Claudine Gay, who resigned as Harvard University president this week, spoke out against her critics and claimed that the events that led to her departure were “merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society.”
“The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader,” she wrote in an op-ed published in the New York Times on Wednesday, the day after she stepped down.
“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,” she added. “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.”
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Gay’s resignation, six months after she became the university’s first Black and second female president, was a result of weeks of conservative attacks, and pressure from politicians and donors. She came under pressure to resign following her remarks during a congressional hearing on antisemitism on university campuses and allegations of plagiarism in her scholarly works, even as hundreds of Harvard professors and alumni backed her and the university’s board said she did not engage in academic misconduct.
Some saw a racial element to the response to her congressional testimony, pointing to remarks from people such as hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and conservative pundits that the Stanford and Harvard-educated Gay was chosen as president due to diversity, equity and inclusion criteria.
In the op-ed, Gay said she received abusive messages and death threats, adding “I’ve been called the N-word more times than I care to count.”
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Gay also acknowledged shortcomings in her response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack in Israel. The assault, which Israel estimates killed 1,200 people — and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza, in which over 22,000 Palestinians have been killed — have led to a rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia in universities, according to watchdogs, and a federal probe into institutions’ responses.
Share this articleShare“Yes, I made mistakes,” Gay wrote. “In my initial response to the atrocities of Oct. 7, I should have stated more forcefully what all people of good conscience know: Hamas is a terrorist organization that seeks to eradicate the Jewish state.”
She added that she “fell into a well-laid trap” during the congressional hearing into antisemitism on university campuses on Dec. 5, where she and two other Ivy League presidents were questioned by a Republican-led House committee on their universities’ policies on dealing with antisemitism and how campus protests fit into the commitment to free speech.
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Gay, University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth, all declined to state plainly that a call for genocide against Jews would violate their universities’ codes of conduct. Their remarks prompted widespread backlash, with Magill resigning from Penn days later. Kornbluth remains in her role with MIT leadership’s backing.
“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,” Gay wrote of her congressional remarks.
She went on to defend her academic record amid the plagiarism allegations, saying that she “promptly requested corrections” to her previously published work after it emerged that she used almost identical language to that of other academic papers without correct attribution in a number of instances.
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An independent review found “a few instances of inadequate citation” but concluded there was “no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct,” the university’s top governing board said in December, as it voiced its unanimous support for Gay.
“I have never misrepresented my research findings, nor have I ever claimed credit for the research of others,” Gay said in the op-ed. “Moreover, the citation errors should not obscure a fundamental truth: I proudly stand by my work and its impact on the field.”
“My hope is that by stepping down I will deny demagogues the opportunity to further weaponize my presidency in their campaign to undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth,” she wrote.
Laura Meckler, Susan Svrluga, Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, Annabelle Timsit and Adela Suliman contributed to this report.
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