Putting the Racist Crusade against Harvard’s Dr. Claudine Gay in Context

This has been a terrible week in the history of Harvard University and the nation. After enduring a racist crusade by rightwing activists, donors, and “academics,” Dr. Claudine Gay, the first Black woman to lead Harvard in its 387-year history, resigned in the face of charges that she did not do enough to combat antisemitism on campus and that she committed plagiarism in some of her academic writings. As I will show in the passages below, both of these charges are absolute nonsense. If the world were just, Dr. Gay would never have been subjected to the repugnant racialized attacks that we have witnessed play out over the past month and she would still have her corner office in Massachusetts Hall. Like so many women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ executives that I encounter in my consulting work with 2040 Strategy Group, Dr. Gay was blamed for not fixing problems that were deeply-rooted in the organization she was leading long before her first day on the job. Moreover, as she struggled to manage the crisis that engulfed her, the broader institution did not provide her with the right resources or give her the leeway to act boldly in defense of herself. In short, Dr. Gay was left all alone to fight off the most vicious attacks against her credentials and personhood.

As a graduate of the same PhD program that Dr. Gay competed at Harvard — she was the best student in the cohort ahead of me — and someone who works in the exact same field of study (Black politics), I am writing to provide important context about her rise and tragic persecution in academia. My goals are to humanize Dr. Gay, provide insights into the bogus claims that she did not do enough to fight antisemitism and plagiarized her work, and point to three important lessons that all leaders from marginalized backgrounds need to take away from her story.

By now, we are all privy to the controversy that has engulfed the campuses of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania since the December 5, 2023 Congressional hearing where Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) posed the hypothetical question to Presidents Liz Magill, Claudine Gay, and Kornbluth: “Can a student say: ‘kill the Jews’ on campus and have that speech be protected?” The three presidents gave an answer that just about every president at a Research-1 university, backed up by the advice of their general counsels, likely would have given at that time: “It depends on the context.” The best way to think about what we witnessed in that moment and the past month is that it is the latest example of how our cultural norms can sometimes be rewritten in real-time. The last time this happened was during the Black Lives Matter movement. No one expected university presidents to issue statements of care and concern for Black students when police officers killed 165 unarmed Black Americans between July 17, 2014, when Eric Garner’s death launched the Black Lives Matter movement, and May 24, 2020. When Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd on May 25, 2020, our students and the broader culture demanded more from campus leaders, and they responded accordingly. Presidents Magill, Gay, and Kornbluth did not know that they would be called upon justify the popular absolutist norms around free speech that exist on their campuses. Unlike their counterparts who had weeks if not months to navigate the new expectations of the Black Lives Matter movement, Presidents Magill, Gay, and Kornbluth had less than an instant before Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), an election-denying supporter of Donald Trump — turned the moment to her baseless hypothetical and immediate call for their resignations.

There is now a debate at Harvard, MIT, and other research universities about whether the free speech absolutism that has prevailed since the middle of the twentieth century should give way to speech codes negotiated by interactions with donors, governments, and the parents of favored groups of students. Some critical questions are: Should students be allowed to say phrases like “Globalize the intifada” or “Free Palestine from the River to the Sea?” Should they be able to step over the prone bodies of students participating in a “die-in” in support of Palestine to film them for doxing? These debates are typical, and as we saw in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, it can take considerable time to produce consensus on what the new norms should be.

Unfortunately, the Harvard community’s ability to begin the crucial work of puzzling through this new cultural moment was highjacked by repugnant racist attacks on Dr. Claudine Gay’s academic credentials. These attacks began with the taunts of Bill Ackman, the self-appointed mouthpiece of the reckless and insular group of donors, that Dr. Gay is a “DEI hire.” These taunts were amplified by both online trolls responding to Ackman’s feed and by Carol Swain and John McWhorter, two members of the cadre of professional Black “conservatives” in academia who have garnered fame and enriched themselves by claiming that every measure of Black progress in America (except their own careers) is unearned and undeserved. Setting aside the plagiarism hoax engineered by Swain and the rightwing activist Christopher Ruffo, which Harvard has already answered, the smear of Dr. Gay as a “DEI hire” rests on the claim that her research output in the field of political science, which John McWhorter calls “meager,” proves that she only got the top job at Harvard because of her race.

