black women in power
a look at politics and prejudice in Claudine Gay's Harvard exit
Claudine Gay’s resignation from Harvard marks a sad, turbulent, and unfortunate, yet all-too-familiar ending to what was the shortest presidential occupancy in the school’s nearly 400-year history. After just six months, the seemingly movie-like tenure filled with congressional hearings, gaslit questions, and strategic traps set up for failure, has arrived at a hapless halt. However, there’s a broader topic at hand that needs to be discussed. One that underlines this entire saga, and too often gets suppressed, shunned, or simply erased from the ears and minds of the mass majority.
Decades ago, Gay misconducted herself academically by committing low-level plagiarism. She duplicated language from other scholars in her work, without proper attribution. This has been cited and shouted out loud, as the primary reason for the numerous calls for her firing. The timing of the discovery of Claudine Gay’s violation of attribution rules raises uncertainty and speculation surrounding the true reason for her outing. How, and why, can a Black woman be left so frustratingly defenseless in the face of various insignificant reasons to force her to resign?
Most of Dr. Gay’s critics have been on the political left, as disruptions during her appearances publicly broke out over the fall semester. Radical students demanded expansions of ethnic studies and more, from both Harvard and Gay. However, if paying close attention, an argument can be made that the bulk of the campaign for the removal of Claudine Gay arrived promptly following the aftermath of the October 7th attack by Hamas on Israel.
Congressional hearings soon followed, and were a trap. While Dr. Gay undoubtably infuriated those in support of Palestine by expressing solidarity with the feelings of fear and loneliness conveyed by many Jewish students and faculty at Harvard, she fully enraged powerful Harvard donors by declining to comment in support of Israel, and take further action on criticism of the Jewish state. Perhaps most enraged of them all was hedge fund tycoon Bill Ackman, whose open letter to Harvard’s Board of Directors pointed to Gay’s congressional testimony as anti-Semitic. (Ironically, Ackman’s wife, American-Israeli celebrity academic Neri Oxman, is also facing allegations of plagiarism.)
Utilizing this argument to paint the narrative of pro-Palestinian activism as antisemitic incitement, US Rep. Elise Stefanik, who delivered many of the questions at the congressional hearings, unleashed a brash interrogation on Dr. Gay that included an all-but-forced call for a ban for Israeli genocide. Stefanik serves as the US representative for New York’s 21st congressional district.
This particular sequence of questioning involving Dr. Gay and US Rep. Stefanik was taken and transformed into a shorter clip for social media, and glaringly omitted the context in which Republicans schemingly defined genocide in the broadest terms. The clip went viral across nearly every social media platform. Facing Congress, Dr. Gay did not provide a “yes” or “no” answer when asked whether or not calls for genocide violate Harvard’s Code of Conduct. Instead, she stated that violations depend on context.
Harvard, like many private academic institutions, follows their own codes and bylaws on freedom of speech. To this point, in 1991 then-president of Harvard University, Derek Gok, penned an essay for the Boston Globe defending students’ rights to display confederate flags and swastikas in an argument for the protection of free speech.
Right-wing politicians attempted to get Gay and other fellow presidents to agree that protest mottos such as “From the river to the sea” were the equivalent of calling for mass genocide of the Jewish people, and complete expressions of antisemitism. A charge that is oversimplified and utterly falsified. While the saying is often taken out of its historical context, to many people it’s a saying of liberation and freedom, not violence, and especially not genocide. Yet this, ultimately, was the deciding factor in the firing calls for Dr. Gay.
Dr. Gay wasn’t the only university president who sat above this cauldron of pressure. Numerous leaders of schools across the country cautiously navigated the gaping topic awkwardly, trying their absolute best to deliver tranquility in a nearly impossible situation. Former University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill, also criticized by Ackman, resigned back in December in the face of antisemitic accusations following widely criticized remarks at a congressional hearing.
While there was an overwhelming amount of calls for Dr. Gay’s resignation, she has had support along the way from people at Congress and on campus. Well over five hundred Harvard professors signed a letter on Dec. 12th, vouching for her, urging the university to resist calls of removing her from office. Alison Frank Johnson, Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard was one of the professors who signed the letter. She expressed her feelings of shock about the resignation during an interview last week with CNN’s Jake Tapper.
