WHEN THE NYT IS DOWN ON DEI, I THINK IT’S PEAKED: The Word That Undid Claudine Gay: The fate of Harvard’s president is the latest evidence of a deep crisis in American academia.

In retrospect, Claudine Gay’s fate was sealed by a single word. (She resigned the presidency of Harvard on Tuesday, just six months into her tenure.) It wasn’t “plagiarism” or “genocide” — the fearsome fighting words most publicly associated with her case — but rather a careful, neutral piece of language that struck some listeners as outrageous for precisely that reason: an attempt at anti-inflammatory rhetoric that had the opposite effect. The word was “context.” . . .

The Israel-Palestine conflict and American election-year politics are not the only salient context here. Academia seems to be in the grip of a multidimensional crisis that goes beyond ideology, and also beyond Harvard. Higher learning is plagued by opaque admissions policies; runaway tuition costs; administrative bloat; grade inflation; helicopter parents; cancel culture. The list goes on. An assiduous scholar might connect these phenomena with recent events in Harvard Yard. An enterprising writer could weave the whole thing into a bristling campus novel, something worthy of Paul Beatty or Mary McCarthy.

Instead, for now, we will have to make do with Dr. Gay’s letter of resignation — emailed to students, faculty, alumni and others with the subject line “Personal News” — and the message from the Harvard Corporation (the university’s secretive governing body) about her departure.

What is most striking about these texts — each amounting to little more than 600 words, all of them carefully measured, few of them memorable — is their rigorous avoidance of context. . . . What’s curious, though, is that Harvard, which compels its undergraduates to master expository writing in their freshman year, cannot find the language to defend itself.

Well, it’s hard to defend the indefensible.