least over her testimony.

In an interview with the Harvard Crimson yesterday and published overnight, Gay allowed that “words matter,” and that hers were, um … poorly chosen:

Harvard President Claudine Gay apologized for her remarks at the end of her congressional testimony, which sparked fierce national criticism and led the leadership of Harvard Hillel to say they don’t trust her to protect Jewish students at the University.

“I am sorry,” Gay said in an interview with The Crimson on Thursday. “Words matter.”

“When words amplify distress and pain, I don’t know how you could feel anything but regret,” Gay added.

Clearly, Gay anticipated the risk, which David wrote about earlier, that Harvard’s board will cut her loose. But later in the same interview, Gay attempted to shift blame back to the congressional committee. Gay laments that she failed to “convey what is my truth,” and which events proved to be objectively a lie:

“I got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures,” Gay said in the interview. “What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged.”

“Substantively, I failed to convey what is my truth,” Gay added.

Ahem. The committee didn’t ask Gay to appear because Harvard had challenged the calls for genocide on campus. Quite the opposite, in fact: pro-Hamas demonstrations and intimidation of Jewish students on campus had gone entirely unchallenged by Gay and her administration, which has tried to hide behind the First Amendment ever since. Gay and her colleagues Liz Magill (Penn) and Sally Kornbluth (MIT) offered that defense for their moral vacuity repeatedly during their congressional testimony.

Gay’s personal “truth” is sheer fabulism. It doesn’t take long for Rep. Elise Stefanik demolish this claim, either. Stefanik, whose grilling of Gay turned the hearing into a viral sensation this week, demolished Gay’s flag-wrapping in a Wall Street Journal editorial today:

What constitutes bullying and harassment at Harvard? A mandatory Title IX training last year warned all undergraduate students that “cisheterosexism,” “fatphobia” and “using the wrong pronouns” qualified as “abuse” and perpetuated “violence” on campus.

But when I asked Harvard President Claudine Gay at a congressional hearing whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated the university’s rules on bullying and harassment, she answered: “It depends on the context.” Pressed further, she said it would qualify “when it crosses into conduct.” I received similar answers from the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania. …

The Penn, Harvard and MIT presidents’ refusal to identify these calls for violence as policy violations is revealing, and their attempt to justify it with feigned concern for free speech is insulting. Just this year, Harvard placed dead last among 248 universities on the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s College Free Speech Rankings, receiving the only score of zero out of 100.

Where was Harvard’s concern for free speech when it disinvited feminist philosopher Devin Buckley from a colloquium on campus last year because of her views on transgender issues? Where was its concern for free speech in 2020 when it revoked conservative activist Kyle Kashuv’s acceptance because of social media posts he made as a 16-year-old, or in 2017 when it revoked admission for 10 incoming freshmen who shared offensive memes on Facebook? Apparently the same outrage doesn’t apply to students sharing antisemitic memes on Slack today, as Bill Ackman noted in his letter to Harvard last month.

Gay’s claim that Harvard challenged this effluvium of Jew-hatred over the last two months in any effective way is a bald-faced lie. Perhaps that’s why Gay framed this as “my truth” in this half-assed apology, as a way of attempting to avoid confronting the obvious truth: Gay’s Harvard has become deeply hostile to Jews as well as Israel, and to Western civilization more generally.

Stefanik notes this as well. Nine months ago, she notes, a Harvard student named Sabrina Goldfischer warned about the university’s anti-Semitic culture in a widely read senior thesis, The Death of Discourse: Antisemitism at Harvard College. The events of the past two months show clearly that Gay never took an interest in addressing this, and indeed presided over its increasingly toxic nature. Stefanik also anticipated Gay’s attempts to evade responsibility:

The leaders of these universities want us to believe they face, through no fault of their own, a predicament for which they have no responsibility or accountability. In fact, they are directly responsible for the vile antisemitic hatred overrunning their campuses. For years they have selectively enforced their own policies to weed out certain viewpoints while fostering others, and now they are reaping the harvest.

They are indeed, and their attempts to rationalize it away are pathetically transparent to everyone whose mind hasn’t been polluted by the Ivy League. Jake Sherman offers up the common-sense reaction to Gay’s laughable assertions in this “apology.” I look forward to reading yours in the comments.

The wild thing to me is that anyone can get to a position at any point in their life where they feel like it’s appropriate to say calling for genocide is not harassment or hate speech. https://t.co/FXWTaTbZPP

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) December 8, 2023