This argument is complete nonsense. Dr. Gay has published 11 peer-reviewed papers in the leading journals in the political science discipline. As the table below shows, this total at the time of her appointment as president of Harvard ranks her fourth among the seven presidents that have led the university since 1953. Indeed, Dr. Gay’s total number of publications is just one less than the 12 publications that Nathan Marsh Pusey (1953–1971), Derek Bok (1971–1991), and Neil Rudenstine (1991–2001) had combined at the time of their appointments to the Harvard presidency. The table also shows that Dr. Gay ranks second (albeit by some distance) to Dr. Lawrence H. Summers regarding the number of citations to her research upon entering office as president of Harvard.

Numerous media articles have quoted political scientists and scholars in related social science fields, suggesting Dr. Gay’s productivity did not merit tenure at a top political science department in the early 2000s. Interestingly, most of these critics of Dr. Gay did not have more publications than she did when they attained tenure at places like Dartmouth and Stanford. It is also important to note that unlike all of her critics, the majority of Dr. Gay’s publications (9 out of 11) are single authored. The highest level of achievement in American political science is publication in the so-called “Big Three” journals: the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics. Most scholars in our field are fortunate to land one or two single-authored papers in one of these journals throughout their careers.

What made Dr. Gay a standout scholar in the discipline and garnered her early tenure at Stanford and Harvard is that she published single-authored pieces in all of the “Big Three” journals. Not one of her vocal critics has even come close to matching this record. If the standard for tenure at Harvard is that a scholar is among the best in the world in their chosen field, there is no doubt that Claudine Gay’s article record elevated her to the head of our field in the early 2000s. For example, 6 of the last 12 American Political Science Association presidents have worked in the same subfield (American politics) Dr. Gay works in. These scholars are an extraordinary group that includes John Aldrich (Duke), Rodney Hero (ASU), Jennifer Hochschild (Harvard), Rogers Smith (UPENN), Paula McClain (Duke), and Janet Box-Steffensmeier (Ohio State). Collectively, these scholars, whom the discipline elected to honor their pioneering and enduring contributions to the field of political science, have hundreds of publications and tens of thousands of citations, yet not one of them achieved Gay’s feat of publishing single-authored works in all the “Big Three” journals.

I am going to let you in on a little open secret: the social science fields in American universities were profoundly racist and sexist cultures in the mid-to-late twentieth century when Claudine Gay and I began our sojourns in political science. At the time, political scientists whose work focused on communities of color were essentially locked out of publication in the “Big Three” journals. We would often get back reviews saying things like this work is interesting, but “can you generalize your findings to white people?” These explicit statements that Blacks, Latinos, and Asians were not worthy of studying unless they somehow illuminated the “universal” experiences of White folks were frequently paired with suggestions that our papers lacked methodological rigor. This trend began to change in the 1990s when scholars like Michael Dawson (University of Chicago), Cathy Cohen (University of Chicago), Rodney Hero (ASU), and Katherine Tate (Brown) began to storm the gates of these journals. Dr. Gay joined this vanguard as a graduate student, and she is significant to our field because she broke through the gates by herself and with greater frequency than any other scholar in our field.

I fully believe that many in the tiny group of political scientists that have publicly questioned the integrity and validity of her work have always resented her for how she stormed the gates and rose so quickly in the discipline. Take, for example, Dr. Carol Swain, one of the principal architects of the plagiarism charges against Dr. Gay. Dr. Swain asserts that Dr. Gay borrowed heavily from her work when describing basic concepts of representation. The problem for Dr. Swain is that the ideas at issue did not originate with her work. On the contrary, they are fundamental concepts that were developed by the political theorist Hanna Pitkin in the 1960s. All Dr. Gay did in her work was describe these concepts. If that description resembles what Dr. Swain wrote, it is only because they both explained Pitkin’s concepts. So, why would Dr. Swain claim that Dr. Gay has plagiarized her and that she is an unqualified “DEI hire.” I speculate that perhaps Dr. Swain, who has never published an article in a political science journal herself, and whose book has not aged very well in the wake of the kinds of rigorous quantitative analyses that Dr. Gay helped usher into the field in the early 2000s simply resents Dr. Gay’s amazingly successful career in the field. To put a finer point on it, the political science journals that Dr. Swain has never been willing or able to publish in are now filled with sophisticated empirical papers that largely contradict the findings of her book, and that tradition began with Dr. Gay’s research. In the incredibly petty world of academia, this might be reason enough for Dr. Swain to want to see Dr. Gay fall from the Harvard presidency.

