Embattled former Harvard President Claudine Gay could retain a nearly $900,000 salary as she returns to “scholarship” on Harvard’s faculty amid an unresolved plagiarism scandal.
Gay’s return to the elite private school‘s rank and file was announced in two Tuesday letters to the Harvard community from both Gay and the Harvard Corporation.
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The university delivered a full defense of Gay and did not address any of the most recent plagiarism allegations as it announced her resignation and new role on the faculty.
Some critics said the school’s decision to allow her to return unscathed to the faculty is part of the diversity, equity, and inclusion framework Harvard has embraced.
“It’s very difficult for Harvard to just fire her,” Mike Gonzalez, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner. “Just as her appointment was symbolic, her departure is symbolic. I think the country can learn a lesson that hiring and promotion should be done on merit and merit only.”
According to the Harvard Crimson, Gay earned $879,079 as Faculty Arts and Sciences dean in 2021, preceded by a 2020 salary of $824,068 for that position. Lawrence Bacow, who served as university president before Gay, had an outgoing salary of over $1.3 million.
Gonzalez went on to argue that Gay’s promotion to the Harvard presidency was more about her being a black woman — the first black president in the school’s history — and less about her academic prowess.
Gay authored only 11 peer-reviewed articles during her more than two decades as an academic, many of which have been caught in the plagiarism scandal, and wrote no books. Her topics of discussion often revolved around race in politics.
“This is something that now we have become very accustomed to hearing in the news, especially since 2020, when the country entered some kind of trance on race,” Gonzalez said. “What your race is or what your ethnicity is now trumps your accomplishments.”
University officials continued to defend Gay’s academic accomplishments on Tuesday even as Gay resigned amid scrutiny of them.
“She has devoted her career to an institution whose ideals and priorities she has worked tirelessly to advance, and we are grateful for the extraordinary contributions she has made — and will continue to make — as a leader, a teacher, a scholar, a mentor, and an inspiration to many,” the Harvard Corporation said.
But Gay’s anemic academic record prior to her short stint as Harvard president has focused attention on why the university allowed her to return to its ranks of scholars.
Frederick M. Hess, senior fellow and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, recalled from his time studying alongside Gay in Harvard’s doctoral program years ago that Gay did not seem at the time to be an ideological crusader.
“I tend to suspect that, like so many others, Gay embraced higher ed’s DEI groupthink mostly as a means of personal advancement,” Hess wrote on Wednesday.
“Gay has spent most of her time at Harvard as a bureaucrat, not a scholar,” Hess noted. “In 2022, when charged with implementing a Faculty of Arts and Sciences anti-racism initiative, Gay sent an email to the faculty seeking ‘requests for denaming’ of campus buildings or programs.”
Harvard’s promotion and protection of Gay is part of the broader, decadeslong push by the ideological Left to take over academia and control public discourse, Gonzalez said.
“This whole thing is about what the future generations are taught: Who gets a say about what truth is, who determines what history is?” he added. “The Left is keenly aware of this.”
Still, many academics and journalists came out in defense of Gay this week, downplaying the seriousness of plagiarism findings.
The Associated Press on Wednesday dubbed plagiarism as the “new conservative weapon” in an article characterizing Gay’s resignation as a warning sign of future tactics from the Right.
1619 Project creator and journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones said Gay’s ouster is evidence that “academic freedom is under attack.”
“Racial justice programs are under attack. Black women will be made to pay,” Hannah-Jones said.
Ibram X. Kendi, a professor and prominent purveyor of critical race theory, blamed the “racist mob” who found in plagiarism a “seemingly legitimate reason for the attack” but is being used as a pretext for the underlying purpose of the criticism: “Because the person is black.”
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“The seemingly legitimate reason, in this latest case at Harvard, is primarily academic misconduct or plagiarism,” Kendi added. “The question to assess whether this was a racist attack isn’t whether Dr. Gay engaged in any misconduct.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to Harvard for a request for comment.
