Not four hundred yards from where I stand, some four centuries ago, four enslaved people—Titus, Venus, Bilhah, and Juba—lived and worked in Wadsworth… - Claudine Gay
" "Not four hundred yards from where I stand, some four centuries ago, four enslaved people—Titus, Venus, Bilhah, and Juba—lived and worked in Wadsworth House as the personal property of the president of Harvard University. My story is not their story. I am a daughter of Haitian immigrants to this country. But our stories—and the stories of the many trailblazers between us—are linked by this institution’s long history of exclusion and the long journey of resistance and resilience to overcome it.
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About Claudine Gay
Claudine Gay (born August 4, 1970) is an American political scientist and academic administrator who is the Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University. From July 1, 2023, until January 2, 2024, Gay was the 30th president of Harvard University. She became the first Black president of Harvard. In December 2023, Gay and two other university presidents faced pressure from the public and from a Congressional committee to resign, over responses to alleged antisemitism on their campuses. Gay also faced myriad accusations of plagiarism and as a result, she resigned from the presidency of Harvard in January 2024.
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Additional quotes by Claudine Gay
On Tuesday, I made the wrenching but necessary decision to resign as Harvard’s president. For weeks, both I and the institution to which I’ve devoted my professional life have been under attack. My character and intelligence have been impugned. My commitment to fighting antisemitism has been questioned. My inbox has been flooded with invective, including death threats. I’ve been called the N-word more times than I care to count.
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.
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.
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