I suspect that the scholars who are now claiming that they always suspected her “logical inconsistencies” in her work, who were nothing but her peers trying to get tenure at the time, are motivated by a similar desire to take her down through innuendo. The reality is that, in the early 2000s, political science did not have robust protocols around sharing one’s data with anyone — let alone critics who would approach you at a conference and say, “I don’t believe your work.” The current codes of ethics that require us all to share public datasets when submitting journal articles did not crystalize until several years later. Indeed, a 2013 analysis of political science journals by Alan Dafoe, who was then an assistant professor of political science at Yale, found that only 18 of 120 political science journals had publicly posted requirements for data sharing. Dafoe also showed that the American Political Science Review, which is the journal at issues in Dr. Gay’s case, did not really begin to enforce a replication policy until more than a decade after the apocryphal conversation between Drs. Herron, Shotts, and Gay in the early 200s. I can say with 100 percent certainty that had Dr. Herron or any scholar approached me for my data, saying that they wanted to examine the “logical inconsistencies” in my regression analyses, as Dr. Herron reportedly did to Dr. Gay, I would have politely told him to kick rocks. So, why are we supposed to believe, 20 years after the conversation, that Herron and Shotts left that conversation so outraged and concerned about Dr. Gay violating norms that simply did not exist in the field at that time?

Moreover, if they genuinely believed that Dr. Gay’s findings were wrong, why didn’t they do what we are trained to do in political science: collect their own data on the subject and prove her wrong with their own analyses? After all, this type of generative work is the business that we are supposed to do. The fact that this did not happen suggests to me that they were more interested in questioning the validity of Dr. Gay’s swift ascent to tenure at Stanford than in science.

I say all this to point to the fact that most of the country did not understand the full impact of the Harvard Corporation’s historic decision to appoint Dr. Gay as the first Black president in the institution’s 387 years. Dr. Gay is an eminent scholar who was more than worthy of the job, but her embodiment as a Black woman made her vulnerable to the kinds of pernicious attacks grounded in racism that ultimately brought her down. As I watched these attacks unfold, I must say how disappointing it is that neither of Harvard’s governing boards publicly shared responsibility for her congressional testimony. It is easy to sit back now and clutch our pearls about what a “bad performance” the three presidents gave in that hearing, but, as I alluded to earlier, I can’t imagine any previous Harvard president — coached up by lawyers and consultants hired by the Harvard Corporation — giving different answers on that day. After all, everyone on those boards should know that Harvard has always maintained an absolutist culture that has tended to protect even hate speech.

Black scholars like Dr. Gay and I, who were trained at Harvard in the early 1990s, learned very early on that hate speech against us, even when it “became conduct,” was typically protected by Harvard. The fact of the matter is that when Dr. Gay arrived at Harvard in 1992 (and I arrived in 1993), the campus was engulfed in a multi-year debate over whether it was permissible to fly the Confederate battle flag on campus. The debate began when a student from Virginia decided to fly the flag by her dorm room near the main entryway of Kirkland House in 1991. Black students on campus were deeply alarmed by the appearance of this symbol on campus because of both its historical connotation and the fact that a spate of modern-day lynchings — Michael Griffith, Yusef Hawkins, and Rodney King — had recently rocked the nation. Black students politely asked the student to remove the flag, and she refused because she did not want her speech rights to celebrate pride in her heritage suppressed. Black students then appealed to the administration and directly communicated how the flag made them feel anguished and unsafe. Although President Bok condemned the flag as a symbol of hate, the administration ultimately defended the white student’s speech rights under the absolutist framework of free speech because there was no universal agreement over what the flag meant. The message to Black students from the administration was clear: accommodating symbols and speech that made some people feel harmful and even unsafe up to the point of legally actionable harm was James Baldwin’s proverbial “price of the ticket” for being in the community of scholars that was Harvard.

