Claudine Gay will be paid $50 million to write her next book

Back in July 2023, I remarked on the Stanford president’s “resignation” in which he would get a paycheck for the rest of his life:

The last part is my favorite. Involvement with academic fraud is intolerable in an administrator, but acceptable for an active researcher and teacher. (Note that CNN implies in the headline that he will be gone (“resigned” from Stanford) when, in fact, he is merely moving offices.)

(Unlike Claudine GPT, Prof. Tessier-Lavigne may not have personally violated any rule. It may have been co-authors who manipulated data (Wikipedia).)

From the folks who broke the proven-untrue-then-banned-by-Facebook-and-Twitter Hunter Biden laptop story… “Harvard’s Claudine Gay set to keep her nearly $900K annual salary despite resigning as university president” (New York Post):

She won’t be leading the Crimson, but green shouldn’t be a problem.

Outgoing Harvard University president Claudine Gay will still likely earn nearly $900,000 a year despite being forced to resign her position as the school’s top administrator.

Political science professor Gay — who stepped down amid a tempest of allegations that she did not do enough to combat antisemitism and academic plagiarism Tuesday — will return to a position on the Cambridge, Mass., school’s faculty.

Prior to being named president just six months ago, Gay earned $879,079 as a faculty of arts and sciences dean in 2021 and $824,068 in 2020, according to records published by the university.

Her new position was not specified Tuesday, but she is expected to receive a salary comparable to what she previously received — if not higher.

Claudine Gay is 53. If we assume that $880,000 in salary translates to $1 million per year including benefits, the Comparative Victimhood scholar could get approximately $50 million before she dies. (No reason to retire since tenure trumps mental infirmity.) Her last book was a popular hit:

O.J. Simpson’s publisher has announced that it will be handling Gay’s next work: If I Did Research.

Let’s check in with Harvard commitment to free speech now that Suppressor-in-Chief Gay is gone. A tweet from before the Gazans’ October 7 raping/killing/kidnapping spree allows anyone to comment. A tweet from December 12 is locked down so that the unrighteous can’t besmirch with comments:

The latest tweet is similarly locked down against vox populi:

Harvard does not have to pay taxes on its $60 billion hoard (it was $50 billion in 2022, so I’m adjusting for inflation). The university doesn’t have to pay sales tax on stuff that it buys, nor real estate taxes on the land that it uses for nominally academic purposes (it does make a voluntary contribution to Cambridge). Harvard receives direct infusions of taxpayer cash via student loan subsidies, tuition grants, and research grants. But the school doesn’t want to hear from the chumps who pay for the federal and state infrastructure in which it sits.

Claudine Gay recently broke her silence to email “Members of the Harvard Community”. She is not resigning because she did anything wrong, but because it will be better for Harvard:

… after consultation with members of the Corporation, it has become clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual.

Those who objected to her tight control of speech on campus with the single exception of anti-Jewish/Israel speech were motivated primarily by racism:

Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor—two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am—and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.

Nobody hates hate and plagiarism more than Prof. Gay! Ergo, anyone who is against this scholar and leader is a racist. The board members (“Fellows of Harvard College”) agree. They simultaneously spammed out a message condemning “racist vitriol directed at her through disgraceful emails and phone calls”.

Speaking of racism, the Affirmative Action/DEI religion says that U.S. society should have quotas for Black Americans whose ancestors lived through slavery and then Jim Crow. Descendants of victims of these pre-Eisenhower systems (it was Eisenhower who engineered the desegregation of schools) are entitled to preference in college admissions, government contracting, executive jobs, etc. Claudine Gay’s parents, however, are from Haiti (Wikipedia). Her retention as Harvard president was supported by Barack Obama, whose father was an elite Kenyan and whose mother was white, yet Obama was able to take advantages of quotas intended for descendants of slaves. Wouldn’t it make more sense for Black Americans to be angry with this pair of quota-stealers than to embrace them as fellow victims of Systemic Everything?

Update from a reader:

13 thoughts on “Claudine Gay will be paid $50 million to write her next book

  1. Her performance before Congress was underwhelming, to say the least.

    On a related note, I’ve read some comments suggesting she didn’t have sufficient scholarly qualifications for her position. Is this really required for this position? Why?

    Do we insist all hospital administrators be the best surgeons, to quality for the job? Do we require the president of Ford to be great at designing engines? Most heads of major corporations in the US are great salespeople.

    I’d think the main job qualifications for this job would be:
    a) Avoid scandal and enhance the reputation
    b) Retain non-profit status
    c) Raise money

    • It’s mainly a pride thing, that to be a leader of intellectual giants, you should also be an intellectual giant.

  2. This is a norm, it happens always in corporate america which is supposed to be capitalistic in nature. I personally saw this multiple times in my career where the CEO/s and other C level executive run the company to the ground with their arrogance and stupidity then walk away at least with 5 Mil. It is happening right now where i work. Take 2007 financial crises, how many executives walked away with millions even though they are the ones who caused the crisis. Better example will be Alan Greenspan, he is chief architect of the crisis but he is considered as GOD when it comes to monetary policy. I am not sure why this is a surprise, may be because her testimony on antisemitism.

  3. Greenspun has definitely lowered the lion kingdom’s regard for top tier higher education. Most anything except for MIT private pilot ground school really is a racket, these days.

  4. A more descriptive title would be “Claudine Gay will be paid $50 million to write her first book”, not “… her next book”.

  5. If board members and the elites at Harvard take down Prof. Gay, it means they are admitting she is wrong and that THEY made a mistake in hiring her and they have to admit that they have bad apples in their close circle. This they will never happen because if they take down a bad apple, the next bad apple they want to take down could turn on them. Thus, it is best to keep *all* bad apples happy so they can all feed each other expansive Caviar even if the Caviar is served with worms.

  6. Sounds a bit racist, Herr PhilG… Now do MIT and your degree and research 🧐, younTrump-loving chump.

  7. Sounds a bit rracist, Heerr PhilG… Now do MIT and your degree and research 🧐, younTrump-loving chump.

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