How grammatical hysteria helped take down Harvard’s Claudine Gay

Former Harvard president Claudine Gay wasn’t ousted because of racism.

It wasn’t antisemitism or plagiarism, either.

The culprit? Pronouns.

After Gay gave laughably bad congressional testimony last month, it looked for a minute like she wouldn’t face any repercussions. But anyone following conservative media saw that opposition to Gay was only heating up.

Grammatical hysteria was just the thing to inflame the base.

“Elite University Scrubs Multiple Web Pages About ‘Identity Recognitions,’ Pronouns,” screamed the headline on Dec. 18 in the ultraconservative Daily Caller, whose story then reverberated in the right-wing echo chamber of the Tennessee Star, the Ohio Star, the Virginia Star, the Florida Capital Star, the Michigan Star, and possibly some other, more originally named publications. (Possibly not.)

The story was written by a “Brandon Poulter,” who is possibly the not-originally-named alter ego of a cosplaying Ann Coulter. (Possibly not.)

According to Poulter’s piece, two pages on Harvard’s website — “Heritage Months and Identity Recognitions” and “Gender Identity and Pronouns at Harvard” — “appear to have been deleted, according to the archives.” It even linked to the retrospective Internet Archive to prove the conspiracy. Juicy, no?

Sometime shortly after publication, however, the Daily Caller discovered that the pages weren’t “scrubbed” after all — just temporarily down. So it added to the article the ungrammatical, “the links to both pages are now been restored.” The conspiracy unraveled quickly, but the nonstory remained on the site.

Things looked different in the Star galaxy. On those news sites mirroring Poulter’s original story, the text was never updated. It still erroneously states, “Both links now route directly to the Diversity and Inclusion homepage.” That might have been the case for a minute, but it’s no longer true.

True or not, it took just a few weeks for the Harvard non-controversy over pronouns to snowball along with a host of other allegations about plagiarism and qualifications and antisemitism. The resulting din led Gay to resign on Jan. 2, while MAGA claimed victory over an elite Ivy League institution.

» READ MORE: ‘They’ as a singular pronoun: Fighting for accuracy in dictionaries and the Supreme Court | The Grammarian

One would think that getting rid of all conversations about pronouns — along with their attendant web pages — would be MAGA’s goal. If they’re so opposed to talking about pronouns, wouldn’t the elimination of these sites be a victory unto itself?

The point isn’t accuracy or nuance; it’s outrage. Personal pronouns have continued to be especially personal for conservative politicians, who, in at least 20% of states, have passed laws saying teachers, staff, or even other students don’t have to use students’ names or pronouns that differ from those the individual was assigned at birth. Florida (quelle surprise) has even stricter laws that could revoke or suspend a teacher’s license if they refer to any student with pronouns other than those assigned at birth.

The point isn’t accuracy or nuance; it’s outrage.

Despite what many right-wing publications would have you believe, there’s nothing new about using the word pronoun to explain gender identity. All major dictionaries now include definitions for pronoun along the lines of, “the third person personal pronouns (such as he/him, she/her, and they/them) that a person goes by,” and that usage has been documented at least as early as 1977. The media attention might be new, but the language usage is not.

Fortunately, you don’t need to be president of an elite Ivy League institution to understand that.

The Grammarian, otherwise known as Jeffrey Barg, looks at how language, grammar, and punctuation shape our world. Send comments, questions, and indefinite pronouns to jeff@theangrygrammarian.com.