After resigning as Harvard president on Tuesday, Claudine Gay took to the New York Times to call out the “campaign” and “coordinated efforts” to attack her.
The op-ed, titled “What Just Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me,” explained that the attempts to oust her since her congressional testimony were not efforts against her but against the institution of education itself.
“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,” Gay wrote Wednesday.
She continued, “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.”
Gay acknowledged the multiple plagiarism accusations against her but emphasized, “I have never misrepresented my research findings, nor have I ever claimed credit for the research of others.”
Furthermore, she blasted “the obsessive scrutiny” of her writing, insisting that it was only feeding into “tired racial stereotypes.”
“Never did I imagine needing to defend decades-old and broadly respected research, but the past several weeks have laid waste to truth. Those who had relentlessly campaigned to oust me since the fall often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not reasoned argument. They recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament. They pushed a false narrative of indifference and incompetence,” Gay wrote.
She continued to repeatedly suggest that criticism against her was racially motivated.
“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. Someone who has advocated a modern curriculum that spans from the frontier of quantum science to the long-neglected history of Asian Americans. Someone who believes that a daughter of Haitian immigrants has something to offer to the nation’s oldest university,” the op-ed read.
SOCIAL MEDIA ERUPTS AS HARVARD PRESIDENT CLAUDINE GAY RESIGNS: ‘SHOULD’VE BEEN FIRED WEEKS AGO’
Gay closed by saying that she will “continue to champion access and opportunity” in her position as a professor and reiterated the need to push back against “extreme voices in our cultures.”
“Having now seen how quickly the truth can become a casualty amid controversy, I’d urge a broader caution: At tense moments, every one of us must be more skeptical than ever of the loudest and most extreme voices in our culture, however well organized or well connected they might be. Too often they are pursuing self-serving agendas that should be met with more questions and less credulity,” Gay wrote.
Gay similarly alleged race as a factor in her resignation letter on Tuesday.
“Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor—two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am—and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus,” her letter read.
In her letter, however, she did not reference the plagiarism charges against her.
