Colleges cannot be places of learning and growth when figures such as Gay, serial political grandstanders, hold sway over the direction of institutions.
Chutzpah, gall, cojones — Claudine Gay, in writing “What Just Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me” for the New York Times opinion pages, has surpassed any singular description of audacity. (And I apologize to Ms. Gay for the use of “chutzpah,” a Yiddish term I have no doubt she’d find offensive in its use to describe her disposition.)
Wrenching
Gay begins her apologia:
On Tuesday, I made the wrenching but necessary decision to resign as Harvard’s president. For weeks, both I and the institution to which I’ve devoted my professional life have been under attack. My character and intelligence have been impugned. My commitment to fighting antisemitism has been questioned. My inbox has been flooded with invective, including death threats. I’ve been called the N-word more times than I care to count.
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.
“Wrenching” is an adjective with blue-collar associations — what a poor choice for a daughter of privilege. Claudine Gay, described as the “daughter of Haitian immigrants” by Harvard’s Crimson, should have continued searching the thesaurus. In troth, she is the daughter of one of Haiti’s most politically connected men. Her father, Sony Gay Sr., is, per the company’s site, vice president of the island’s sole ready-mix concrete supplier, GDG Béton. And her uncle, Michael Gay, is the president of the company. (Michael Gay is the father of Roxane Gay, a visiting Yale professor, Gloria Steinem Chair at Rutgers, and contributing opinion writer for the New York Times.) The board happens to enjoy the patronage and vice presidency of Patrick Delatour, Haiti’s former tourism officer who oversaw the international aid that flew Haiti’s way in the aftermath of 2010’s devastating earthquakes. There’s reason to believe that GDG has a relationship with grift-adjacent operations.
A 2012 review of NGO aid in Haiti from Oliver Cunningham reads:
Those [reconstruction] contracts that have been granted to Haitians benefit local elites only. These include Haiti’s top reconstruction planning official, who owns part of the country’s largest concrete company and stands to reap major gains from the coming wave of international rebuilding aid (Center for Economic and Policy Research 2010). Another is Haiti’s tourism minister, who heads the commission for reconstruction of Port-au-Prince and other earthquake-devastated areas, but also owns 5% of GDG Concrete and Construction, Haiti’s lone supplier of ready-mixed concrete (Center for Economic and Policy Research 2011). Even on a local scale, elites exert their political power for personal benefit.
While Harvard’s former president appears to have no relationship with Haitian concrete contracts, other than of the quality of life that such income provides, it’s nonetheless worth acknowledging the truth — something Gay calls upon in her second paragraph — of her origins. She is, at a minimum, the daughter of college-educated professionals who had the money and connections to see their daughter attend Phillips Exeter Academy (tuition $50,000+ in 2023), then Princeton for a year, then Stanford to wrap her undergrad. And so on.
Claudine Gay’s familiarity with work has been the pursuit, capture, and hebetudinous “wrenching” of others’ thoughts and efforts from the pages of their work. Unfortunately, what she stole was also the best work she produced. Now let’s inspect the footings of the institution she has beclowned.
Institutions
Those who appreciate tradition and institutional reputation should look at the Gay scandal and weep. We see in the first paragraph Gay’s inability to admit the source of what has harmed Harvard, namely, her transgressions of transfer (not to mention her failure to speak in defense of Jewish students). Instead, she looks at the devastation she has wrought and, from atop the rubble, points to “demagogues” weaponizing her presidency as the reason for ruin. It is one thing to have been wrong (we all have); it’s the denial that it happened that shatters trust.
While discussing the diminishment of American institutions with NPR in 2020, Yuval Levin said, “We now think of institutions less as formative and more as performative, less as molds of our character and behavior, and more as platforms for us to stand on and be seen. And so for one arena to another in American life, we see people using institutions as stages, as a way to raise their profile or build their brand. And those kinds of institutions become much harder to trust.”
We then look back to the Times and discover Gay operating a Cat 323 as she digs further into the earth under Harvard’s foundation.
Gay writes:
As I depart, I must offer a few words of warning. The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader. This 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. For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal.
Yes, I made mistakes. 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.
Most recently, the attacks have focused on my scholarship. My critics found instances in my academic writings where some material duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution. I believe all scholars deserve full and appropriate credit for their work. When I learned of these errors, I promptly requested corrections from the journals in which the flagged articles were published, consistent with how I have seen similar faculty cases handled at Harvard.
Gay cannot manage that delineator between adulthood and childhood: the ability to say, “I was wrong. I’m sorry.” In her defense, I don’t know whether anyone has ever asked her to say as much. There’s a level of elite advantage where one has the position, money, and connections that permit one to avoid contemplation and humility. Instead, on her way to a tenured position at Harvard that retains her pay rate, all that Gay can muster is a petty op-ed that proves her critics right and leaves her apologists to reassemble, if they can, their professional reputations. Gay broke higher education because she couldn’t admit fault — it’s like watching Icarus’s doomed descent and then realizing he managed to level the Parthenon at the culmination of his earthward fall.
Advance Truth
Let us be done with this delusion.
Gay concludes:
College campuses in our country must remain places where students can learn, share and grow together, not spaces where proxy battles and political grandstanding take root. Universities must remain independent venues where courage and reason unite to advance truth, no matter what forces set against them.
Colleges cannot be places of learning and growth when figures such as Gay, serial political grandstanders, hold sway over the direction of institutions. To advance truth is to acknowledge failure and accept the consequences — Gay’s tirade en route to resplendent semi-retirement proves that Harvard cannot be a place to do so.