Days after the resignation of Claudine Gay, the first Black president of Harvard University, students, faculty, alumni, observers, and Gay herself are sounding alarms that her resignation was the outcome of mounting political pressure from conservatives on colleges and universities.
Now, her rocky tenure and stunning downfall have emboldened conservative activists to keep up their fight.
Gay stepped down as president on January 2 amid numerous accusations that she had plagiarized some of her academic writings and that she’d failed to address antisemitism on campus in the wake of Hamas’s October attack on Israel; Gay and Harvard have since acknowledged that Gay made “missteps” and “mistakes” both in a failure to initially cite materials from other authors and better communicate Harvard’s commitment to confronting antisemitism.
Meanwhile, conservatives and billionaire donors are jostling for credit for a departure that they say was warranted and overdue, arguing that Gay lacked the merit to lead Harvard through campus unrest or exemplify academic integrity.
But the fallout at one of the nation’s elite universities is also illuminating the ways in which the political right is increasingly targeting education, with deliberate efforts to “take on” elite schools by stripping them of federal student loan money and undermine diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, and a parallel movement to undo K–12 education with laws that limit the teaching of history or ban books and classroom libraries.
People on both sides of the controversy have portrayed the resignation as something much bigger than just Gay or plagiarism or antisemitism.
“This is the beginning of the end for DEI in America’s institutions,” conservative activist Christopher Rufo, one of Gay’s most vocal detractors on the right, posted on X after Gay’s resignation. “We will expose you. We will outmaneuver you. And we will not stop fighting until we have restored…
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