Harvard University president Claudine Gay resigned Tuesday, Jan. 2, amid plagiarism accusations and criticism over testimony at a congressional hearing where she was unable to say unequivocally that calls on campus for the genocide of Jews would violate the school’s conduct policy.Steven Senne/The Associated Press
Claudine Gay seemed destined to make history when she was officially inaugurated as Harvard University’s first Black president on a rainy Friday in September. Her appointment had been seen as a turning point for the august 387-year-old Boston-area institution that, only a year earlier, had finally acknowledged its own deep ties to slavery in a watershed report on its dark past.
At the inauguration, Dr. Gay’s predecessor as president, Lawrence Bacow, praised her “as a person of bedrock integrity” who would “provide Harvard with the strong moral compass necessary to lead this great university.”
Within days, that assessment was gravely in doubt.
Dr. Gay’s resignation on Tuesday assured her a place in history, all right – as Harvard’s shortest-serving president. Her departure is held up as a victory by critics of the diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives she both championed and is seen as benefiting from. Her supporters see her as a victim of a racially motivated campaign by right-wing activists to roll back the clock.
Yet, it would be a mistake to see Dr. Gay’s downfall as proof that all DEI initiatives are inherently corrosive or that she is just a victim of a reactionary mob bent on unseating her. Rather, the lessons to be retained from her short and turbulent tenure as Harvard’s top administrator are that DEI efforts must never overtake the core mission of universities and that campus politics must take a back seat to knowledge transmission.
Dr. Gay’s resignation became inevitable because she brought disrepute on Harvard not only by failing to take decisive action in face of widespread antisemitism on campus. Multiple corroborated revelations of plagiarism in her scholarly work, and the likelihood that more damaging revelations would follow, were supremely damaging for an institution that sees itself as at the pinnacle of academic excellence.
The Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel provoked disturbing reactions on campuses across North America. At Harvard, a coalition of student organizations published an open letter holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for the unfolding violence.”
Harvard’s administration refused to denounce the letter or dissociate itself from its contents despite calls for it to do so. On the evening of Oct. 9, top administrators led by Dr. Gay put out a tepid statement saying they were “heartbroken by the death and destruction unleashed by Hamas that targeted citizens in Israel.” But it contained no condemnation of Hamas, much less a rebuke of its apologists on campus.
Dr. Gay did follow up the next day with a statement condemning “the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas.” Dr. Gay made a few overtures to Jewish students, but failed to crack down on antisemitic behaviour on campus. It was all too little for her critics, including powerful Wall Street types and Harvard alumni who called publicly for her head.
Then came her Dec. 5 testimony before a House of Representatives committee. She stepped right into the trap set by Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who asked Dr. Gay if calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s code of conduct. “It can be, depending on the context,” Dr. Gay replied, appearing to deem some forms of freedom of speech more worthy of protection than others.
Calls for the elimination of almost any other targeted group – including the racial and gender minorities covered by Harvard’s own DEI policies – would not be tolerated. The double standard Dr. Gay appeared to apply to speech targeting Jews might well have been the final straw had it not been for a move by pro-Gay Harvard faculty members and Black community leaders to rally behind her in the face of widespread calls for her ouster.
The plagiarism allegations against Dr. Gay that soon followed made her situation simply untenable, though both she and Harvard’s board seemed to be in denial for weeks.
It was soon revealed that the university’s governing body first responded to an October email from a New York Post reporter concerning “possible examples of plagiarism” by Dr. Gay with a menacing letter from its lawyers that called the allegations “demonstrably false.” The board stood by Dr. Gay even after later acknowledging several examples of “duplicative language” in her doctoral thesis and other published work. The jig was finally up on Monday when the Washington Free Beacon published a story on six new allegations of plagiarism by Dr. Gay.
Nowhere in her resignation letter did Ms. Gay apologize for the embarrassment she had caused the institution she claimed to love so much. Rather, she said it was “frightening to have been subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.”
The content of far too many online attacks on her was indeed racist. But it was her own actions and behaviour, not racism, that brought her sorry stint as Harvard president to such an early and inauspicious end.