Former Harvard University president Claudine Gay claimed in a New York Times op-ed on Wednesday that she was the victim of a “trap” by “demagogues,” and that she had “been called the N-word more times than I care to count.”
Gay resigned after researchers exposed dozens of examples in which she lifted the language of other scholars in her own writings without providing attribution.
Gay had also come under scrutiny for her failed response to antisemitism on campus, including at a contentious congressional hearing where she declined to say that calling for the genocide of Jews would violate Harvard’s code of conduct.
But in her op-ed, Gay wrote that she was a victim of an organized ideological campaign — to do what, she never quite specified.
She wrote:
As I depart, I must offer a few words of warning. The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader. This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda. But such campaigns don’t end there. Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organizations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility. For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal.
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.
Most recently, the attacks have focused on my scholarship. My critics found instances in my academic writings where some material duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution. I believe all scholars deserve full and appropriate credit for their work. When I learned of these errors, I promptly requested corrections from the journals in which the flagged articles were published, consistent with how I have seen similar faculty cases handled at Harvard.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who questioned Gay in Congress, rejected the idea the former Harvard president had been “trapped”:
This was not a “well laid trap” (to properly cite the disgraced @Harvard former president Claudine Gay).
Let me remind everyone of the simple moral question I posed to the former presidents of @Harvard @Penn and (will be former) president of @MIT.
Q: Does calling for the…
— Elise Stefanik (@EliseStefanik) January 3, 2024
Of the three university presidents who testified last month and gave similar answers to Gay, only one still has her job.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the 2021 e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now updated with a new foreword. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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