Harvard appoints Claudine Gay as its first black president

The daughter of Haitian immigrants will take over from Lawrence Bacow as the university’s 30th president next July 1.

Claudine Gay 52, is just the second woman to be elected to head the Ivy League university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Picture: AFP

Harvard University has named Claudine Gay, a dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, as its new president, the first African American to hold the post at the university.

Professor Gay, 52, is just the second woman to be elected to head the Ivy League university in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Harvard said on Thursday (Friday AEDT) that Professor Gay, the daughter of Haitian immigrants, will take over from Lawrence Bacow as the university’s 30th president next July 1.

“Claudine is a remarkable leader who is profoundly devoted to sustaining and enhancing Harvard’s academic excellence,” said Penny Pritzker, chair of Harvard’s presidential search committee.

Professor Gay took the helm of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 2018, steering it through the difficult period of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Today, we are in a moment of remarkable and accelerating change – socially, politically, economically, and technologically,” she said on Thursday. “So many fundamental assumptions about how the world works and how we should relate to one ­another are being tested.”

One of those tests will come just as she assumes the leadership role: next July the university faces a US Supreme Court decision that may force it to revise its longstanding admissions processes. Suits have been brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, challenging their policy of affirmative action.

That policy emerged from the civil rights movement in the late 1960s to help address the legacy of discrimination in higher education against African-Americans. The suits against Harvard and UNC were brought by a group known as Students for Fair Admissions, which claims that race-conscious admissions policies discriminate against equally qualified applicants of Asian American origin.

AFP