The first Black president of Harvard, who resigned on Tuesday after a successful rightwing campaign to oust her, warned that the tactics used against her were “merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society”.
“Trusted institutions of all types – from public health agencies to news organizations – will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility,” Claudine Gay wrote in the New York Times on Wednesday, a day after she announced she was resigning from her position and returning to her role as a faculty member.
Gay, a political scientist who was appointed six months ago as the first Black woman to serve as president of Harvard, had the shortest tenure in the university’s 388-year history.
In her first major comment since her official Harvard statement announcing her resignation, Gay admitted bluntly that “I made mistakes”. But she also argued that her invitation to testify to Congress about antisemitism on elite college campuses had been “a well-laid trap” and that “the campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader”.
The playbook that had successfully been used against her would soon be mobilized against other institutional leaders, Gay warned. “For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal,” she said.
For the past month, the campaign against Gay, which included prominent Harvard donors, had centered on allegations of antisemitism and plagiarism in her academic work, focusing on her widely criticised comments during a December congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses, and on multiple passages in her academic work that closely resembled the work of other scholars, without the appropriate citations.
Gay once again said she regretted not speaking forcefully enough against antisemitism on campus in congressional remarks that had sparked bipartisan backlash, writing: “I should have stated more forcefully what all people of good conscience know: Hamas is a terrorist organization that seeks to eradicate the Jewish state” and that she had “neglected to clearly articulate that calls for the genocide of Jewish people are abhorrent and unacceptable and that I would use every tool at my disposal to protect students from that kind of hate”.
But she defended the value and originality of her scholarship, even while conceding that she had duplicated language from other academics “without proper attribution” in her published work. Several of the scholars whose work Gay was accused of plagiarizing had previously told news outlets they considered the citation issues highlighted by conservative media outlets to be relatively minor, or even not plagiarism at all, with one scholar calling it “technically plagiarism” but “minor-to-inconsequential”, and another saying: “This isn’t even close to an example of academic plagiarism.”
Some of the activists who campaigned most prominently against Gay made clear this week that their broader aim was opposing “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) programs in all US universities and attacking DEI as a movement, not just opposing the choices of one individual Harvard president.
Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager and Harvard donor who had been one of Gay’s most prominent public critics, wrote in a 4,000-word Twitter/X post that he believed diversity, equity and inclusion efforts were “racist” and dangerous, that he was concerned about “reverse racism” and “racism against white people”, and that he saw DEI as “a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large” and that it needed to be opposed.
Ackman also wrote that he believed that Gay was “not qualified” to be president of Harvard, and that diversity considerations had played a role in her initial selection.
The campaign to oust Gay, which was covered closely by both rightwing and major mainstream US media outlets, has been widely criticized as racist.
In the past weeks, Gay wrote in the Times, her inbox had been flooded with death threats, and that “I’ve been called the N-word more times than I care to count”. She said that she had been targeted with “recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament” and “a false narrative of indifference and incompetence”.
In announcing her resignation on Tuesday, the Harvard Corporation, one of Harvard’s governing boards, had also condemned the “racist vitriol directed at her through disgraceful emails and phone calls”.
Despite the obsessive attention to allegations of plagiarism in her peer-reviewed research, Gay wrote that “few have commented on the substance of my scholarship, which focuses on the significance of minority office holding in American politics”, and on the “concrete evidence” that increasing the representation of people of color in “the halls of power” can strengthen US democracy.
Elise Stefanik, the Republican member of Congress and Donald Trump ally whose questions to Gay about Harvard’s approach to calls for genocide on campus went viral, responded to Gay’s op-ed by saying that their exchange “was not a ‘well laid trap’” but Gay’s own “cataclysmic failure”.
