The ballad of Claudine Gay
And the lessons of a Harvard tragedy
There are things about the matter of Claudine Gay, the famously resigned president of Harvard that are particular to her case; there are things about it that are particular to American academia; there are things about it that are particular to academias everywhere; and then there things about it that are horribly universal. This is your rapid tour of the first three so we can arrive better armed at the last one.
But let’s preface this by acknowledging just how unrecent some of it is. In 2012 the author Philip Roth, miffed by an inaccuracy in the Wikipedia entry concerning his novel The Human Stain (which had appeared 12 years earlier), wrote an open letter which was published in the New Yorker magazine, the full text of which is to be found here:
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/an-open-letter-to-wikipedia
The exact nature of Roth’s spiky complaint doesn’t concern us here. What does is his revelation that the book was “inspired… by an unhappy event in the life of my late friend Melvin Tumin, professor of sociology at Princeton for some thirty years.”
Tumin, Roth told readers, had had a distinguished academic career, breaking ground in the study of inequalities and race relations. His publications included Desegregation: Resistance and Readiness from 1959 and - eight years later - Social Stratification: The Forms and Functions of Inequality. In the real world he had also been director of the Mayor of Detroit’s Commission on Race Relations, in a period and in a place where that was a pretty big job.