Countless instances of scholarly misconduct, including plagiarism, can be highlighted by numerous distinguished professors, scholars, and leaders from across the globe. Notably, Justice Neil Gorsuch faced widespread criticism from Democrats during his 2017 Supreme Court nomination for the nearly-dozen counts of unaddressed plagiarism in his scholarly work. However, he was still elected into the Supreme Court and his work is still widely cited today. Asking a university president to resign due to plagiarism, or due to a congressional hearing that was admittedly misworded but also extremely taken out of context, is one of the more explicit cases of double standards that Black women in power face frequently. All of this to say: the irony of “becoming aware” of the accusations against her academic writings arriving in late October, weeks into the war in the Middle East, is all but coincidental.
Immediately following her resignation, leaders of the revolt against former president Gay celebrated the news across numerous platforms including social media, as if a great victory had been won. One of the more infamous voices that sounded off in commemoration was conservative anti-DEI advocate Christopher Rufo, the one who brought both allegations of plagiarism and antisemitism into the public spotlight. “This is the beginning of the end for DEI in America's institutions," said Rufo in a social media post. "We will expose you. We will outmaneuver you. And we will not stop fighting until we have restored colorblind equality in our great nation.”
When pondering whether Claudine Gay resigned from Harvard due to plagiarism, anti-semitic comments, and criticisms about her leadership, or lack thereof, ask yourself this: would she have gotten more opportunities at redemption if she weren’t a Black woman? Would Harvard stand firmly by her side if, let’s say, she was a white man? The nearly 400-year-norm at Harvard, before Claudine Gay and former president Drew Gilpin Faust, the university’s first female president who led the school from 2007-2018.
Contrary to the sentiments of Christopher Rufo and millions of people like him, for many of us - DEI is crucial. Especially those who come from marginalized backgrounds. Without it, the very thing that you seek to cancel and destroy, people like Claudine Gay would never have an opportunity to become president of the most prestigious school in the country.
It’s fitting that the vast majority of people who are adamantly against diversity, equity, and inclusion, are not only privileged and unaware of the privileges they were born with, but are incoherent and blind to the harsh realities that exist, and have been in existence for quite some time. They have no idea what it’s like to have to work three times as hard for a position than your white male counterpart, regardless if you’re overqualified. And if and when you’re “granted” a seat at the table, it typically comes with far less pay and much more scrutiny. Far less room to make mistakes, if you will.
The false, fatigued, and thoroughly impudent narrative of Black women being too incompetent to excel in positions of power needs to conclude, today. Especially in the realm of academia, where the importance of seeing Black faces thrive throughout grounds shared by brilliant minds, is more mountainous now than ever before. The same biased, imbalanced, and lackluster playing cards that are constantly given to our people in this country, can no longer be dealt.
Seeing Black women excel in executive roles such as CEOs, owners & founders, innovators, distinguished board members, and especially as presidents of universities, is vital. Not only for Black women but for all women who come from marginalized backgrounds. We have younger sisters who are growing into magnificent women. Brilliant, kind, intuitive, empathetic, and daring. These traits will be crucial as they maneuver through the world and crossover into adulthood. Nothing is ever promised, but one can almost guarantee that they will certainly face the same ill-favored and disproportionate treatment as Claudine Gay, in whichever career they choose to pursue.
The dialogue surrounding this topic, at the very least, could assist the next generation of Black leaders and thinkers by extending more cognizance to the world and bringing our issues to the forefront. By spreading more awareness toward egregious agendas deeply rooted within the core of certain political groups in this country, we can sow unbiased and uncontaminated intentions of identifying these cases of prejudiced treatment toward Black women and people on a wider margin, into the fabric of true equality and equity, for us. One day, people other than our own and the few allies we have will possess the ability to promptly recognize immoral and inequitable treatment the moment they sense it, and hopefully, extinguish the fire of hatred that used to be suppressed on the surface - but is now clearer than ever.
