Harvard's Black president resigns after targeted by smear campaign

Harvard University's Black president has resigned stating that she became a target of a sustained campaign of lies and personal insults.

Claudine Gay stepped down on Tuesday after facing an assault over her response to pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus amid Israel’s war on Gaza and plagiarism accusations.

Gay, who made history as the first Black person to be president of Harvard said she was targeted because she believed "that a daughter of Haitian immigrants has something to offer to the nation's oldest university."

"They recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament. They pushed a false narrative of indifference and incompetence," Gay said.

Gay, a professor of political science, was born in New York to Haitian immigrants.

The former president said that the tactics used against her were “merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society.”

Gay was accused by some members of Congress of not doing enough to condemn and combat anti-Semitism on Harvard's campus. 

When asked by a Congress member if a hypothetical call for the genocide of Jewish people would qualify as a violation of Harvard's code of conduct, Gay responded, "It can be, depending on the context."

She later clarified, "Anti-Semitic rhetoric, when it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation — that is actionable conduct and we do take action.”

Gay said that the call to testify to Congress about anti-Semitism on elite college campuses had been “a well-laid trap” and that the campaign against her was about more than one university and one leader.

A day after resigning from her position Gay wrote in the New York Times, “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.”

Gay warned that the tactics that were used to oust her would soon be used to trap other institutional leaders, “For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal.”

For the past month, the campaign against Gay, which also included prominent Harvard donors, had centered on allegations of Antisemitism and plagiarism in her academic work, focusing on her widely criticized 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.

Many scholars whose work Gay has been accused of plagiarizing have told news outlets that they considered the citation issues relatively minor, or even not plagiarism at all, with one scholar saying, “This isn’t even close to an example of academic plagiarism.”

Some of the activists who campaigned most prominently against Gay made clear that their broader aim was opposing “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) programs in all the universities of the United States and it won’t remain confined to one individual Harvard president.

ME