Claudine Gay resigned as the President (vice-chancellor) of Harvard on 2 January. Her position became increasingly untenable following her disastrous appearance on December 5 before a Congressional Committee investigating how three leading American universities (Harvard, U Penn and MIT) were dealing with alleged antisemitism on campus since the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October.
Gay was asked: “At Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment — yes or no?” She replied: “It can be, depending on the context.” Her inability to provide a clear and powerful response to the questions she faced led to an outcry from donors and other critics. Gay “has done more damage to the reputation of Harvard University than any individual in our nearly 500-year history”, said the Hedge Fund manager Bill Ackman, who became a leading critic of Claudine Gay. “As a result of President Gay’s failure to enforce Harvard’s own rules,” Ackman said, “Jewish students, faculty and others are fearful for their own safety, as even the physical abuse of students remains unpunished.” Nevertheless, some 600 Harvard academics signed a letter supporting their president.
Gay’s defence of her performance did not impress critics. “I got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures,” she said in an interview. “What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community – threats to our Jewish students – have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged.” This raised the question why she didn’t say any of this at the time. “Substantively,” she went on, “I failed to convey what is my truth [my emphasis].” This takes us to the heart of the problem. College administrators should not speak about “my truth”, “guiding” or otherwise, but the truth, demonstrated by rational argument, supported by evidence.
Harvard Hillel President Jacob Miller and Hillel Campus Rabbi Getzel Davis issued a joint statement criticising her failure to “reassure us that the University is seriously concerned” about antisemitism at Harvard and that her comment “calls into question her ability to protect Jewish students on Harvard’s campus”.
The British historian Niall Ferguson wrote a coruscating attack on Gay and her fellow college presidents for The Free Press on 11 December. “[T]he reason Claudine Gay’s carefully phrased answers on Tuesday infuriated her critics is not that they were technically incorrect, but that they were so clearly at odds with her record—specifically her record as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in the years 2018–2022, when Harvard was sliding to the very bottom of the rankings for free speech at colleges.
“The killing of George Floyd happened when Gay was dean. Six days after Floyd’s death, she published a statement on the subject that suggests she felt personally threatened by events in distant Minneapolis. Floyd’s death, she wrote, illustrated ‘the brutality of racist violence in this country’ and gave her an ‘acute sense of vulnerability’. She was reminded, again, ‘how even our [i.e., black Americans’] most mundane activities, like running. . . can carry inordinate risk. At a moment when all I want to do is gather my teenage son into my arms, I am painfully aware of how little shelter that provides.’ In nothing that Gay said [at the congressional hearing] did she seem aware that Jewish students might have felt the same way after October 7.”
Gay’s supporters have argued that “there’s no good answer” to Rep. Kiley’s question:
“If you were talking to a prospective student’s family, a Jewish student’s family right now,” asked Kiley, “could you look them in the eye and tell them that their son or daughter would be safe and feel safe and welcome on your campus?”
Really? How about this answer: “No one can absolutely guarantee anyone’s safety but I can assure these parents that everyone at Harvard is absolutely committed to student safety, especially at a time of rising antisemitism in our universities, and we do everything in our power to ensure student safety at Harvard. Here are our statistics for Jewish students and what we have done about antisemitism on campus.” Why couldn’t Gay have said something like this?
Then there’s the question of double standards, which neither Gay nor her supporters addressed. At many American college campuses there has been open war against free speech by students and faculty alike (for further examples see my piece, “The treason of the intellectuals – again”, TheArticle, 13 December, reposted on Arutz Sheva).
The final straw came with a rising tide of accusations of plagiarism made against Gay in her own academic work. That seemed to calm down over Christmas and the New Year, but on 2 January The New York Times printed further allegations: “New plagiarism allegations that surfaced on Monday against Claudine Gay threatened to mire Harvard deeper in debate over what constitutes plagiarism and whether the university would hold its president and its students to the same standard.”
Gay finally resigned that day and then on 3 January BBC News entered the fray with an astonishingly misguided report by its North America correspondent, Anthony Zurcher:
This headline was quickly withdrawn. But how was it possible for BBC News to claim that Claudine Gay was “a casualty of campus culture wars”, rather than someone who had been accused of numerous examples of plagiarism and who had failed to engage with an increasingly intimidating culture at Harvard, especially for Jews?
In his article for the BBC News website, Zurcher began, “Claudine Gay’s resignation as president of Harvard University is being celebrated as a high-profile victory by conservatives who have objected to her on ideological grounds since shortly after she took the job in July 2023.” Throughout his article, Zurcher implies that only people on the American Right were concerned about the tide of accusations of plagiarism against Gay, or about her failure to address issues of how Jewish students and faculty were being protected against antisemitism at Harvard.
Zurcher wrote, “The plagiarism allegations that led to Dr Gay’s resignation were surfaced by Christopher Rufo, a right-wing activist [sic] best known for the cultural battle over alleged teaching of Critical Race Theory in US schools.”
Does this mean he feels the allegations of plagiarism are untrue? What about other sources, individuals and newspapers who unearthed examples of plagiarism by Gay? Zurcher went on: “Although allegations of plagiarism in her doctoral thesis were a factor [sic] in her exit from Harvard’s top job.” Zurcher might have written that the growing number of accusations of plagiarism made her position untenable, but instead he calls these merely “a factor”.
Elsewhere, Zurcher writes about Gay’s “right-wing critics”, quotes defenders of Gay on the Left who accused Harvard of caving i “to fascists”, writes of “the larger conservative effort to undermine — and ultimately supplant — liberal-dominated institutions of higher education continues”. He freely quotes right-wing Republicans like DeSantis and Trump, as if the attacks on Gay came only from the American Right. This is not even balanced enough for an op-ed opinion piece.
Zurcher’s disregard for impartiality is a worrying sign of what listeners and viewers can expect from the BBC in the run-up to the November election in America (let alone Israel's war in Gaza, ed.).
David Hermanis a freelance journalist. He has written for the Guardian, the New Statesman, Prospect and Standpoint, among others.
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