Ex-Harvard president claims her ouster was about racism – not antisemitism

Claudine Gay pens scathing NYT op-ed accusing her critics of racism.

By World Israel News Staff

Claudine Gay, who recently announced her resignation as president of Harvard, took aim at her critics Wednesday in a scathing opinion piece published by The New York Times.

Entitled What Just Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me, the article shifts the focus away from Gay’s plagiarism scandal and her testimony before Congress in which she refused to say calls for the genocide of Jews would constitute harassment.

Echoing her claims of “personal attacks” and “racial animus” mentioned in her resignation letter Tuesday, in her Times piece Gay accused those who called for her ouster of pushing “tired racial stereotypes about Black talen and temperament.”

“They pushed a false narrative of indifference and incompetence.”

Briefly referencing the issue of antisemitism and her controversial testimony to Congress, Gay acknowledged she “made mistakes,” but downplayed their relevance to her subsequent resignation.

Gay also appeared to blame Congresswoman Elise Stefanik for the controversy which erupted in the wake of her testimony, calling the questions a “well-laid trap.”

“I neglected to clearly articulate that calls for the genocide of Jewish people are abhorrent and unacceptable and that I would use every tool at my disposal to protect students from that kind of hate.”

Notably, Gay again declined to say that such calls for Jewish genocide would constitute harassment and thus be in violation of campus rules.

Regarding the roughly 50 accusations of plagiarism, Gay suggested that she had merely failed to offer “proper attribution” to “some material duplicated” from “other scholars’ language.”

AntisemitismClaudine GayHarvard