Progressivism is trying to save Harvard President Claudine Gay by using the old radical victimization card. Despite her controversial anti-Semitic testimony before Congress and the severe accusations of plagiarism in different press reports, Gay has some support from American progressive organizations, which assure that the criticism against the academic is part of a racist campaign.
For example, Derrick Johnson, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said that Gay's critics were pushing a white supremacist agenda.
There is also the case of Nikole Hannah-Jones, progressive author of the controversial article "1619 Project," who asserted that the attacks against the president of Harvard are, in reality, a propaganda campaign against "racial equity."
However, not everyone agrees with Johnson and Hannah-Jones' views.
Winkfield Twyman Jr., a former professor at California Western Law School in San Diego and a former law professor and Harvard graduate, wrote an op-ed for the magazine Newsweek where he assured that the criticism against Gay is legitimate and that the defense of progressives based on race is hypocritical, since the academic herself, according to Twyman Jr., "made a career attacking black academics."
The former Harvard professor recalled several cases where Gay, while president of Harvard, harmed the careers of black professors.
Twyman Jr., for example, recalled the controversial dismissal of Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr. during Gay's administration. Sullivan was dean of the Winthrop House and was the first black dean in Harvard's history.
"What was Professor Sullivan's offense? Sullivan deigned to represent the disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein—an act of moral conscience, since all are entitled to legal representation in our legal system. Yet legal conscience mattered not to Claudine Gay, who terminated a race pioneer for doing his civic duty," the professor wrote.
According to the author, this case was not isolated, and he mentioned the dismissal of economics professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr., a prominent black professor at Harvard.
"When Fryer undertook research into the killings of unarmed Black men in Houston, Fryer's research found no racial disparities. He made the mistake of undercutting the racial narrative that the Left has adopted, and as a result, Gay did her best to remove all of his academic privileges, coordinating a witch hunt against him," Twyman Jr. stated. "Fryer survived Gay's crusade of discharge but Fryer's lab was shut down, his reputation tarnished."
For this reason, the former Harvard professor distances himself from racial defenses in favor of Gay. He, as a black academic, asks in his op-ed that the progressive left not to defend the president of Harvard using the race card.
