Did the case of Claudine Gay give new energy to the conservative campaign against left-wing academia?

I'm reading "How a Proxy Fight Over Campus Politics Brought Down Harvard’s President/Amid plagiarism allegations and a backlash to campus antisemitism, Claudine Gay became an avatar for broader criticisms of academia" by Nicholas Confessore, in The New York Times.

Dr. Gay’s defenders... warn[ed] that her resignation would encourage conservative interference in universities and imperil academic freedom. (Though some experts have rated Harvard itself poorly on campus free speech during Dr. Gay’s tenure in leadership.)...

What a delicious parenthetical!

That link on "poorly" goes to the FIRE website, where you have to do a search to see where Harvard ranks. I did the search (and you can too). We're told the "speech climate" is "abysmal."

But of course, this article, outside of its parentheses, portrays conservative critics of academia as the threat to freedom.

"[A]ntisemitic and anti-Israel protests on campuses — and the university presidents’ lawyerly responses at last week’s hearing — were akin to... the 'Zoom moment' during the pandemic..."

"... when some parents first listened closely to what their children were learning in school and concluded it was 'subpar in quality and radical in content.' 'One of those things we’ve struggled with, those of us who want to reform higher education, is convincing people that there’s a problem... Historically, they look around and say, "Huh, this seems fine." Everything they’re seeing right now is that things are not fine.'" 

According to Jay P. Greene, a senior researcher at the Heritage Foundation, quoted and summarized by Nicholas Confessore, in "As Fury Erupts Over Campus Antisemitism, Conservatives Seize the Moment/Republicans have been attacking elite universities for years. After a tense congressional hearing last week, many on the left are joining them" (NYT).

"[S]ome students embrace Mr. Trump as a way of rebelling against the intricate rules surrounding privilege and microaggression, and provoking the keepers of those rules."

"... And Mr. Trump’s rise is shifting the country’s racial discourse just as the millennial generation comes fully of age, more and more distant from the horrors of the Holocaust, or the government-sanctioned racism of Jim Crow.... For a generation weaned on a diet of civic multiculturalism, supporting Mr. Trump breaks the ultimate taboo. Students writing Mr. Trump’s name and slogans in chalk have been accused of hate crimes and spurred calls for censorship. And on campuses frozen by unyielding political correctness and expanding definitions of impermissible speech, some welcome the provocation that Mr. Trump provides...."

I cherry-picked that from a NYT article by Nicholas Confessore titled "For Whites Sensing Decline, Donald Trump Unleashes Words of Resistance."

The NYT detects "a familiar mixture of celebration and anxiety among Jews in the United States and abroad" as Bernie Sanders becomes "the first Jewish candidate in history to win a presidential primary election."

It's "As Bernie Sanders Makes History, Jews Wonder What It Means," by Nicholas Confessore.

While Mr. Sanders was raised Jewish and even spent time on an Israeli kibbutz in the 1960s, he has been muted in his own embrace of the faith.... The Israeli paper Haaretz noted that Mr. Sanders often refers to himself as the son of a Polish immigrant, rather than a Jewish immigrant. “The Jewish establishment has a hard time considering him one of its own,” the paper observed.

Another Haaretz commentator, Chemi Shalev, worried that Mr. Sanders’ victory, and his firebrand liberal politics, would stoke anti-Semitism: “More than any other Democratic candidate, Sanders fits the bill of the G.O.P.’s favorite Jewish bogeyman, Saul Alinsky”....

Why do we have this idea that a candidate should forefront his ethnic or religious identity? I'd rather assume that Bernie Sanders is getting it right, presenting himself as an individual and not making much of his identity in a particular group. I'd rather call into question why other candidates try to gain by calling attention to their group identity. Hillary Clinton has been milking her status as a female like mad, even shaming those of us who are in this group — that is, the majority of Amercan voters.

I mean, just imagine Bernie pushing the "first Jewish President" theme as hard as Hillary pushes "first woman President." I'd like to see a SNL skit with Larry David running with that scenario. Here's a piece from a few days ago in The Washington Post, "Clinton looks to sisterhood, but votes may go to Sanders":

"Clinton’s struggles with women underscore the extent to which she has not yet figured out how to harness the history-making potential of her candidacy in the same way that Barack Obama mobilized minorities and white liberals excited about electing the first black president."

But Obama didn't go around talking about it. He presented himself and we, the voters, thought about it on our own. If he'd talked about the prospect of becoming the first black President half as much as Hillary talks about becoming the first woman President, things would not have unfolded the way they did. We're properly defensive to the verbalized argument that a group-based first is something to strain after. It has to be a good feeling that arises from within, out of a real sense of good will and promise. The hard sell stimulates our resistance to the huckster.