Outrage after Harvard president resigns amid "attacks and threats fueled by racial animus"

Harvard University President Claudine Gay's resignation following weeks of conservative outcry and intense scrutiny is an attack on Black leaders and particularly Black women, civil rights activists say.

Gay resigned Tuesday after weeks of outrage and criticism over her responses to antisemitism on campus and accusations of plagiarism. She was the first Black woman to head the Ivy League school and had the shortest tenure of a Harvard president in the institution's history. 

Despite the widespread outcry, Harvard's governing board along with hundreds of alumni and faculty had rallied behind her and advocated for her retention. Her Tuesday resignation letter, and a statement from Harvard's board, described her experience of the backlash as being “subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus,” according to Politico. 

The sustained pressure campaign came amid a broader nationwide conservative effort to thwart campus diversity initiatives meant to bolster support for underrepresented students, and the Supreme Court's 2023 decision to ban race-conscious admissions only added to the political right's push to tank diversity programming. Critics of the outcry against Gay have argued that the conservative alumni, donors and lawmakers fueling the backlash are out to accomplish the same thing.

Janai Nelson, the director-counsel and president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, criticized the scrutiny of the college leader leading up to her resignation, writing on X that the “attacks against Claudine Gay have been unrelenting & the biases unmasked.”

“Her resignation on the heels of Liz Magill’s set dangerous precedent in the academy for political witch hunts,” Nelson wrote on X, referring to the former president of the University of Pennsylvania, who in December stepped down amid outrage over her performance at a House hearing investigating how college leaders were responding to antisemitism on their campuses. “The project isn’t to thwart hate but to foment it thru vicious takedowns. This protects no one.”

Civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton, a supporter of Gay, called her resignation “an assault on the health, strength and future of diversity, equity and inclusion.”

He also directly called out on Tuesday one of Gay's critics, Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager and Harvard alum who had led calls for her to step down and suggested she was only elevated to the position because of her race. Ackman penned an open letter to the university criticizing Gay's failure to condemn the deadly October Hamas attacks on Israel in her initial statement and used his platform on X, formerly Twitter, to further critique the former college leader.

“President Gay’s resignation is about more than a person or a single incident,” Sharpton said in a statement. “This is an attack on every Black woman in this country who’s put a crack in the glass ceiling … Most of all, this was the result of Bill Ackman’s relentless campaign against President Gay, not because of her leadership or credentials but because he felt she was a DEI hire.”

Those sentiments toward DEI are held by other conservatives, including GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who wrote on X Tuesday that “it was a thinly veiled exercise in race & gender when they selected Claudine Gay” to lead Harvard.

“Here’s a radical idea for the future: select leadership based on *merit.* It’s a great approach, actually,” Ramaswamy wrote following Gay's resignation.

Ackman, for his part, pushed back on the criticism lobbed his way, writing on X Tuesday that “President Gay resigned because she lost the confidence of the University at large due to her actions and inactions and other failures of leadership."

"Gay resigned because it was untenable for her to remain President of Harvard due to her failings of leadership,” he added.

Sharpton said that his civil rights organization, the National Action Network, is planning to hold a protest outside of Ackman's office in New York for Thursday.

“If he doesn’t think Black Americans belong in the C-Suite, the Ivy League, or any other hallowed halls, we’ll make ourselves at home outside his office,” the reverend said. 

Last month, Morehouse College President David Thomas lambasted Ackman for comments on X that claimed Harvard's presidential search committee "would not consider a candidate who did not meet the DEI office’s criteria.”

“Mr. Ackman and others are right to call attention to issues of antisemitism at his alma mater where he attended as a Jewish student,” Thomas said in a LinkedIn post. “To turn the question to the legitimacy of President Gay’s selection because she is a black woman is a dog whistle we have heard before: black and female, equal not qualified. We must call it out.”

PEN America expressed similar concerns last month about the risk of "undue" influence in higher education after Magill stepped down.

“We should not hold university leaders to impossible standards, nor reward combative approaches by campus constituencies that overlook the genuine challenges involved,” said Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education at PEN America, in a December statement. “We hope that this development does not serve as an invitation for politicians or donors to try to exert undue control over our higher education institutions.”

Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, who spearheaded the charge against Gay, Magill and MIT president Sally Kornbluth over their testimonies at the House hearing, declared Gay's resignation a victory. 

"TWO DOWN," Stefanik, N.Y., wrote in a post to X. "Harvard knows that this long-overdue forced resignation of the antisemitic plagiarist president is just the beginning of what will be the greatest scandal of any college or university in history,"

During the December congressional hearing, Stefanik questioned the then-three university leaders on whether "calling for the genocide of Jews" violates their schools' rules prohibiting bullying and harassment.

Gay answered that it "depends on the context" and said, "Antisemitic rhetoric, when it crosses into conduct, it amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation."

"That is actionable conduct," Gay continued, "and we do take action."

While Republicans and far-right activists erupted over Gay's testimony, critics of the outrage, including the former executive director of Harvard Hillel, have argued that right-wing forces are weaponizing antisemitism in an effort to further their attacks on higher education and provide cover for Israel's "deeply unpopular policies with regard to Palestine," according to Common Dreams. 

Far-right activist Christopher Rufo and conservative news outlets further fueled the backlash by reporting and amplifying allegations of plagiarism against Gay. 

"On December 12, in a statement backing Gay as president, the Corporation acknowledged findings of improper citation," The Harvard Crimson, the university's student newspaper, reported last week. "The statement also indicated Gay would make corrections to two articles, which she submitted on December 14. One week later, Harvard announced Gay would also submit corrections to her dissertation."

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Gay, whose tenure as Harvard's president lasted six months, wrote that she decided to step down "after consultation with members" of the Harvard Corporation. 

David Austin Walsh, a historian and postdoctoral associate at the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, wrote in response to Gay's resignation that while he has "no particular love for Claudine Gay... this is a major victory for reactionary donors and the far-right's campaign to dismantle American higher education."

Others echoed that sentiment, arguing that Gay's decision to step down would embolden the right and have reverberating effects on U.S. higher education. 

"Claudine Gay didn't do herself any favors," wrote Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch, "but I'll say what I said when Penn's Magill resigned: This will be used by the very worst people to make higher education worse, not better. It will be used to cut funding, end diversity, stifle academic freedom."