Proxy war, campus politics led to Harvard president's resignation

Nicholas Confessore

The resignation of Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay (pictured), on Tuesday followed a lengthening catalog of plagiarism allegations that appeared to steadily sap her support among the university’s faculty, students and alumni. But for many of Gay’s critics, her departure was also a proxy victory in the escalating ideological battle over American higher education.

Taking down Gay was a “a huge scalp” in the “fight for civilizational sanity,” Josh Hammer, a conservative talk show host and writer, wrote on the social media platform X. is the beginning of the end for DEI in America’s institutions,” said the conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who had helped publicize the plagiarism allegations.
 

Until last month, conservative-inspired efforts to remake higher education had unfolded primarily at public universities in right-leaning states such as Florida and Texas, where GOP lawmakers and state officials could exercise their legislative and executive powers to ban diversity offices, set up right-leaning academic centers and demand changes to curriculum.

But Gay’s resignation on Tuesday secured their movement a signal victory at the country’s most storied private university, which had for weeks resisted calls for a change in leadership.

“I think there are major problems with higher education, and Harvard represents a lot of those problems,” said John D. Sailer, a senior fellow at the National Association of Scholars, a conservative education nonprofit. 
 

Gay’s defenders seemed to agree, warning that her resignation would encourage conservative interference in universities and imperil academic freedom. “This is a terrible moment,” said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of history, race and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.Barely a month had passed since  Gay had appeared, along with the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania, at a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism, where their lawyerly defense of a student’s right to engage in anti-Jewish speech provoked national outrage. Some Jewish students, faculty and donors also felt Dr. Gay had been too timid in her response to the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas, as well as to complaints over antisemitism on campus.

Two of the three presidents who spoke at the hearing are now out of office. 

On Tuesday, Gay’s antagonists jockeyed for credit, sometimes hailing the effectiveness of their own political theater. Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, the Harvard-educated Republican, noted that her interrogation of  Gay at last month’s hearing had “made history as the most viewed congressional testimony in the history of the US Congress.” Republican lawmakers, she promised, would “continue to move forward to expose the rot in our most ‘prestigious’ higher education institutions.”

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