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Claudine Gay, who resigned as president of Harvard University Tuesday, defended herself and condemned the attacks against her and the university in an opinion article in The New York Times Wednesday.
Gay, whose resignation was part of the fallout from the controversy over her testimony at a congressional hearing last month about antisemitism on American college campuses related to the war between Israel and Hamas and allegations that she plagiarized portions of her academic writings, said in the article that what happened to her was part of a larger effort to “undermine” Harvard’s values and erode public trust in higher ed and other “trusted institutions.”
“The campaign against me 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 wrote. “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. 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.”
Gay was the second college president to resign in the wake of the contentious, hours-long House hearings, at which she testified along with the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Liz Magill, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sally Kornbluth. Magill resigned under pressure on Dec. 9, after both she and Gay were widely criticized for failing to clearly state that calls for the genocide of Jewish people would be considered unacceptable speech at their universities.
Gay acknowledged missteps in how she responded to lawmakers’ questions.
“I fell into a well-laid trap. 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,” she wrote.
She also conceded mistakes in citations in her published work, but she defended her scholarship.
“I have never misrepresented my research findings, nor have I ever claimed credit for the research of others. Moreover, the citation errors should not obscure a fundamental truth: I proudly stand by my work and its impact on the field.”
Gay, who was Harvard’s first Black president, also noted the racial nature of the attacks against her by people who “relentlessly campaigned to oust me” and “trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults” and “recycled tired racial stereotypes.”
“It is not lost on me,” she wrote, “that I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses: a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution.”
