Former Harvard President Claudine Gay claimed that public pressure that led to her resignation was an attack on the “pillars of American society.”
Gay resigned on Tuesday after intense public pressure resulting from her repeated failure to condemn antisemitism at a House hearing and allegations that she had committed plagiarism in several of her published scholarly works. In a guest essay for the New York Times, Gay instead blamed her resignation on an attack by malicious forces seeking to undermine American democracy.
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“The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader,” Gay wrote.
“This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. 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,” she continued.
The former Harvard president accused those who led the charge calling for her resignation of engaging with racist stereotypes, holding that her race was a prominent reason for the attacks against her.
“Those who had relentlessly campaigned to oust me since the fall often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not reasoned argument,” she wrote. “They recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament. They pushed a false narrative of indifference and incompetence.”
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The attacks against her, she claimed, were only a proxy for those looking to check the growing prominence of minority voices on college campuses.
“It is not lost on me 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,” she wrote. “Someone who views diversity as a source of institutional strength and dynamism. Someone who has advocated a modern curriculum that spans from the frontier of quantum science to the long-neglected history of Asian Americans. Someone who believes that a daughter of Haitian immigrants has something to offer to the nation’s oldest university.”
