Claudine Gay’s brief, scandal-marked tenure as president of Harvard University ended more than a year ago. Yet the milieu of wokeness that facilitated her rise is still entrenched there and at most universities. The problem has still not been addressed. They all need to go.

John V. Lombardi, a former chief executive at too many colleges and universities to list, writes in his 2013 book How Universities Work that universities are “quality engines.” This means corporations, donors, students, and parents seek to get involved with universities because they want some part of the experience of their quality research and teaching. Apart from former President Claudine Gay’s tone-deafness regarding anti-Semitism, it is fair to ask what quality she offered Harvard.

Put another way, it may be helpful to ask an analogous question: What quality did the universities teaching Marxism in former Communist countries offer? The answer, of course, is the quality—if one wishes to call it that—of ideological compliance.

Universities, Lombardi claims, should pursue the true and useful. Therefore, if one accepts the fundamental principles of American constitutional democracy, one should seek education that accepts our Constitution and constitutionally enacted laws as practically true and politically useful. This education in reverence for the law and the Constitution is, in effect, what Abraham Lincoln called “the political religion of the nation.” Compliance with evil ideologies, on the other hand, is neither true nor useful, and compliance with an ideology of racial pessimism and irreverence for the law and its enforcers is what, critics charge, Claudine Gay promulgated at Harvard.

Professor Gay’s research, as Carol Swain recently documented in a short book, was largely unoriginal, partly plagiarized from Swain and others, and questionable in terms of accuracy. Her work relied on an innovative but controversial and much-debated methodology pioneered by her advisor, Harvard government professor Gary King. Gay herself refused to share data from one of her key studies, thus preventing its validation by other scholars.

As Harvard’s Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Gay presided over the 2019 disciplining of economist Roland Fryer Jr. for sexual comments some female students considered harassment. Fryer, only a few years before this incident, had been awarded the 2015 John Bates Clark Medal as “that American economist under the age of forty who is adjudged to have made a significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.” Gay maneuvered to overrule a committee recommendation that Fryer be required merely to take sensitivity training. Gay wanted Fryer fired, but she had to settle for suspending him without pay for two years and forcing him to shut down his research group.

Many have argued that Fryer’s 2019 disciplining, with its seemingly disproportionate punishment, was payback for his intellectual courage in publishing a careful study that showed that white police were no more likely to shoot blacks than the whites with whom they came into contact. Fryer thus upended the “Black Lives Matter” narrative that had dominated American public and academic life since the deaths of Michael Brown and George Floyd.

As dean of the faculty of Arts and Science, Gay’s message to Harvard’s politically incorrect dissenters from the prevailing Black Lives Matter narrative seemed clear: Any excuse or opportunity would be used to purge them from the university or, if that failed, at least to impede their research and silence their dissenting voices.

It was after sending that message that Gay was promoted to the presidency of Harvard, a position previously held by such luminaries as McGeorge Bundy and the legendary Henry Rosovsky. Gay presided over the entire institution and had the final say over every future tenure decision.

Gay resigned after six months and two days as president of Harvard. She remains on the faculty, however, and according to news reports has retained a princely salary of more than $800,000 per year. Gay has vacated the president’s office, but those who hired her and appeared to reward her for her campaign against Roland Fryer are still running Harvard. Penny Pritzker, scion of the wealthy Pritzker family, former secretary of Commerce, and sister of Illinois governor and woke presidential hopeful JB Pritzker, was elevated in 2022 from fellow of the Harvard Corporation—Harvard’s effective board of trustees—to senior fellow, and thus its effective chair. Despite her role in Gay’s ignominious hiring and resignation, Pritzker has so far resisted calls to step down.

After the fall of Communism, former Communist countries found themselves with elites across all fields who by training and habit of compliance with dictatorial Communism were unsuited to continue as elites in their newly freed nations. In the former East Germany, in the Czech Republic, in Poland, and across Central and Eastern Europe, departments of Marxism-Leninism were shuttered, and ideologically driven faculty members were dismissed. What Westerners might see as fundamental violations of norms of academic freedom were in fact necessary to make universities in these post-communist societies centers of true and useful research and teaching. The Czechs referred to this process as “lustration,” from the Roman term for the process of purification by which the “censors” such as the celebrated Cato expelled morally unworthy senators to preserve Roman virtue and freedom.

Harvard’s purificatory rite has only just begun.