The resignation of Claudine Gay, the first black person and second woman, to preside over Harvard, although only for six months (the shortest presidency in the history of the institution), represents a victory for sectors of the American right that want to end the policies to promote racial diversity in the country's elite universities
This woman, the daughter of Haitian immigrants, with a degree from Stanford and a doctorate from Harvard, submitted her resignation in a letter on Tuesday, amid a barrage of criticism for accusations of plagiarism in her publications and for what they considered a weak reaction against anti-Semitism at the university.
Gay came under fire for her response in Congress a little over a month ago to a question from New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik about whether “calling for the genocide of the Jews violates her university's bullying and harassment policies.” The academic said that it could be a violation of the institution's code of conduct “depending on the context.”
His statements generated outrage among some Jewish alumni, whose million-dollar donations are key to Harvard today. Gay apologized for his words, but it was too late. An unfortunate comment about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had the power to trigger the campaign that ended his career.
Accusations of plagiarism against Claudine Gay have fueled the conservative argument that American academic institutions are losing their standards of excellence in favor of attention to issues of race and gender that, they claim, would have allowed Gay to become president of Harvard. .
But she is not the only one. Defenders of her resignation demand a change in universities that brings back the sole criterion of meritocracy, and forgets the socioeconomic context that makes it easier for some students to reach the top. “We will continue to move forward to expose the rot at the most prestigious educational institutions,” Elise Stefanik, the Republican congresswoman who questioned Gay in Congress, said in a statement.
At the center of the debate is DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), as initiatives that seek to promote equal opportunities within public or private institutions are called in the United States. Republican conservatives have been opposing this system for years, which began to come under strong attack during Donald Trump's term.
In 2020, the former president called teaching about racial sensitivity “un-American propaganda” and banned it in federal agencies. Today, the Republican right is trying to modify these programs in universities or close departments that promote diversity, after in June the Supreme Court invalidated race as an admission criterion.
Christopher Rufo, one of the conservative activists who spread the accusations against Claudine Gay, announced on his the greatest principle of academic life”, in the face of “racial ideology”. Gay, a professor of African and African American studies, is a strong supporter of considering race in the hiring and admission of staff and students, and during her presidency racial justice was one of her priorities. For Rufo, her fall represents “the beginning of the end of the DEI.”
Half of the work published by Gay would be affected by plagiarism, the conservative magazine The Washington Free Beacon stated on Monday, the source of the vast majority of accusations against the former president. Little criticism came from colleagues at the academy. While a review conducted by Harvard acknowledged errors in Gay's work, they were “unintentional or reckless” and fell short of misconduct.
The university noted the existence of “duplicate language” and missing quotation marks. But after the resignation announcement, Harvard did not indicate at any time that Gay's actions had been incorrect. Claudine Gay's defenders point out that repetitions of terms in very specialized fields are common and that behind the criticism of Gay there is a republican desire to interfere in the academic freedom of universities.
