How a proxy battle over campus politics brought down Harvard’s president
Harvard President Claudine Gay’s resignation Tuesday followed a growing catalog of plagiarism accusations that appeared to steadily undermine her support among the university’s faculty, students and alumni. But for many critics of Dr. Gay, her departure was also a proxy victory in the escalating ideological battle over American higher education.
Taking down Dr. Gay was a… “a huge scalpIn the “fight for the sanity of civilization,” Josh Hammer, a conservative talk show host and writer, wrote on the social media platform X.
“A crushing loss for DEI., wokeism, anti-Semitism and university elitism,” wrote conservative commentator Liz Wheeler.
“This is the beginning of the end for DEI. in American institutions,” said conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who helped publicize the plagiarism allegations.
Until last month, conservative-inspired efforts to reshape higher education had unfolded primarily at public universities in right-wing states like Florida and Texas, where Republican lawmakers and administration officials could exercise their legislative and executive powers to ban diversity offices and shut down right-wing institutions. to target. -Leaning academic centers and demanding changes in the curriculum.
But the resignation of Dr. Gay on Tuesday secured their movement a clear victory over the nation’s most storied private university, which had resisted calls for a change in leadership for weeks.
“I think there are big 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 that these problems have been exposed and skepticism is increasing towards the current best embodiment of higher education, I think this puts a lot of wind in the sails of reform.”
The defenders of Dr. Gay seemed to agree, warning that her resignation would encourage conservative interference in universities and endanger academic freedom. (Although some experts have rated Harvard itself bad freedom of expression on campus during Dr. Gay’s leadership period.)
“This is a terrible moment,” said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, 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 strengthened by Gay’s resignation.”
Barely a month had passed since Dr. Gay, along with the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania, had appeared at a Congressional hearing on anti-Semitism on campus, where their legal defense of students’ right to engage in anti-Jewish practices, had appeared. speech caused national outrage. Some Jewish students, teachers and donors also believed that Dr. Gay had been too timid in her response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, as well as to complaints about anti-Semitism on campus.
Two of the three presidents who spoke at the hearing are now no longer in office. (The second of these is M. Elizabeth Magill, who resigned as president of the University of Pennsylvania just four days after testifying before Congress.)
On Tuesday, Dr.’s opponents fought. Gay for the honor, sometimes praising the effectiveness of their own political theater. Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, the Harvard-educated Republican, noted a statement that her interrogation of Dr. Gay had “made history as the most watched congressional testimony in the history of the United States Congress” during last month’s hearing. Republican lawmakers, she promised, would “continue to push forward to expose the rot in our most ‘prestigious’ institutions of higher education.”
Even for By the time of the hearing, conservative activists and media had begun to re-examine Dr.’s acclaimed but relatively meager academic output. Gay, prompting further investigation by the mainstream news media.
The public drumbeat started almost immediately after the hearing with a after by Mr. Rufo, who had obtained an anonymous file of work published by Dr. Gay in which she allegedly plagiarized other scientists, as well as a report at the Washington Free Beacon.
That outlet has been published a sequel on Monday evening with additional examples. All told, the plagiarism allegations included nearly half of her published scientific articles, the report said.
But gradually Dr. Gay – a scholar of black political participation and an architect of Harvard’s efforts to do so deposit what she has called “racial justice” on campus – came to stand for the right’s broader criticism of elite academia, which she sees as intellectually narrow. lax in standards and overly focused on questions of identity.
Opponents criticized Dr. Gay, who attended Stanford University and Harvard before turning to an administrative career, said she was not qualified for the position she accepted just six months ago, an accusation her supporters rejected as racist.
“It was a thinly veiled exercise in race and gender when they chose Claudine Gay,” said Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and Republican candidate for president. wrote at X on Tuesday. “Here’s a radical idea for the future: selected leadership based on *merit*.”
Harvard announced her departure without any indication that she believed that Dr. Gay had acted inappropriately; In Dr.’s resignation letter. Gay was mentioned that she had made her decision to resign “in consultation with the members of the company,” but did not elaborate. Some Harvard faculty and alumni concluded that the school had simply caved to public pressure from activists and powerful donors.
“I am saddened by the inability of a major university to defend itself against an alarmingly effective campaign of disinformation and intimidation,” Randall Kennedy, a Harvard law 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 an enormous amount of federal subsidies and other funding, a potential pressure point for Republican lawmakers in the future.
Whether the resignation of one or two university presidents will spur broader higher education reform is unclear. As the Covid pandemic recedes, Republican officials and education activists have found it harder to interest large swaths of voters in campaigns to restrict access to sexually explicit books, or in often vague attacks on “wokeism” and “equality.”
The two Republican presidential candidates who have campaigned most explicitly against institutions of higher education — the Yale-educated Mr. DeSantis and the Harvard-educated Mr. Ramaswamy — have failed to gain lasting traction in the race.
Efforts to prevent schools from requiring applicants to make diversity statements, or commitments to certain ideas about race and justice, have drawn support from outside the political right.
But harsher measures to require (or ban) the teaching of certain ideas have lost traction, leading right-wing activists to focus more on other areas, such as dismantling property protections and administrative programs related to DEI.
“If Rufo’s goal is to engage the public in his war on higher education, he has yet to succeed,” said Jeffrey Sachs, a scholar at Acadia University in Nova Scotia. studies academic speech policy. “The public, including a majority of Republicans, doesn’t want a government deciding what is taught in the American university classroom. They also don’t like the idea of specific legislation being submitted to them for review.”
Dana Goldstein And Annie Karni contributed to reporting on this story.