Claudine Gay survives. Expect business as usual at Harvard.

But it would have been business as usual even if Harvard had sacked her.

There’s an old joke that goes, “you can always tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much.” After the unanimous decision of the Harvard Corporation, the university’s top governing board, to retain Claudine Gay as president, I would add, “you can’t tell members of the Harvard Corporation much.”

Members of Congress couldn’t tell them much. Neither could extremely wealthy and generous donors. Nor could Harvard’s besieged Jewish community. And the fact that Gay’s scholarly work is marred by plagiarism (more on this below) didn’t matter to the folks who oversee Harvard, either.

Why did Gay survive while Liz Magill, Penn’s president, didn’t? Two reasons come to mind.

First and foremost, Harvard is so lavishly endowed that the loss of $1 billion or more didn’t matter. Penn’s endowment is much smaller.

Harvard’s enviable financial condition was probably both a necessary and a sufficient condition for Gay’s survival. Had her retention materially threatened that condition, Harvard likely would have let her go, reluctantly.

The fact that Harvard isn’t in financial jeopardy was probably sufficient to ensure her place as president. Financially free to give the finger to Congress, Jews, and annoying rich donors, Harvard’s governors flipped them the bird.

But if Harvard’s extraordinary financial health wasn’t sufficient to ensure Gay’s retention, I think we can assume her race was. Gay is black; Magill’s white. On American college campuses, that makes a huge difference.

In fact, Gay’s race was probably the reason Harvard selected her in the first place. Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager and major donor to Harvard, wrote on X, “I have confirmed now from multiple sources that the search committee that led to President Gay’s appointment excluded non-DEI eligible candidates from the process.”

After today, Gay isn’t just a DEI hire. She’s also a DEI non-fire.

Gay stands out among the three presidents who testified before Congress on that fateful (for Magill, at least) day last week. Not just because of her race, but also because of her academic background and credentials.

Magill was a law professor and former dean of Stanford law school. After law school, she clerked for J. Harvie Wilkinson, a leading conservative jurist who made George W. Bush’s short list for the Supreme Court, and for Ruth Bader Ginsburg. As a professor, she specialized in administrative law and won awards for her scholarly writing.

Sally Kornbluth, MIT’s president, was a distinguished biologist whose research focused on the biological signals that tell a cell to start dividing or to self-destruct — processes that apparently relate to understanding cancer and various degenerative disorders.

Gay, by contrast, was a professor of African and African-American Studies. She also was affiliated with Harvard’s government department, but nearly all of her research seems to have pertained to black studies.

Molecular biology is a rigorous field. So is administrative law.

Black studies is far less rigorous. It’s marred by identity politics and fealty to a radical ideology. Peer review in this area isn’t by scientists or by law professors. It’s by the race mongers who dominate field (which may explain how Gay got away with some of her plagiarism).

I’m not saying that a great college administrator couldn’t emerge from a black studies department. But other things being roughly equal, an institution like Harvard should be led either by a distinguished scholar — like MIT and Penn are — or a person with successful experience running a major institution.

I’m also not saying that just because black studies is less rigorous than just about any other academic field, a scholar in this field couldn’t do great research. In Gay’s case, however, it now appears that, far being a great scholar, she was a serial plagiarist.

To be sure, some of the allegations of plagiarism are trivial at best. But some are serious.

The Harvard Crimson reported:

The Crimson independently reviewed the published allegations. Though some are minor — consisting of passages that are similar or identical to Gay’s sources, lacking quotation marks but including citations — others are more substantial, including some paragraphs and sentences nearly identical to other work and lacking citations.

Some appear to violate Harvard’s current policies around plagiarism and academic integrity.

Regarding Gay’s doctoral dissertation:

One implicated paragraph — a technical description of statistical results — is nearly identical to Voss and Palmquist’s work and differs by only a few select words, including changing “decrease” to “increase” to reflect a different dataset. . . .

[A] second repeats some exact phrases from Voss and Palmquist’s article while others are rearranged or slightly revised to fit Gay’s dissertation.

At no point in either paragraph does Gay use quotation marks or include in-text citations. Voss and Palmquist are not cited anywhere in Gay’s dissertation.

(Emphasis added)

In another essay written while Gay while still a graduate student:

Substantial portions of two paragraphs in the piece are worded either exactly the same or have minor changes in wording as a 1992 essay by the historian George Reid Andrews. . . .

In another sentence in the same piece, Gay uses almost the exact same wording in two instances as a 1990 journal article by David Covin. . . .

Neither article is cited in Gay’s piece, which includes no formal citations. Andrews’ book “Blacks and Whites in Sao Paulo, Brazil” is listed in a box at the end titled “Suggestions for Further Reading,” though his 1992 journal article is not. Covin’s journal article is also not listed in the “Suggestions for Further Reading” section.

What about Gay’s more recent writings as a Harvard professor?

The Free Beacon identified four instances in [a 2012] article where Gay had identical or near-identical language as [a] 2003 report.

In one instance, Gay does not cite the report. In two other instances, which appear in consecutive paragraphs, Gay references the report at the end of the second paragraph as a place to find “similar approaches.” In the fourth instance — where Gay does not use identical language but very similar language as the 2003 report — Gay also does not cite the report.

Carol Swain, a black conservative scholar, also had some of her work lifted by Gay without proper attribution. She says:

There seems to be a pattern because it’s not just two cases from my work. There are instances. . .from other people’s work. At best, it was sloppiness, but it would be considered plagiarism if you lift sections of other people’s work and you pass it off as your own. . . .

She became president of Harvard and got recognition as being its first black president. I don’t believe her record warranted tenure. . . .

The board of trustees needs to deal with those issues. They need to apply the same standards to her as they would apply to a white person under the same circumstances.

A white male would probably already be gone.

(Emphasis added)

But Gay is at Harvard to stay.

I should add, though, that if Harvard let her go, it undoubtedly would replace her with someone equally bad — most likely another DEI hire.

Given this reality, one can argue that Harvard will be less hostile to Jews and maybe even less woke overall because of Gay’s retention. It’s possible that her experience before Congress and the blowback it produced will have a slightly sobering effect on Gay.

I doubt it, though. As I said, Harvard has given the middle finger to Congress, Jews, and rich non-woke donors. It wants to continue to do business as usual, uninfluenced by pesky meddlers.

In the words of a friend who attended two of the three top Ivy League schools, including Harvard, “the administrations at each view themselves as practically untouchable and free to do whatever they want.” Now, Gay must realize she’s practically untouchable, too.

No one outside of the woke cocoon will be able to tell her much.