Ex-Harvard President Claudine Gay Acknowledges Mistakes, Calls Critics ‘Demagogues’ in NYT Op-Ed

A day after her resignation as Harvard president, Claudine Gay offered her clearest admission of wrongdoing to date, writing in an opinion article in the New York Times that she should have more forcefully denounced Hamas and clearly condemned calls for genocide.

“Yes, I made mistakes,” Gay wrote in the article, her first public comment since stepping down as the shortest-serving president in Harvard history.

“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,” she added.

In the article, titled “What Just Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me,” Gay sought to portray her resignation as putting the University’s interests ahead of her own. But she also said that she was the target of vicious racism and death threats as Harvard’s first Black president.

“I've been called the N-word more times than I care to count,” she wrote.

Gay also addressed her widely condemned testimony before the House Education and the Workforce Committee. At the committee hearing, Rep. Elise M. Stefanik ’06 (R-N.Y.) asked whether calling for the genocide of Jewish people would violate Harvard’s code of conduct. Gay responded that it would be context dependent.

In an interview with The Crimson two days after the hearing, Gay apologized for her testimony, but her op-ed on Wednesday was by far her most candid reflection on the hearing, calling Stefanik’s line of questioning a “well laid trap.”

Gay acknowledged that she “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.”

Gay faced intense pressure to resign following her response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and her remarks before Congress. Calls for her resignation, amplified by Republican politicians and conservative activists, only grew louder as Gay faced allegations of plagiarism in her academic work.

Gay, who called the resignation “wrenching but necessary,” said she made the decision in order to prevent “demagogues” from exploiting the backlash against her to attack Harvard’s institutional values. Her critics, she said, used racist tropes to question her merit and push for her removal.

“Those who had relentlessly campaigned to oust me since the fall often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not reasoned argument,” she wrote. “They recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament.”

In her op-ed, Gay also conceded that she had made some errors in her academic citations by failing to properly attribute some of her sources.

“My critics found instances in my academic writings where some material duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution,” she wrote.

She has recently requested corrections to her dissertation and two articles, a move she said was in line with how other similar cases involving faculty were resolved at Harvard.

But she pushed back against the “obsessive scrutiny” of her work, writing that she has never “claimed credit for the research of others.”

“Moreover, the citation errors should not obscure a fundamental truth: I proudly stand by my work and its impact on the field,” she added.

Gay framed the backlash that led to her removal as bigger than Harvard, calling it just one example of a wider attack on higher education and public institutions.

“This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society,” she wrote.

Gay’s resignation Tuesday ended her six month tenure, the shortest in University history. She was the first woman of color and the second woman to hold Harvard’s top post.

—Staff writer Emma H. Haidar can be reached at emma.haidar@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @HaidarEmma.

—Staff writer Cam E. Kettles can be reached at cam.kettles@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @cam_kettles or on Threads @camkettles.