Claudine Gay

Claudine Gay
30th President of Harvard University
In office July 1, 2023 – January 2, 2024
Preceded by	Lawrence Bacow
Succeeded by	Alan Garber (interim)
Dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences
In office August 15, 2018 – June 30, 2023
Preceded by	Michael D. Smith
Succeeded by	Emma Dench (interim) Hopi Hoekstra
Personal details
Born	August 4, 1970 (53 years old) New York City, U.S.
Spouse(s)	Christopher Afendulis
Relations	Roxane Gay (cousin)
Children	1
Education	Stanford University (BA) Harvard University (PhD)
Scientific career
Fields	Political science
Institutions	Harvard University
Thesis	Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Policies (1997)

Claudine Gay (born August 4, 1970) is an American political scientist and academic administrator who was the 30th president of Harvard University, and the Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies. Gay's research addresses American political behavior, including voter turnout and politics of race and identity.

On assuming office in 2023, she became Harvard's first black president. Prior to that, she served as the Edgerley Family Dean of Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Gay's role as university president came to international media attention following the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, when she was accused of not responding to antisemitism on campus and of not adequately condemning the attacks. In the aftermath of the hearing, accusations that Gay had plagiarised parts of her dissertation and multiple papers resurfaced in various media outlets. On January 2, 2024, Gay resigned. Alan Garber will serve as Harvard's interim president.

Early life and education

Gay grew up the child of Haitian immigrants who came to the United States and met in New York City as students. Her mother studied nursing and her father studied engineering. Gay spent much of her childhood first in New York City, and then in Saudi Arabia, where her father worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, while her mother was a registered nurse. Gay is a cousin of writer Roxane Gay.

Gay attended Phillips Exeter Academy, a private boarding school in Exeter, New Hampshire, from which she graduated in 1988. She then attended Princeton University for one year, before transferring to Stanford University, where she studied economics. She received the Anna Laura Myers Prize for best undergraduate thesis in economics and graduated in 1992. Gay earned her Ph.D. in 1998 from Harvard, where she won the university's Toppan Prize for the best dissertation in political science. As a result of investigations into possible plagiarism by Gay, she made corrections to three citations in that dissertation.

Academic career

After graduating, Gay was an assistant professor, and later tenured associate professor, in Stanford University's Department of Political Science from 2000 to 2006. In the 2003–2004 academic year, Gay was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Gay's research addresses American political behavior, including voter turnout and politics of race and identity. She was recruited by Harvard to be a professor of government in 2006, and was appointed professor of African American studies in 2007.

Administrative positions

In 2015, Gay was named the Dean of Social Studies at the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and the Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies. In 2018, she was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

As Dean of FAS, which oversees graduate and undergraduate studies, Gay outlined four priorities: increasing diversity among faculty, increasing interdisciplinary studies among students, encouraging collaboration among professors, and fostering faculty involvement in the university's community.

In 2019, Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana declined to renew the appointments of Ronald Sullivan and Stephanie Robinson, the faculty deans of Winthrop House and Harvard's first Black faculty deans. This followed months of campus protests after Sullivan joined the legal defense team for Harvey Weinstein, who at the time was on trial for rape, and public allegations of a toxic environment by Winthrop House tutors and staff. The university announced that the decision was based on performance and morale at Winthrop House, but Sullivan accused Khurana and Gay of capitulating to campus protestors.

In 2020, the university faced educational and financial disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic. For fiscal year 2020, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences reported losses of $15.8 million. In 2021, Gay announced that the cost of the FAS's core academic commitments were greater than its revenues and began processes to reduce expenses including a freeze on faculty bonuses and salary increases, and a freeze on faculty searches. In 2021, the FAS reported a surplus of $51 million, an increase from the projected deficit of $112 million.

In addition to her time at Harvard and Stanford, Gay served as a vice president of the Midwest Political Science Association from 2014 to 2017 and was a trustee of Phillips Exeter Academy from 2017 to 2023.

Harvard presidency

In June 2022, Harvard President Lawrence Bacow announced he would resign from the post in one year. A search committee, led by Penny Pritzker, Senior Fellow at the Harvard Corporation, considered 600 nominees and selected Gay to succeed Bacow. On December 15, 2022, Harvard announced that Gay had been selected as the 30th president of Harvard University. She took office on July 1, 2023, becoming the university's first Black president.

