Claudine Gay Quotes

Our community still mourns those brutally murdered during the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel on October 7. Words fail in the face of such depravity, the deadliest single day for the Jewish community since the horrors of the Holocaust.

A responsibility to help anchor our democracy—by cultivating norms and values essential to a free society and by ensuring the free flow of knowledge not only among students and faculty but to all citizens to enable them to make informed decisions.

Both of my parents, each on their own, left everything they knew in Haiti to forge new lives in the United States. And because they understood that coming to America was not enough, they eagerly sought college education—to ensure the future they wanted for themselves and for their family.

I love this place. Harvard is where I found my intellectual home. It has nurtured and inspired me since I first set foot in the Yard. I am deeply invested, not only in what Harvard is today, but also in what Harvard’s leadership means for the future.

Why? is a question that comes to us early in life. If you know a young child, you know this well: Why are we here? Why is the moon out during the day? Why can’t I eat ice cream for breakfast? Why is she talking so much? We may be tempted to stop asking why when we accept the default answers around us, until something sparks us to question those answers.

As we welcome a new year and a new semester, I hope we can all look forward to brighter days. Sad as I am to be sending this message, my hopes for Harvard remain undimmed. When my brief presidency is remembered, I hope it will be seen as a moment of reawakening to the importance of striving to find our common humanity — and of not allowing rancor and vituperation to undermine the vital process of education. I trust we will all find ways, in this time of intense challenge and controversy, to recommit ourselves to the excellence, the openness, and the independence that are crucial to what our university stands for — and to our capacity to serve the world.

Antisemitism is a symptom of ignorance, and the cure for ignorance is knowledge. Harvard must model what it means to preserve free expression while combating prejudice and preserving the security of our community. We are undertaking that hard, long-term work with the attention and intensity it requires.

Debate and the inclusion of diverse viewpoints and experiences, while essential for our work, are not always easy to live with. They can be a recipe for discomfort, fired in the heat of social media and partisan rancor. And discomfort can weaken our resolve and make us vulnerable to a rhetoric of control and containment that has no place in the academy. That is when we must summon the courage to be Harvard. To love truth enough to endure the challenge of truth-seeking and truth-telling. To love truth enough to ask Why?

Family, friends, colleagues, students and postdocs, alumni, distinguished guests. I stand before you today humbled by the prospect of leading Harvard, emboldened by the trust you have placed in me, and energized by your own commitment to this singular institution and to the common cause of higher education.

The political polarization doesn’t help, but it is striking that the erosion in public trust is bipartisan. That should be telling us something, that there’s a broad-based questioning of the value of higher education. Yes, there are some elements that are being inflected by partisan politics, but this is pretty widespread.

Throughout this work, I asked questions that had not been asked, used then-cutting-edge quantitative research methods and established a new understanding of representation in American politics. This work was published in the nation’s top political science journals and spawned important research by other scholars.

In response, I have sought to confront hate while preserving free expression. This is difficult work, and I know that I have not always gotten it right. The free exchange of ideas is the foundation upon which Harvard is built, and safety and wellbeing are the prerequisites for engagement in our community. Without both of these things, our teaching and research mission founder.

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.

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.

College campuses in our country must remain places where students can learn, share and grow together, not spaces where proxy battles and political grandstanding take root. Universities must remain independent venues where courage and reason unite to advance truth, no matter what forces set against them.