Bengaluru: In July last year, Harvard University’s then Dean was elevated to the position of the president of the university. Claudine Gay became the first black person to hold the post in the nearly 400 years of the oldest institution of higher education in the United States.
At the dawn of the new year, Gay resigned. In her letter, Gay remarked upon the nature of “personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus” she has faced in the past few months.
She had been accused of plagiarism and faced a public campaign led by professors to oust her, especially after she refused to silence pro-Palestine protesters on campus. Academics globally, especially in America, have reacted strongly to the last five months of accusations against Gay.
ThePrint examines the timeline and nature of events that led to the first Harvard black president’s resignation in what is the shortest tenure, so far.
Gay’s work and move to president
Gay is a political scientist, and her research specialisation was understanding American political behaviour and the role of race and identity in politics. Her thesis from her 1998 batch of Harvard graduates, ‘Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Policies’, was adjudged the best thesis in political science of the graduating year.
She dropped out from Princeton and moved to Stanford for her undergraduate studies in economics (1992), where she was winner of the best undergraduate thesis award
She started working in academia in Stanford, in the department of political science. Her work in race and identity politics led Harvard to pursue her; in 2006, she joined as a professor of government, and the next year, the professor of African American studies.
In 2015, Gay made her first move into the administrative side, when she became the Dean of Social Studies at the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In 2018, she became the Dean of the entire arts and sciences department.
As a dean, she oversaw attempts to increase diversity among faculty and to increase more interdisciplinary and collaborative studies among students. She also led Harvard through the years of raging COVID-19, making difficult financial decisions for the university.
Presidency & backlash
In July 2023, Gay became Harvard’s first black president and second woman president after Drew Gilpin Faust (2007-2018). She was selected by a search committee who went through 600 nominees.
While she enjoyed support from a large number of faculty and students, Gay remained unpopular with conservative figures. This came to a head after the 7 October attack by Hamas on Israel.
Due to the US-Israel impactful financial relationship, a majority of American leaders and institutions, as well as the wealthy, have aligned with Tel Aviv. Many conservatives in America and in the West conflate Palestinian freedom with antisemitism, and thus Gay was accused of not condemning the Hamas attacks enough.
Further, Gay was accused of not condemning pro-Palestine groups. A day after the Hamas attack, 31 student groups banded together and published an open letter that said it holds Israel “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence”. This drew immediate backlash from the conservatives and the lack of statements from anyone in the Harvard leadership led many to say that the letter was an attempt at supporting Hamas.
Many student protesters also chanted “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” on campus. The slogan, which calls for Palestinian citizens to live free, is a call for Jewish genocide, claim many American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)-funded Americans and Europeans. Subsequently, conservative activists and thought leaders, including billionaire Bill Ackman, went all out against Gay.
This culminated in a Congressional hearing in December where three female university presidents — those of Harvard, MIT, and University of Pennsylvania — were subject to hypothetical rhetoric about Jewish genocide by a number of American politicians.
“In her short tenure as President, Claudine Gay has done more damage to the reputation of Harvard University than any individual in our nearly 500-year history,” Ackman wrote in his third open letter to his alma mater Harvard. He also alleged that she was only hired to fulfil diversity criteria.
Plagiarism allegations
Immediately after the hearing, Gay was accused of plagiarism in her dissertation and published papers. Her critics provided examples that were lines of technical jargon that were only mildly modified despite citation and sometimes appeared to have been copied verbatim. These lines also included legal definitions, and many academics laughed off the accusations of plagiarism.
It’s darkly funny—and certainly revealing—that part of the ostensible “plagiarism” alleged in this bad-faith attack is.. the verbatim QUOTED legislative text of the Voting Rights Act. Like, did you want her to put the legal standard of Section 2 into new prose? Absolutely inane. https://t.co/4qSS6tsKbL
— Brian Highsmith (@bd_highsmith) January 2, 2024
“This isn’t even close to an example of academic plagiarism,” said David Canon, political science professor at University of Wisconsin, whose work Gay cites, to the conservative publication Washington Free Beacon.
Both Harvard University and Gay defended the work, and she requested an independent committee review her work for plagiarism. One of Harvard’s two boards, the Harvard Corporation, conducted an independent review and found some instances of “inadequate citation”, but not enough to call it misconduct.
After more such instances were noticed, Gay requested corrections to be made to her dissertation and two articles to include proper citations and quotation marks.
Since then, student newspaper The Harvard Crimson has alleged more instances of plagiarism from Gay’s work going back into the 1990s.
Strong reactions
After the Congressional hearing in December, UPenn’s Liz Magill, one of the three presidents, stepped down from her position. It was later revealed that the President of Columbia University had also been invited to testify, but she declined.
While Sally Kornbluth of MIT continues to remain president, Gay announced her resignation on 2 January. In her resignation email, she stated that it was “distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor – two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am—and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus”.
News about Gay’s resignation was celebrated in right-wing media circles and among conservative Americans, but the US academia is not entirely on the same side.
Over 700 of Harvad’s nearly 2,500 faculty members signed a letter of support for Gay’s presidency and her protection of academic freedom and freedom of expression.
This “weaponization of antisemitism” to suppress pro-Palestinian voices has come under criticism as well. Jewish academics and professors such as those from Yale have also called the “orchestrated rage against university presidents” as targeting pro-Palestine voices.
Her six-month stint makes Gay’s the shortest term a president has held. Many say that her ousting had been racially motivated.
Academics and professors pointed out the disparity in the treatment of other academics who were accused of plagiarism, and Gay’s targeted criticism. In a statement, Harvard Corporation condemned the “repugnant” and “racist vitriol” towards Gay in the form of “deeply personal and sustained attacks”, and thanked her for her work.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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It is funny to see the ironies in the article.
1. At one instance author is feminist enough to say that the Gay was only 2nd woman president, but, on other hand just saw that due to financially beneficial relationship people were condemning Hamas attacks. Author no where condemned the Hamas attacks where women were brutally raped in front of their families, disfigured and other horrible crimes.
2. Does Freedom of expression means supporting terrorist event? Because Hamas attacks were purely terrorist attacks. If they were not inhumane, like roasting kids in microwave oven, it surpasses imagination, what will be.
Just to support a person because her gender is female, she is black, despite how wrong that person is, is not done, whatsoever are circumstances. These kind of atrocities be condemned by both left and right. Probably because of this kind of mentality of left is the reason people all over the world are moving towards more right wing Governments.