NEW YORK, CMC – Dr. Claudine Gay, the Haitian-American former president of Harvard University, says she “made the wrenching but necessary decision to resign as Harvard’s president.”
On Tuesday, Gay, 53, the daughter of Haitian immigrants, who became Harvard’s 30th president on July 1, 2023, cited racism in her abrupt resignation letter submitted to members of the Harvard community.
Gay, the first Black and second woman to head the educational institution, resigned amid heightened allegations of plagiarism in her scholarly work and increased political pressure, primarily by some Republican Members of the United States Congress, over responses she made on December 5 in congressional testimony about antisemitism at Harvard University.
In an Opinion piece in the New York Times earlier this week, Gay wrote that, for weeks, both she and the institution – among the top universities in the world and to which she said she has devoted her professional life – “have been under attack.”
“My character and intelligence have been impugned,” she said. “My commitment to fighting antisemitism has been questioned. My inbox has been flooded with invective, including death threats. I’ve been called the N-word more times than I care to count.
“I hope that, by stepping down, I will deny demagogues the opportunity to weaponize my presidency in their campaign further to undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth,” added Dr. Gay, stating, however, that the campaign against her was “about more than one university and one leader.”
“This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society,” she continued. “Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda. But such campaigns don’t end there.”
Gay warned that 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.
“For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal,” she said.
She admitted that she made mistakes in the congressional testimony, stating that, in her initial response to the atrocities by Hamas on October 7 in Israel, she “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, at a congressional hearing last month, I fell into a well-laid trap,” Gay said. “I 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 noted that, most recently, the attacks have focused on her scholarship, that her “critics found instances in my academic writings, where some material duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution.
“I believe all scholars deserve full and appropriate credit for their work,” she said. “When I learned of these errors, I promptly requested corrections from the journals in which the flagged articles were published, consistent with how I have seen similar faculty cases handled at Harvard.”
However, Gay said that she has “never misrepresented” her research findings, nor has she “ever claimed credit for the research of others.
She said college campuses in America “must remain places where students can learn, share and grow together, not spaces where proxy battles and political grandstanding take root,” urging that universities “remain independent venues, where courage and reason unite to advance truth, no matter what forces set against them.”
In her biography, Gay is considered “a leading scholar of political behavior, considering issues of race and politics in America.”
In her resignation letter to the Harvard community on Tuesday, she said it was “not a decision I came to easily.”
Harvard announced that its provost and chief academic officer, Dr. Alan M. Garber, a physician and an economist, will temporarily replace Dr. Gay until the university finds a permanent president.
and then 