Was Claudine Gay’s Resignation Caused by Racism?
Last week, Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard University after only six months in the position. In my first post of 2024, I’ll briefly review some leadership lessons from her sad situation.
The beginning of her end as president was her terrible performance at the Congressional hearing on post-October 7th antisemitism on college campuses. As she wrote in a Times piece last week,
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.
—Claudine Gay
Excuse me? A well-laid trap? New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik asked Gay a hypothetical question: "Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules on bullying and harassment?" Gay’s answer: “The rules around bullying and harassment are quite specific and if the context in which that language is used amounts to bullying and harassment, then we take, we take action against it.”
If the question was, “Does calling for the lynching of Black people violate Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment?” I doubt that the answer would have been so mealy-mouthed.
Although the Harvard Corporation stood by Gay initially, in the weeks following her testimony charges of plagiarism dogged her. Christoper Rufo, a right-wing conflict entrepreneur, led the charge on this front, making clear his political strategy to “wield power and reshape institutions in the real world.” Rufo and others aligned against the DEI industry and ideology that has reigned supreme in the academy for the past decade, and which spread like wildfire after 2020, are in an ideological and political battle they intend to win.
Whether or not those forces are racist in intent, if Gay had been more careful and less sloppy in her relatively skimpy academic work (just 11 published articles), then Rufo and others wouldn’t have had the evidence to wield against her. If another Afro-American female academic at Harvard, Professor Danielle Allen, had been in that position, her incontrovertible record as a leading scholar of political philosophy, a best-selling author, and a prominent public intellectual, would have left no room for claims that she rose to the position based on race and ideological allegiance. Even though I don’t doubt that Gay likely received racist emails and phone calls from lowlife trolls during this debacle, her becoming the shortest-lived president in Harvard history was not ultimately, in my estimation, about racism.
Why I Never Applauded Gay’s Ascension
Although I’m a proponent of deracialization, I’m not immune to feeling pride when people of my ethnocultural tribe rise as notable “firsts.” But I didn’t applaud Gay’s rise to the presidency of Harvard. Why?
Roland Fryer, a brilliant Black American economist at Harvard who earned tenure there at the age of 30, was railroaded by … Claudine Gay. I watched a 25-minute documentary, “How Claudine Gay Canceled Harvard’s Best Black Professor” eighteen months ago, around the time I met and heard Fryer give a presentation on his work to accelerate the achievement of students in under-performing urban schools and his research on police violence against Black Americans. The latter results—revealing that police were not more likely to kill racialized black folk but were more likely to treat them harshly—was what I suspect put him in the crosshairs of the liberal progressive establishment at Harvard emphasizing “systemic racism.”
Under the pretense of a sexual harassment charge, they closed Fryer’s Education Innovation Laboratory and suspended him from teaching for two years. Gay reportedly even asked for Fryer’s tenure to be revoked. Fortunately, tenure at Harvard is sacrosanct—which will allow Gay, ironically enough, to continue teaching there at a nearly seven-figure annual salary.
Unfortunately, Fryer’s lab, which focused on helping young and too often impoverished Black American students improve and advance, remains closed. That’s true injustice and evidence of poor leadership. Fortunately, he’s entrepreneurial and has launched Equal Opportunity Ventures to invest in early-stage businesses that increase opportunity in the United States.
Roland Fryer was victimized because his professional and scientific allegiance to truth, to follow the data wherever it led, didn’t align with a narrative of ubiquitous anti-black racism. Claudine Gay was in the wrong position at the wrong time and ended up facing the truth of an old saying in Afro-American vernacular: What goes around, comes around.