2023 congressional hearing

After the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, Gay faced criticism, including from former Harvard President Lawrence Summers, for failing to adequately condemn the attacks.

In a December 2023 Congressional hearing on antisemitism, Gay and two other university presidents were accused by some members of Congress of not doing enough to condemn and combat antisemitism on Harvard's campus. When asked if a hypothetical call for the genocide of Jewish people would qualify as a violation of Harvard's code of conduct, Gay responded "It can be, depending on the context." She later clarified: "Antisemitic rhetoric, when it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation — that is actionable conduct and we do take action."

Gay's remarks were broadly criticized in the media. In response, Gay apologized and said that some people "have confused a right to free expression with the idea that Harvard will condone calls for violence against Jewish students". A letter signed by 70 Congressional Representatives called for all three presidents to resign.

On December 11, more than 700 of Harvard's 2,452 faculty members signed a letter opposing calls for her to be removed as university president, and Harvard's Alumni Association stated it "unanimously and unequivocally" supported Gay's leadership, praising her "for protecting academic freedom and the right of all students to voice their opinions". On December 12, the board of the Harvard Corporation said they "unanimously" supported Gay's leadership, adding: "President Gay has apologized for how she handled her congressional testimony and has committed to redoubling the University's fight against antisemitism."

Plagiarism allegations

Soon after the December 2023 congressional hearing, Gay was accused of plagiarism by conservative activists Christopher Rufo and Aaron Sibarium. As summarized by The New York Times, the allegations concerned "using material from other sources without proper attribution in her dissertation and about half of the 11 journal articles listed on her résumé. The examples range from brief snippets of technical definitions to paragraphs summing up other scholars' research that are only lightly paraphrased, and in some cases lack any direct citation of the other scholars."

Harvard University initially decried such allegations as "demonstrably false" when contacted by the New York Post in October 2023 for comment on a planned story about 27 "possible examples of plagiarism", and threatened to sue the newspaper for libel. However, a subsequent internal review requested by Gay herself found "instances of inadequate citation".

In response, Gay said she stood behind the integrity of her work. The Harvard Corporation reported that the review found "a few instances of inadequate citation" in her work, but "no violation of Harvard's standards for research misconduct." Gay requested corrections to add citations and quotation marks to her dissertation and two of her articles. Harvard University announced on December 20 that it had discovered two additional instances of "duplicative language without appropriate attribution", giving rise to concerns whether the Harvard Corporation's process for investigating the allegations "has been overly lenient with" Gay, according to The New York Times.

In response to the allegations, the United States House Committee on Education and the Workforce stated that it would examine Gay's work; chairwoman Virginia Foxx said the inquiry would see if students and staff are held to the same academic standard.

Gay resigned her position as president on January 2, 2024. She made a statement that "It is with a heavy heart but a deep love for Harvard that I write to share that I will be stepping down as president."

Personal life

Gay is married to Christopher Afendulis, an information systems analyst at Stanford University's Department of Health Research and Policy. They have a son who was born in 2006.

Selected publications

• 1998: "Doubly Bound: The Impact of Gender and Race on the Politics of Black Women", Political Psychology, co-authored with Katherine Tate
• 2001: "The Effect of Black Congressional Representation on Political Participation", American Political Science Review
• 2001: The Effect of Minority Districts and Minority Representation on Political Participation in California, Public Policy Institute of California
• 2002: "Spirals of Trust? The Effect of Descriptive Representation on the Relationship Between Citizens and Their Government", American Journal of Political Science
• 2004: "Putting Race in Context: Identifying the Environmental Determinants of Black Racial Attitudes", American Political Science Review
• 2006: "Seeing Difference: The Effect of Economic Disparity on Black Attitudes Toward Latinos", American Journal of Political Science
• 2007: "Legislating Without Constraints: The Effect of Minority Districting on Legislators' Responsiveness to Constituency Preferences", The Journal of Politics
• 2012: "Moving to Opportunity: The Political Effects of a Housing Mobility Experiment", Urban Affairs Review
• 2013: Outsiders No More? Models of Immigrant Political Incorporation, Oxford University Press, co-editor with Jacqueline Chattopadhyay, Jennifer Hochschild, and Michael Jones-Correa
• 2014: "Knowledge Matters: Policy Cross-pressures and Black Partisanship", Political Behavior

External links

• Biography on the Harvard University website