Harvard University’s former president said Wednesday following her resignation that she made mistakes, specifically in her response to the October 7 Hamas atrocities in southern Israel, but insisted she was the target of a sustained campaign of lies and personal insults.
Dr. Claudine Gay stepped down Tuesday after coming under ferocious attack over plagiarism accusations, criticism over testimony at a congressional hearing where she was unable to say unequivocally that calls on campus for the genocide of Jews would violate the school’s conduct policy, and her response to pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel demonstrations on campus amid the Israel-Hamas war.
“Those who had relentlessly campaigned to oust me since the fall often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not reasoned argument,” Gay wrote in The New York Times Wednesday.
“They recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament. They pushed a false narrative of indifference and incompetence.”
“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. Someone who views diversity as a source of institutional strength and dynamism.”
She warned that her ouster “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,” she added.
“Yes, I made mistakes,” she went on. “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. And at a congressional hearing last month, I fell into a well-laid trap. 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.”
In recent weeks, Gay also faced serious accusations of plagiarism as reports surfaced alleging that she did not properly cite scholarly sources. The most recent accusations came Tuesday, published anonymously in a conservative online outlet.
Last month, Gay was engulfed by scandal after she declined to say unequivocally whether calling for genocide of Jews would violate Harvard’s code of conduct, during testimony to Congress alongside the heads of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania.
Gay, who made history as the first Black person to be president of Harvard and who served for just six months, said she was targeted because she believed “that a daughter of Haitian immigrants has something to offer to the nation’s oldest university.”
Gay, 53, was born in New York to Haitian immigrants and is a professor of political science.
Her downfall comes after the powerhouse university in Cambridge, Massachusetts’s governing Harvard Corporation had initially backed her after the public relations disaster of the congressional testimony.
But the body did criticize the university’s initial response to the Hamas October 7 attacks, in which thousands of Palestinian terrorists killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians in their homes and at a music festival, and took about 240 hostages.
Gay was among three university presidents who had been called before the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce to answer accusations that universities were failing to protect Jewish students amid rising fears of antisemitism worldwide and fallout from Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza following the October 7 attacks.
In her testimony, Gay said “calling for the genocide of Jews” could violate the colleges’ code of conduct, depending on the context, adding that when “speech crosses into conduct, that violates our policies.” The answer faced swift backlash from Republican and some Democratic lawmakers as well as the White House. The hearing was parodied in the opening skit on “Saturday Night Live.”
Gay later apologized, telling The Crimson student newspaper that she got caught up in a heated exchange at the House committee hearing and failed to properly denounce threats of violence against Jewish students.
“What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged,” Gay said.
Following the congressional hearing, Gay’s academic career came under intense scrutiny by conservative activists who unearthed several instances of alleged plagiarism in her 1997 doctoral dissertation. Harvard’s governing board initially rallied behind Gay, saying a review of her scholarly work turned up “a few instances of inadequate citation” but no evidence of research misconduct.
The university’s governing Harvard Corporation said that Gay had “shown remarkable resilience in the face of deeply personal and sustained attacks.”
The House Republican who challenged Gay during her testimony with the question about whether free speech extended to calling for genocide of Jews has now called for members of the Harvard Corporation to apologize.
“Neither the resignation from Claudine Gay nor the statement from the Harvard Corporation included any apology for the morally bankrupt testimony,” New York Rep. Elise Stefanik wrote on social media.