Politixia
The series is essential listening for anyone seeking to understand Gay’s unraveling — from her own mistakes to the influence of alumni donors and social media — and how the conservative forces that undermined her are emboldened by Donald Trump’s reelection, along with Vice President-elect J.D. Vance’s declaration that “universities are the enemy.”
Marritz had a front row seat to Harvard’s annus horribilis as a Nieman Foundation fellow studying at the university during the crisis. I recently caught up with Marritz because a year ago I, too, was immersed in Gay’s departure, writing about whether Harvard’s governing board had her back and what her resignation meant for diversity, equity, and inclusion everywhere.
Spoiler alert: Marritz ends his podcast series with this sobering observation: “If colleges and universities are going to survive and thrive, they need to look at the storm that blew through Harvard, and start learning lessons … fast.”
For those of you with short memories (OK, it was a long year), here’s what happened to Gay. Three months after being celebrated as Harvard’s first Black president, Gay came under fire for failing to immediately denounce Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Her delayed condemnation drew the ire of some donors who paused their contributions in protest.
Weeks later, at a Congressional hearing on campus antisemitism, New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik asked Gay whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s code of conduct, and she replied with a legalistic response. The exchange went viral with Gay saying, “It depends on the context,” and Stefanik, a Harvard alum, retorting: “It does not depend on the context. The answer is yes, and this is why you should resign.”
Meanwhile, conservative activists and journalists were chasing tips accusing Gay of plagiarism and published pieces as her presidency hung in the balance. The university sought to quell the controversy by having Gay issue corrections to her doctoral thesis and two scholarly articles. While Harvard’s governing board initially stood by Gay, their confidence in her eventually eroded.
Many believe that conservatives targeted Gay because she is Black, and wanted to paint her as an illegitimate leader even though Marritz reports the Harvard board sought out Gay multiple times to apply for the presidency. She certainly had the right resume as an alum, a distinguished scholar, and the former dean of one of Harvard’s most powerful schools.
As for her conduct unbecoming of a scholar, Marritz and I still can’t get ourselves to label Gay a plagiarist. She was never accused of claiming someone else’s ideas as her own, but rather of sloppy citations. I believe she was held to an unfair standard — which unfortunately is par for the course for women of color.
Follow the money, and we learn from Marritz’s reporting that the conditions for the plagiarism scandal were created by prominent Harvard-educated billionaires who think the world has gone too “woke.”
As Marritz points out in his podcast: “These plagiarism allegations didn’t come out of nowhere. They emerged from a complex web of tips, and axes to grind. The whole picture may never be clear, but it’s useful to examine what we do know … because a close reading of one academic’s footnotes and quotation marks became a referendum on diversity, equity and inclusion.”
The rollback of DEI was well underway with the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that struck down affirmative action in college admissions in a case that featured Harvard as a lead defendant. After Gay’s departure, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, its largest division, followed the lead of other universities in banning mandatory diversity statements in academic hiring.
Fewer Black students now matriculate at Harvard, and the university’s leadership ranks have grown whiter since Gay stepped down and returned to the faculty. Harvard’s current president is another white male — the former provost Alan Garber, who is set up to serve through the 2026-27 academic year.
As much grief as I have given Harvard over its handling of Gay, what may be more consequential is how Harvard responds to Trump’s attempts to “reclaim” universities from what he calls “Marxist maniacs and lunatics.”
Because if the world’s richest and most powerful university caves to such demands, what chance does anyone else in academia have?
Some college presidents have publicly vowed to protect their institutions. Among them are Mount Holyoke president Danielle Holley (who appears in “The Harvard Plan” podcast) and Wesleyan University president Michael Roth, who has been publishing essays in Slate and The New York Times about the need to “call out the threats to higher education” and how it’s possible to “be anti-elitists without falling into the trap of being anti-education.”
But they are the outliers. Other campuses around the country have chosen to preemptively shutter cultural centers and remove race and equity from course titles, perhaps to avoid being in the crosshairs of the new administration.
I hope Harvard doesn’t lay low in 2025, but charts a bold new path to uphold academic values and diversity, equity, and inclusion. All President Garber needs to do is to remember his remarks from his December installation ceremony:
“An excessive aversion to risk is a risk itself. We must keep in mind, always, that the mistakes we have made — whether individually and collectively — may have been plentiful, but we have our long history to celebrate because they have never been fatal. Assuming that this trend continues, our history demands that we plan — boldly — for a very long future. We need to think not only in years and decades, but centuries.”
Listen to the conversation between Ilya Marritz and Shirley Leung on the Globe’s “Say More” podcast at globe.com/saymore and wherever you get your podcasts.
Check out the Harvard Plan podcast:
Shirley Leung is a Business columnist and host of the Globe Opinion podcast “Say More with Shirley Leung.” Find the podcast on Apple, Spotify, and globe.com/saymore. Follow her on Threads @shirley02186
Shirley Leung is a Business columnist. She can be reached at shirley.leung@globe.com.
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