This message was consistently reinforced to Black graduate students like Dr. Gay and me by how the university ignored the blatantly racist behavior of some of the professors in the Government Department in the 1990s. For an entire year, I sat in Harvey Mansfield’s core course on political theory and listened to him tell lecture halls filled with undergraduates that “the university’s decision to admit Black students under affirmative action policies had made grade inflation a problem.” Professor Mansfield would then say that to correct this problem, he would present everyone in class with two grades: an inflated one to protect the affirmative action system and a “real grade based on merit.” This same professor had a genuinely bizarre penchant for patting or rubbing his face and telling us that we should be sure to protect “our beautiful Black skins” that would help us “get jobs in the absence of virtue.” I thought Professor Mansfield’s commentary in his classes and his direct comments to me and other Black students were noxious and damaging, but even after just a couple of years at Harvard, I knew that they had to be tolerated under the absolutist speech norms that governed academic freedom at Harvard. It is absolutely shocking to me that members of Harvard’s governing boards, who must know about these widely publicized events from our past, would sit back and allow Dr. Gay, someone whose scholarly career, like mine, was formed in the crucible of these incidents on campus, to take the fall by herself for a culture that has always been there, and in plain sight. Let’s also be clear-eyed about the fact that many of the same donors and members of Congress who called for Dr. Gay’s head in the current moment celebrated the racist elements of Harvard’s culture while they were students themselves. So, it is the highest level of hypocrisy for anyone in the Harvard community to sit back and wring their hands about what a “bad job” Dr. Gay did with donors and on Capitol Hill when no one else was courageous enough to speak the truth to the donor class about Harvard’s culture. It is also true that there are real legal risks of changing Harvard into the sort of Disney World of ideas — where nothing they nor their kids will ever disagree with will be said on campus — that the donors desire. Harvard’s faculty, governing boards, students, and alumni should have been engaged in real time conversations about what comes next instead of making Dr. Gay take the fall by herself.

In the aftermath of Dr. Gay’s resignation, Bill Ackman has taken a victory lap acknowledging that his trolling campaign against her was motivated by a desire to end Harvard’s focus on DEI. Harvard’s governing boards need to step up and clearly articulate that their commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and antiracism at Harvard will continue. It is disheartening that the only voices that we have heard on this issue have been from old-guard (even emeritus) faculty members who have supplied the donor rebels with their talking point that Harvard’s students are protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza because they have been exposed to DEI training programs. Beyond the attack on Dr. Gay’s credentials, this is perhaps the most intellectually dishonest part of the debate around fighting antisemitism at Harvard. There is a palpable racial resentment in the online words of some of the rebellious donors about how Harvard did so much for Black students during the Black Lives Matter protests over George Floyd’s death in 2020, but Dr. Gay did not show the same care and attention to Jewish students after October 7. The upshot of this talking point is that the DEI programs must end because they do not protect everyone equally. Well, that narrative is demonstrably false. While Dr. Gay issued her first statement offering comfort to all affected by Hamas’ horrific terrorist attack on Israel two days after the event, Dr. Bacow, who was president of Harvard in 2020, did not issue a statement about George Floyd until five days after the nation watched Derek Chauvin extinguish his life on national television. Moreover, Dr. Bacow did not condemn police brutality nor call for the abolition of police, as some student groups had called on him to do, in his statement. It is also noteworthy that the administration defended the rights of Harvard students to say and post “All Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” on campus throughout the entire period.

I say all of this not to generate an “Oppression Olympics,” a term coined by the scholar Ange-Marie Hancock (OSU) to point out when one marginalized group states a grievance that another marginalized group has been treated so much better than they have by an institutional process, in this debate. Instead, I simply wish to point out that the “what about Black Lives Matter” claims are false, grounded in racial resentment, and should have no impact on the debate going forward. I call on Harvard’s governing boards to clearly state this principle to disabuse the donors of the preposterous idea that shifting Harvard’s focus away from DEI is the way to get better protections against antisemitism on campus. The boards need to articulate to the entire community that despite what the lunatic fringe on X or in congressional hearing rooms believes, Harvard cannot ban equity programs without violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The donors need to be told in no uncertain terms that a ban on these programs would weaken their own standing to use the courts to protect their kids and grandkids on campus. The boards should also communicate to the donors that they will ensure that any new speech codes will not create “special favorites of the law” but will encompass all forms of hate speech and intolerance. As someone who has long advocated for more restrictions on hate speech on campus, this moment might provide the perfect opportunity for what another Harvardian, Derrick Bell, called “interest-convergence,” whereby enacting new restrictions on phrases like “From the River to the Sea” and calling Keffiyeh’s “terrorist scarfs” will finally allow us to ban other forms or hate speech and fighting words. Perhaps we will finally be able to take action against the Confederate Flag on campus and to establish blanket bans on groups at the university from hosting racist, homophobic, and antisemitic speakers like Milo Yiannopoulus, Donald Trump, and Senator Tom Cotton. The reason that this won’t happen is simple: most of the backlash against Dr. Gay was motivated by racism.

