How a Proxy Fight Over Campus Politics Brought
Down Harvard’s President
Amid plagiarism allegations and a backlash to campus
antisemitism, Claudine Gay became an avatar for broader criticisms of academia.
By Nicholas
Confessore
Published
Jan. 2, 2024
Updated
Jan. 3, 2024, 3:03 a.m. ET
The
resignation of Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, on Tuesday followed a
lengthening catalog of plagiarism allegations that appeared to steadily sap her
support among the university’s faculty, students and alumni. But for many of
Dr. Gay’s critics, her departure was also a proxy victory in the escalating
ideological battle over American higher education.
Taking down
Dr. Gay was a “a huge scalp” in the “fight for civilizational sanity,” Josh
Hammer, a conservative talk show host and writer, wrote on the social media
platform X.
“A crushing
loss to D.E.I., wokeism, antisemitism & university elitism,” wrote the
conservative commentator Liz Wheeler.
“This is
the beginning of the end for D.E.I. in America’s institutions,” said the
conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who had helped publicize the plagiarism
allegations.
Until last
month, conservative-inspired efforts to remake higher education had unfolded
primarily at public universities in right-leaning states such as Florida and
Texas, where G.O.P. lawmakers and state officials could exercise their
legislative and executive powers to ban diversity offices, set up right-leaning
academic centers and demand changes to curriculum.
But Dr.
Gay’s resignation on Tuesday secured their movement a signal victory at the
country’s most storied private university, which had for weeks resisted calls
for a change in leadership.
“I think
there are major problems with higher education, and Harvard represents a lot of
those problems,” said John D. Sailer, a senior fellow at the National
Association of Scholars, a conservative education nonprofit. “To the extent
those problems have been exposed, and skepticism increases towards the current
best instantiation of higher education, I think that puts a lot of wind in the
sails of reform.”
“This is
the beginning of the end for D.E.I. in America’s institutions,” said Chris
Rufo, a conservative activist who pushed for Dr. Gay’s resignation and helped
publicize allegations of plagiarism. Credit...Todd Anderson for The New York
Times
Dr. Gay’s
defenders seemed to agree, warning that her resignation would encourage
conservative interference in universities and imperil academic freedom. (Though
some experts have rated Harvard itself poorly on campus free speech during Dr.
Gay’s tenure in leadership.)
“This is a
terrible moment,” said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of history, race and
public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. “Republican congressional leaders
have declared war on the independence of colleges and universities, just as
Governor DeSantis has done in Florida. They will only be emboldened by Gay’s
resignation.”
Barely a
month had passed since Dr. Gay had appeared, along with the presidents of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania, at a
congressional hearing on campus antisemitism, where their lawyerly defense of a
student’s right to engage in anti-Jewish speech provoked national outrage. Some
Jewish students, faculty and donors also felt Dr. Gay had been too timid in her
response to the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas, as well as to complaints
over antisemitism on campus.
Two of the
three presidents who spoke at the hearing are now out of office. (The second of
those is M. Elizabeth Magill, who resigned as the University of Pennsylvania
president just four days after she testified before Congress.)
On Tuesday,
Dr. Gay’s antagonists jockeyed for credit, sometimes hailing the effectiveness
of their own political theater. Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, the
Harvard-educated Republican, noted in a statement that her interrogation of Dr.
Gay at last month’s hearing had “made history as the most viewed congressional
testimony in the history of the U.S. Congress.” Republican lawmakers, she
promised, would “continue to move forward to expose the rot in our most
‘prestigious’ higher education institutions.”
Even before
the hearing, conservative activists and outlets had begun re-examining Dr.
Gay’s acclaimed but relatively thin academic output, prompting further
examination by mainstream news outlets.
The public
drumbeat began almost immediately after the hearing with a post by Mr. Rufo,
who had obtained an anonymous dossier of work published by Dr. Gay in which she
had allegedly plagiarized other scholars, as well as a report in the Washington
Free Beacon.
That outlet
published a follow-up on Monday night with additional examples. All told, the
plagiarism allegations spanned nearly half of her published academic articles,
the report said.
But along
the way, Dr. Gay — a scholar of Black political participation and an architect
of Harvard’s efforts to advance what she has called “racial justice” on campus
— came to stand for the right’s broader critique of elite academia, which it
views as intellectually narrow, lax in standards and overly focused on
questions of identity.
Opponents
attacked Dr. Gay, who attended Stanford University and Harvard before turning
to an administrative career, as unqualified for the position she had assumed
just six months ago, a charge her supporters rejected as racist.
“It was a
thinly veiled exercise in race & gender when they selected Claudine Gay,”
Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and Republican candidate for president, wrote
on X on Tuesday. “Here’s a radical idea for the future: select leadership based
on *merit.*”
Harvard
announced her departure without any indication that it believed that Dr. Gay
had acted improperly; Dr. Gay’s resignation letter noted that she had made her
decision to step down “in consultation with members of the corporation,” but
did not elaborate. Some Harvard faculty and alumni were left to conclude that
the school had simply caved to public pressure from activists and powerful
donors.
“I am
saddened by the inability of a great university to defend itself against an
alarmingly effective campaign of misinformation and intimidation,” Randall
Kennedy, a Harvard legal scholar and one of the university’s most prominent
Black faculty members, wrote in a text message.
Like other
major research universities, Harvard is supported by a huge volume of federal
grants and other funding, a potential pressure point for Republican lawmakers
going forward.
Whether the
resignation of one or two college presidents will spur any broader remaking of
higher education is unclear. As the Covid pandemic recedes, Republican
officials and education activists have found it more difficult to interest
broad swaths of voters in campaigns to restrict access to sexually explicit
books, or in often-vague attacks on “wokeism” and “equity.”
The two
Republican presidential contenders who have campaigned most explicitly against
higher education institutions — the Yale-educated Mr. DeSantis and the
Harvard-educated Mr. Ramaswamy — have failed to gain lasting traction in the
race.
Efforts to
stop schools from requiring job applicants to furnish diversity statements, or
commitments to particular ideas about race and justice, have attracted support
beyond the political right.
But more
heavy-handed measures to require — or ban — the teaching of particular ideas
have gained less traction, leading activists on the right to focus more on
other areas, such as dismantling tenure protections and administrative programs
related to D.E.I.
“If Rufo’s
goal is to enlist the public into his war on higher ed, he has yet to succeed,”
said Jeffrey Sachs, a scholar at Acadia University in Nova Scotia who studies
academic speech policies. “The public, including a majority of Republicans,
does not want government deciding what gets taught in America’s university
classroom. Nor do they warm to the idea when specific legislation is presented
to them for review.”
Dana
Goldstein and Annie Karni contributed reporting to this story.
Nicholas
Confessore is New York-based political and investigative reporter for The Times
and a staff writer at the Times Magazine, covering power and influence in
Washington, tech, media and beyond. He can be reached at
nicholas.confessore@nytimes.com. More about Nicholas Confessore
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