Now that Claudine Gay is out as president at Harvard after a plagiarism scandal, will Barack Obama become the university's next president?

Here's what's being bruited about in the media, according to the Daily Mail:

Barack Obama has been touted as a contender for the next president of Harvard after the resignation by Claudine Gay due to an anti-Semitism and plagiarism scandal.

The former president, who graduated from Harvard Law School in 1991, may be a candidate for the position - and he wouldn't be the first ex-POTUS to take charge of an elite college.

Alan M. Garber is currently the interim president of Harvard, but the institution is understood to still be weighing up its options for a permanent replacement for Gay.

Harvard University - who has not named any candidates yet - said the search for a new leader 'will include broad engagement and consultation with the Harvard community in the time ahead.'  

Discussions over who should take over Gay have swirled on social media, with names such as Deval Patrick, Danielle Allen, and Barack Obama's popping up, according to the Boston Globe. 

The Boston Globe article they cited had this:

On social media, a few suggestions have begun circulating, including Deval Patrick, a former two-term Massachusetts governor, and Danielle Allen, a former Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate and a professor of political philosophy, ethics, and public policy at Harvard. Barack Obama’s name has come up, too.

Gay’s interim replacement, Alan Garber, a Harvard physician and economist, could be considered as well, due to his experience as the college’s provost for the past 12 years.

...and...

Obama and Garber did not respond to requests for comment. Putnam, who knows Obama, said he doubted the former president would take the job.

It seems a little tenuous, given that the Boston Globe cited experts who emphasized that holding the post is hard work, and we all know what Obama's work ethic was like as president. That clearly carried over from Obama college days. Obama's academic output while at Harvard was about nil, and even while holding the prestigious post as editor of the Harvard Law Review, he has no articles to his name, which many legal observers found highly unusual when the news of it came out.

In short, he'd bring glitz to Harvard, but probably wouldn't do much to change the negative trajectory of the university. Billionaire vacays, adoring speeches, and lots of money flowing would probably be the next thing up for the university, but no restoration of merit over DEI nor any changes to the faculty lounge culture at the school that could wave people like Claudine Gay right through on her doctorate and her presidency of the school with no scrutiny of her obvious plagiarism.

Obama lobbied hard for Gay to stay, and the university powers that be ruled against him in the end,. so he lost that battle. Obama himself is a firm supporter of affirmative action over merit-based admission and hiring, and has stated in the past that he never felt that his easy ride upward as an affirmative action admission to all the prestigious schools he went to ever resulted in anyone looking in askance at his credentials. He'd keep the bad course the school is on, where DEI overrides academic freedom on every front.

The Boston Globe does note some other characters up for consideration, all of them by the wildest coincidence black candidates, except for the plodding Garber with all his unglamourous administrative experience, which rather suggests that the board making the selection doesn't want to get ragged on by the DEI crowd with claims of a racist firing of a black woman.

The name Deval Patrick is brought up, a classic leftist political hack, comparable to Obama. Yawn.

But the name Danielle Allen is also brought up, and she may be a credible possibility -- a look at a Harvard Magazine profile of her shows she's classically educated in Greek and Latin, not wokester studies, which is major cred right there. Her Wikipedia bio indicates she went to the University of Chicago, which until recently, was pretty academically neutral and rigorous, it was when she was there. She also has won tons of big awards -- MacArthur Fellowships and Marshall Scholarships and the like -- and done significant papers as a researcher. Her father, a black political scientist, was actually known as a 'conservative' and served as chair of President Reagan's Civil Rights Commission, following the estimable Clarence Pendleton. She sounds pretty progressive in most of her statements but on substantial things, she does have academic and political chops as normal people would recognize them. For one thing, has spoken out against Harvard's version of DEI as failing to address political diversity, which kind of draws one's attention. She's also condemned campus antisemitism back when plenty of the others were cheering it. She's probably a leftist like the rest of them but not be a cookie-cutter faculty-lounge leftist, getting along to go along. She could be a decent president of Harvard addressing the actual problems of censorship and merit that have made the university go downhill.

All of that may be good as we recognize good, but in light of the schools resistance to fixing its problems, they may be strikes against her.

She has downplayed the prospect, but not outright declared she doesn't want the job.

They'd all have to pass plagiarism tests, of course. Could Obama do that? Well, with no academic papers to speak of, he probably could, but then, he knows how to employ ghostwriters for all he needs to do.

Still, I'm skeptical generally, given Obama's general laziness. He may not even want the job which would distract from his political medding nationally, but the Harvard faculty, which fought so hard to keep Gay in place, is capable of anything. Plus, in Obama's world, being president of Harvard University is much more prestigious than being president of the United States, given all its deplorables.  Would the board that chooses the president go for Obama? Maybe not so much.

Image: Logo/shields, Harvard University // fair use