Former Harvard University President Claudine Gay recounted Wednesday the ordeal that led as much as her resignation, insisting she was focused by a marketing campaign of lies and private insults.
Gay stepped down Tuesday after coming underneath ferocious assault over plagiarism accusations that solely got here to mild following her response to alleged anti-Semitism on campus amid Israel’s brutal warfare on Gaza.
“Those who had relentlessly campaigned to oust me since the fall often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not reasoned argument,” she wrote in The New York Times.
“They recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament. They pushed a false narrative of indifference and incompetence.”
“It is not lost on me that I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses: a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution. Someone who views diversity as a source of institutional strength and dynamism.”
Claudine Gay was criticized in current months after experiences surfaced alleging that she didn’t correctly cite scholarly sources in her 1997 doctoral dissertation. The most up-to-date accusations got here Tuesday, revealed anonymously in a conservative on-line outlet.
‘Morally bankrupt testimony’
Gay was additionally engulfed by scandal after she declined to say unequivocally whether or not calling for genocide of Jews would violate Harvard’s code of conduct, throughout testimony to Congress alongside the heads of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania final month.
Gay, who made historical past as the primary Black individual to be president of Harvard mentioned she was focused as a result of she believed “that a daughter of Haitian immigrants has something to offer to the nation’s oldest university.”
Gay, 53, was born in New York to Haitian immigrants and is a professor of political science.
Her downfall comes after the powerhouse college in Cambridge, Massachusetts’s governing Harvard Corporation had initially backed her after the general public relations catastrophe of the congressional testimony.
But the physique did criticize the college’s preliminary response to the Oct. 7 Hamas incursion of Israel that killed 1,140 individuals.
Israel’s offensive, in response, has decreased a lot of Gaza to rubble and killed at the very least 22,313 individuals, largely girls and youngsters, in response to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
The college’s governing Harvard Corporation mentioned that Gay had “shown remarkable resilience in the face of deeply personal and sustained attacks.”
Source: www.dailysabah.com