The resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay on Tuesday followed a long list of plagiarism allegations that appeared to steadily erode her support among the university’s faculty, students and alumni. But for many of Dr. Gay, her departure was also a proxy victory in the escalating ideological battle over American higher education.
The downing of Dr. Gay was a “a huge scalpin the “struggle for cultural sanity,” wrote Josh Hammer, a conservative talk show host and writer, on the social media platform X.
“A crushing loss for PPCrevivalism, anti-Semitism & university elitism,” wrote conservative commentator Liz Wheeler.
“This is the beginning of the end for PPC in America’s institutions,” said conservative activist Christopher Ruffo, who helped publicize the plagiarism allegations.
Until last month, conservative-inspired efforts to revamp higher education had unfolded mostly at public universities in skill states like Florida and Texas, where lawmakers and state officials could exercise their legislative and executive powers to ban desks. diversity. -bed academic centers and require changes in the curriculum.
However, the resignation of Dr. Gay on Tuesday secured their movement a landmark victory at the nation’s most prestigious private university, which for weeks has resisted calls for leadership change.
“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 growing toward the current best practice of higher education, I think that puts a lot of wind in the sails of reform.”
The defenders of Dr. Gay appeared to agree, warning that her resignation would encourage conservative interference in universities and jeopardize academic freedom. (Though some pundits have given Harvard itself a poor rating in terms of free speech on campus during Dr. Gay’s tenure at the helm.)
“This is a terrible moment,” said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of history, race and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. “Republican leaders in Congress have declared war on college and university independence, as Governor DeSantis did in Florida. They will only be emboldened by Gay’s resignation.”
It had been just over a month since Dr. Gay appeared, along with the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania, at a congressional hearing on campus anti-Semitism, where their legal defense of a student’s right to engage to anti-Jews. the speech caused national outrage. Some Jewish students, faculty and donors also felt that Dr. Gay was too cowardly in her response to the October 7 Hamas attacks in Israel, as well as allegations of anti-Semitism on campus.
Two of the three presidents who spoke at the hearing are now out of 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, the competitors of Dr. Gays 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 by Dr. Republican lawmakers, he vowed, “will continue to move forward to expose the rot in our most ‘distinguished’ institutions of higher learning.”
Even before the hearing, conservative activists and the media had begun to reexamine Dr. Gay, prompting further scrutiny from the mainstream news media.
The public outcry began almost immediately after the hearing with a post by Mr. Rufo, who had obtained an anonymous working file published by Dr.
That agency posted a follow-up Monday night with additional examples. Overall, plagiarism allegations covered 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 promote what he called “racial justice” on campus — has come to endorse the right’s broader critique of elite academia, which he sees as intellectually narrow, lax in standards. and overly focused on issues of identity.
Opponents attacked Dr. Gay, who attended Stanford University and Harvard before turning to an administrative career, as inadequate for the position she took up just six months ago, a charge her supporters dismissed as racist.
“It was a subtle exercise in race and gender when they chose Claudine Gay,” said Vivek Ramaswamy, the businessman and Republican presidential candidate. He wrote at X on Tuesday. “Here’s a radical idea for the future: choose leadership based on *value*.”
Harvard announced her departure without any indication that it believed Dr. Gay had acted inappropriately. Dr Gay’s resignation letter noted that she had made the decision to resign “in consultation with members of the company”, but gave no further details. Some Harvard faculty and alumni were left to conclude that the school had simply caved to public pressure from activists and powerful donors.
“I deplore the failure of a major university to defend itself against a disturbingly effective campaign of misinformation and intimidation,” Randall Kennedy, a Harvard Law Fellow and one of the university’s most prominent black faculty members, wrote in a message.
Like other major research universities, Harvard is supported by a huge amount 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 reform of higher education is unclear. As the Covid pandemic recedes, Republican officials and education activists are finding it harder to engage large swathes of the electorate in campaigns to limit access to sexually explicit books or in often vague attacks on “vigilante” and “equality.”
The two Republican presidential candidates who have campaigned most vocally against institutions of higher learning — 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 provide diversity statements or commitments to specific ideas about race and justice have attracted support beyond the political right.
However, heavier measures to require — or ban — the teaching of certain ideas have gained less traction, leading right activists to focus more on other areas, such as dismantling tenure protections and PPC-related administrative programs.
“If Rufo’s goal is to enlist the public in his war on higher edification, he hasn’t succeeded yet,” says Jeffrey Sachs, a scholar at Acadia University in Nova Scotia who studies the politics of academic speech. “The public, including a majority of Republicans, does not want the government deciding what is taught in America’s college classroom. Nor do they warm to the idea when presented with specific legislation for review.”
Dana Goldstein and Annie Karni contributed reporting to this story.
The sound is produced by Adrienne Hurst.
