Claudine Gay

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Claudine Gay (born August 4, 1970) is an American political scientist who is the 30th president of Harvard University. Assuming office in 2023, she became the university's first Black president 368 years after its founding.

Prior to becoming the university's president, she served as the Edgerley Family Dean of Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies. Gay's research addresses American political behavior, including voter turnout and politics of race and identity.

Gay's role as Harvard's president came under international media attention following the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, when Gay faced accusations of failing to adequately condemn the attacks. In a subsequent congressional hearing in December 2023 on antisemitism, Gay's response drew criticism for responses that were perceived as evasive.

Gay grew up the child of Haitian immigrants who came to the United States over fifty years ago and met in New York City as students. Her mother studied nursing and her father studied engineering. Gay spent much of her childhood first in New York City, and then in Saudi Arabia, where her father worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, while her mother was a registered nurse. Gay is a cousin of writer Roxane Gay.

Gay attended Phillips Exeter Academy, a private boarding school in Exeter, New Hampshire, and then attended Stanford University, where she studied economics. She received the Anna Laura Myers Prize for best undergraduate thesis in economics and graduated in 1992. Gay earned her Ph.D. in 1998 from Harvard University, where she won the university's Toppan Prize for the best dissertation in political science.

Early academic career (2000 - 2014)

After graduating, Gay was an assistant professor, and later tenured associate professor, in Stanford University's Department of Political Science from 2000 to 2006. In the 2003-2004 academic year, Gay was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Gay was recruited by Harvard to be a professor of government in 2006 and appointed professor of African American studies in 2007.

Senior academic positions (2015 - 2022)

In 2015, Gay was named the Dean of Social Studies at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and the Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies. In 2018, she was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

As Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which oversees graduate and undergraduate studies, Gay outlined four priorities: increasing diversity among faculty, increasing interdisciplinary studies among students, encouraging collaboration among professors, and fostering faculty involvement in the university's community.

In 2019, Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana declined to renew the Faculty Deans of Winthrop House, Ronald Sullivan and his wife Stephanie Robinson, the university's first Black faculty deans. This followed months of campus protests after Sullivan joined the legal defense team for Harvey Weinstein, who at the time was on trial for rape, and public allegations by House tutors and staff of a toxic environment at the House. The university announced that the decision was due to performance and morale conditions in Winthrop House, but Sullivan accused Khurana and Gay of hiding the actual reasoning for his non-renewal.

In 2020, the university faced educational and financial disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic. For fiscal year 2020, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences reported losses of $15.8 million. In 2021, Gay announced that the cost of the FAS's core academic commitments were greater than its revenues and began processes to reduce expenses including a freeze on faculty bonuses and salary increases, and a freeze on faculty searches. In 2021, the FAS reported a surplus of $51 million, a great increase from the projected deficit of $112 million.

In June 2022, Harvard President Lawrence Bacow announced he would resign from the post in one year. A search committee, led by Penny Pritzker, Senior Fellow at the Harvard Corporation, considered 600 nominees and selected Gay to succeed Bacow. On December 15, 2022, Harvard University announced that Gay had been selected as the 30th president of Harvard University.

In addition to her time at Harvard and Stanford, Gay served as a vice president of the Midwest Political Science Association from 2014 to 2017 and has been a trustee of Phillips Exeter Academy since 2017.

President of Harvard University (2023 - present)

Gay became Harvard University's first Black president on July 1, 2023. She is also the Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies.

Following the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, Gay faced criticism, including from former Harvard President Lawrence Summers, for failing to adequately condemn the attacks. In a December 2023 congressional hearing, Gay was criticized by some members of Congress who accused her of not doing enough to condemn and combat antisemitism on Harvard's campus and was questioned by U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) about her failure to classify calls for "genocide of Jews" as harassment. At the Congressional House Education and the Workforce Committee hearing on antisemitism, Rep. Stefanik asked, “Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?”, and Gay answered, “It can be, depending on the context.”

Responding to criticism after the December 2023 congressional hearing, Gay apologized and released a statement saying that some people “have confused a right to free expression with the idea that Harvard will condone calls for violence against Jewish students.” Following the congressional hearing, the House Education and the Workforce Committee launched an investigation into the learning environments and disciplinary policies at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), over alleged antisemitism on their campuses.

One week after the hearing, conservative activist Christopher Rufo accused Gay of plagiarizing sections of her Ph.D. dissertation. Rufo claimed that Gay had used "verbatim language, with a few trivial synonym substitutions, without providing quotation marks" from multiple sources. In one example, Gay reused a sentence from a source she had cited nearly verbatim, substituting the word "African-Americans" for the word "blacks." According to Rufo, Gay's actions violated Harvard's anti-plagiarism policy, which informs readers: "[Y]ou must completely restate the ideas in the passage in your own words. If your own language is too close to the original, then you are plagiarizing, even if you do provide a citation."

Responding to Rufo's allegations, Gay said: "I stand by the integrity of my scholarship. Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure my scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards." Political scientist Gary King, one of Gay's dissertation advisers, called Rufo's claims "false and absurd."

Scholia has an author profile for Claudine Gay.

• 1998: "Doubly Bound: The Impact of Gender and Race on the Politics of Black Women", Political Psychology, co-authored with Katherine Tate
• 2001: "The Effect of Black Congressional Representation on Political Participation", American Political Science Review
• 2001: The Effect of Minority Districts and Minority Representation on Political Participation in California, Public Policy Institute of California
• 2002: "Spirals of Trust? The Effect of Descriptive Representation on the Relationship Between Citizens and Their Government", American Journal of Political Science
• 2004: "Putting Race in Context: Identifying the Environmental Determinants of Black Racial Attitudes", American Political Science Review
• 2006: "Seeing Difference: The Effect of Economic Disparity on Black Attitudes Toward Latinos", American Journal of Political Science
• 2007: "Legislating Without Constraints: The Effect of Minority Districting on Legislators' Responsiveness to Constituency Preferences", The Journal of Politics
• 2012: "Moving to Opportunity: The Political Effects of a Housing Mobility Experiment", Urban Affairs Review
• 2013: Outsiders No More? Models of Immigrant Political Incorporation, Oxford University Press, co-editor with Jacqueline Chattopadhyay, Jennifer Hochschild, and Michael Jones-Correa
• 2014: "Knowledge Matters: Policy Cross-pressures and Black Partisanship", Political Behavior