Claudine Gay received the call that ended her six-month tenure as Harvard University’s first Black president two days after Christmas while on vacation in Rome, per the New York Times. Gay’s congressional testimony about anti-semitism on college campuses, along with plagiarism allegations, sparked mounting controversy. (Harvard has denied that Gay committed any “research misconduct.”) The Harvard Corporation initially backed Gay, but support eroded as members of Harvard’s Board sustained increasing criticism. Gay, meanwhile, faced death threats alongside racist messages and phone calls; police reportedly monitored her home around the clock. Academics have decried the racism that animated the loudest cries for Gay’s resignation, and in a Times op-ed, she wrote that those who’d “relentlessly” campaigned against her “often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not reasoned argument. They recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament. They pushed a false narrative of indifference and incompetence.”
