You may have been surprised to read the name Claudine Gay in this headline. After all, it has been a few months since Gay stepped down as president of Harvard University, and the dust surrounding her tenure and resignation has largely settled outside of the Harvard community.
It’s in the wake of her presidency, however, that a new question emerges: what comes next? What should Harvard — and collegiate institutions more broadly — take away from the downfall of a president who over-promised and under-delivered?
Harvard knew what they wanted from Gay’s presidency. As the first Black woman to lead the university, they expected a president who could champion the interests of underrepresented groups on campus and serve as Harvard’s proud face to the outside world.
Instead, she will be known for having the shortest presidential stint in Harvard’s history. She will be remembered for nearly 50 instances of plagiarism and inadequate citations across eight of her published works. In conversations about a Dec. 5 congressional hearing, she will be recalled for her failure to address whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard’s student code of conduct.
Harvard knows that a lesson needs to be learned from Gay’s troubled tenure. The problem? They can’t seem to agree on what that lesson is.
In the Harvard Crimson alone, you will find a smorgasbord of opinions: the university must learn to be either less political or more political. Harvard must learn to be either more staunchly pro-Israel or more staunchly pro-Palestine. Some students argue that plagiarism accusations such as those against Gay are overstated. Others claim they are grossly understated. Some argue that Gay’s downfall is her own doing, while others implicate a larger-scale assault on higher education.
Make no mistake: it is admirable and necessary that Harvard students engage in a discourse on the future of their university, and a varied array of editorials reflects that effort. But it also reflects a broader turmoil that the university is experiencing behind closed doors.
Harvard administration doesn’t know what comes next. Should presidents remain neutral in political debates on campus going forward? Should they be encouraged to comment on the discourse? What expectations can we hold for future leaders of the university?
In short: Harvard doesn’t know what to take away from the downfall of Claudine Gay.
This is significant beyond the four walls of Harvard. Questions about the role of leaders in higher education are important for all major universities to answer. UW-Madison has faced its own controversies surrounding free speech on campus, administrative response to campus politics and even plagiarism. We too need to assess the expectations we hold for our university officials.
Until Harvard is able to decisively answer those questions for themselves, though, and until Harvard can decide what lessons need to be learned, we cannot look to them as a guide.
Universities like ours need to determine for themselves what lessons can be learned from Gay’s tenure.
Allow me to propose one lesson: Gay’s conduct opposed the values that Harvard University strives to uphold. She claimed the “demagogues” who pioneered her ouster undermined “the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth.”
But by failing to hold herself to the same standards of academic integrity that she expects of her students, it was Gay who undermined excellence and truth. By failing to protect a marginalized group on campus, it was Gay who undermined independence and openness. For these failures, Gay’s resignation was necessary.
This is a lesson that just about every university can learn from. At minimum, we need to trust that university leaders will abide by the university values that they claim to uphold.
You might think that these feel like empty words. Gay’s resignation proved they aren’t. They are a necessary starting point for a far more difficult conversation — one we can’t assume other universities will have for us.
Lauren Stoneman is an Opinion Editor. She is a junior studying history, philosophy, and political science. Do you agree that universities have something to learn from Gay's resignation? Send all comments to opinion@dailycardinal.com
