Claudine Gay Has Resigned As President Of Harvard. What Next?
/The news arrived today in my inbox at 1:27 PM, in an email from Claudine Gay herself. She wrote me “to share that I will be stepping down as president” of Harvard. Fourteen minutes later, that email was followed by an official announcement to the same effect from the Harvard Corporation.
Of course, Ms. Gay took the opportunity to blame her downfall on racism of unnamed adversaries. “[I]t has been . . . frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.” What personal attacks and racial animus exactly, Ms. Gay? What I have seen (and contributed to) is plenty of fair criticism of the sort that everyone who operates at the level of President of Harvard must deal with every day. Since when is it a “personal attack,” let alone “racial animus,” simply to document a record of enforcing woke orthodoxy on campus, or of allowing anti-semitism to flourish, or of committing more than 40 instances of clear plagiarism in an already sparse record of academic publication?
Anyway, with Gay gone, the ball goes back to the board known as the Harvard Corporation to find a replacement as President. What can Harvard expect in the next round?
The board responsible for this decision consists of only 12 people. All of them (along with three others) were on the “Search Committee” in 2022 that came up with Ms. Gay as the next President. As of today, not one of them has stepped down.
Make no mistake, the Search Committee and the Corporation knew exactly what they were getting when they chose Ms. Gay. She was not some lightly-vetted outsider. She had been at Harvard since 2006 — 17 years — and had made advancement of the woke/diversity/equity/inclusion agenda a clear priority during that time. She was initially recruited from Stanford to be a professor of government and African American Studies. Her best-known research, a 2001 piece in the American Political Science Review, purported to show change in voting behavior of whites when they find themselves in a majority-minority congressional district — that is, supposedly a showing of some kind of implicit racial bias on the part of at least some white voters, which would be obvious catnip for the DEI crowd. (Note that this paper now turns out to contain several instances of alleged plagiarism, and moreover Ms. Gay has refused to release the underlying data for the study, making its results dubious.).
Gay quickly rose in 2015 to the position of Dean of Social Studies within Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and then in 2018 to Dean of the full FAS itself. (Harvard’s FAS includes all of the academic departments, from humanities to social sciences to STEM, but not the professional schools like law, medicine, and business.). A piece at Campus Reform on December 29, 2022, contains a list of some of Gay’s DEI initiatives during her tenure as Dean of Harvard’s FAS. From Campus Reform:
The Harvard Crimson . . . reported that “Gay has supported the creation of an ethnic studies department at Harvard, a longtime demand of student and alumni activists.”
During her time as dean, Gay “appoint[ed] an inaugural associate dean of diversity, inclusion, and belonging“ for FAS and outlined her plan to diversify faculty.
Gay . . . served on the Association of American Universities (AAU) advisory board on racial equity in higher education, according to her FAS biography. An advisory board report [during Gay’s membership] suggested strategies for universities to adopt “to mitigate structural barriers.” One suggested strategy is to “[a]dopt an equity-based mindset in tenure and promotion considerations,” referencing universities’ commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)
The FAS website includes a page for Advancing Racial Justice. A 2021 task force created a 26-page report on “Visual Culture & Signage.”
Then there was Gay’s role in the matters involving Harvard faculty members Ronald Sullivan, Roland Fryer and Ryan Enos, covered in my post of December 16, 2022. Sullivan, a law professor and head of Winthrop House, one of Harvard’s undergraduate “houses” (dormitories), joined the defense team of Harvey Weinstein in 2019. When students protested Sullivan’s taking on that role, Gay weighed in, in an interview with the Harvard Crimson, calling Sullivan’s response “insufficient” — even though Sullivan, as a law professor, did not even fall under her purview as Dean of FAS. Sullivan was forced out of his role as head of Winthrop House. Fryer was a highly productive young black economist at Harvard when his research seemed to be coming to some inconvenient conclusions (lack of evidence of racial bias in policing); Gay then spearheaded an effort to destroy his career over a handful of allegations of allegedly offensive sexual banter in his office.
The “Senior Fellow” of the Harvard Corporation (there is only one such), and the head of the search committee that selected Gay, is Penny Pritzker. You may recognize the name of Ms. Pritzker as the billionaire heiress of the Hyatt Hotel fortune, the sister of Illinois Governor Jay Pritzker and former Commerce Secretary during Barack Obama’s second term. What you may not know is that Ms. Pritzker was the finance chair of Obama’s first campaign for President, and a co-chair of his second campaign. In other words, she is an ultimate Obama crony and Democratic Party mega-donor and insider.
There was no mere negligence in the process by which Claudine Gay became President of Harvard. The whole idea was to divert Harvard away from bona fide research and scholarship and make its new focus the woke orthodoxy and DEI agenda. Penny Pritzker led the effort, but every member of the Harvard Corporation was fully on board. With a black woman placed in the public-facing role, her race and sex could be used to deflect any potential criticism of the new direction.
So what is next for Harvard? Unless there is some sudden earthquake of resignations from the Harvard Corporation (I will bet strongly against it), the exact same people will imminently get a second shot at accomplishing their exact same goal. The universe of Harvard faculty and administrators consists almost unanimously of Democrats, and a good half of them are radical leftists. Somewhere among them is someone who will be an equally unwavering force for the advancement of wokism as was Claudine Gay, with a record perhaps a bit less obviously vulnerable to having a spotlight shown on it. If you need a place to start your search, here is a Petition of Harvard faculty members, signed by more than 750 such, urging the retention of President Gay.
And meanwhile, will Ms. Gay see her academic career damaged by this episode, or will she quietly go back to her tenured professorship? For now, I’m betting on the latter.