It is also genuinely shocking to me that we have heard more wisdom from the student editors of the Harvard Crimson on the “plagiarism” allegations against Dr. Gay than we have from Harvard’s governing boards. Why on earth have they allowed this story to metastasize by not releasing the details of the internal investigation and calling on outside scholars from his discipline to defend her work? To any scholar with half a brain doing quantitative methods, the similarity between the description in Dr. Gay’s and Dr. Voss’s papers stems from the fact that they are presenting a technical description of the interactions between variables. There are only so many plain-meaning words in the English language to describe such relationships. If what Dr. Gay did in that paper is plagiarism, then just about every political scientist who uses quantitative research methods would be found guilty of this infraction if you took the time to run our papers from 30 years ago through a fancy, new AI-powered plagiarism checkers. As one of my colleagues said to me with tongue in cheek over a water cooler conversation before the holidays: “I guess we’re all plagiarists now.”

The same is true of the errors that Dr. Gay made with quotation marks in some of her papers. The young journalists at the Harvard Crimson have said that the “sloppiness” that Dr. Gay demonstrated by forgetting quotation marks or other unintentional misattributions in some of her work is “unbefitting a Harvard president.” I won’t quarrel with the young editorialists’ judgments. I will just say that in the past, before all the assistive technology that they have benefited from throughout their lives as digital natives, human beings occasionally made errors in their writing and proofreading of documents. When the controversy over Dr. Gay emerged, I asked one of my research assistants to begin running Dr. Gay’s papers and some of the former Harvard presidents’ papers through several commercially available plagiarism checkers. I wanted to see first-hand what this technology identified as “plagiarism.” The first paper that we tested was a paper that Dr. Summers, Harvard’s most-published president, published in 1982: “The Non-Adjustment of Nominal Interest Rates: A Study of the Fisher Effect,” NBER Working Paper, №836. When we ran this paper through the Grammarly plagiarism checker, the AI technology lit up like a Christmas tree, suggesting that Dr. Summers had plagiarized Irving Fisher’s book The Theory of Interest (New York: MacMillan, 1930). When my assistant and I dug deeper into what the software was picking up, we found that Professor Summers had reproduced two large block quotes from Fisher’s book at the bottom of page 1 and the top of page 2 of his paper. While correctly attributes the first block quote on page 1 of the paper, he forgets to attribute the second block quote at the top of page 2, so the AI program says that he has plagiarized Dr. Fisher. Now, anyone with common sense should be able to look at Dr. Summers’ papers and see that he made a human error — or what the young journalists at the Crimson would call sloppy — but did not commit plagiarism. I assert that it should have been just as easy for the Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers to use their common sense, aided by the testimony of so many experts from political science saying that her mistakes did not amount to plagiarism, to push back on the nonsense claims about Dr. Gay’s work.

As I stated at the outset, my goal for writing this piece was to provide important context for understanding the racialized attacks against Dr. Gay and to humanize her. From my perspective, Dr. Gay was not only unfairly targeted by racist taunts that she was a “DEI hire” and unfounded accusations of plagiarism. Sadly, the deeper story shows that the broader Harvard community knew full well that her congressional testimony about hate speech on campus was completely in line with the university’s existing rules and the cultural norms, yet they let her take the blame all by herself. They also did not do anything to protect her from claims that she was unqualified and a plagiarist. There are three distinct lessons here for Black women and other leaders from marginalized communities in America who claw their ways to top executive positions. First, no matter how much you love your organization and how happy you are to be at the helm, do not own all of the problems that existed before you arrived by yourself. Second, know your credentials and how your excellence stacks up against your predecessors. When the inevitable charges from racists that you are not qualified begin to fly, make sure that you can push back by showing how your credentials are just as good if not better than previous occupants of your job. Finally, do not believe, as Dr. Gay must have thought, that accepting minor corrections to your job record — as she did by inserting those questions marks in her thesis — will mollify the racists who are coming after you. Instead, provide rousing, even snarling, defenses of your record just like we see nominees to the Supreme Court and candidates for political office do when the waters get choppy on their cruises to power.