I fell into Republican trap, says ousted Harvard president Claudine Gay

Claudine Gay hit back at the campaign to remove her after resigning from the university following weeks of criticism over her handling of anti-Semitism.

Claudine Gay was pilloried after her appearance before a congressional committee in December. Picture: Getty Images/AFP

The former president of Harvard University said she “fell into a well-laid trap” set by Republicans during a disastrous appearance before Congress that led to a row over anti-Semitism on Ivy League campuses.

Claudine Gay, who resigned on Tuesday after weeks of criticism, admitted that she had “made mistakes” in her handling of rising anti-Semitism on campus after the attack on Israel by Hamas on October 7.

But she hit back at the campaign to oust her and warned that it was a “single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society”.

In July Gay, 53, became the first black person and only the second woman to lead America’s oldest university. Her resignation, which also came after allegations of plagiarism in her academic work, brought the shortest presidency in Harvard’s history – six months and two days – to an ignominious end.

Harvard and Gay were pilloried for being too slow to denounce the Hamas attack, and there was uproar when she appeared before a congressional committee last month to face questions about rising anti-Semitism at American universities.

Questioned by Elise Stefanik, a Republican congresswoman, over whether calls for a genocide of Jewish people would violate Harvard’s code of conduct, Gay insisted that the question of whether hate speech crossed a line would depend on its “context”. Despite her later apology, donors threatened to withhold contributions to the university.

“I made mistakes,” Gay said, writing in The New York Times after her resignation. “In my initial response to the atrocities of October 7 I should have stated more forcefully what all people of good conscience know: Hamas is a terrorist organisation that seeks to eradicate the Jewish state.”

She added: “At a congressional hearing last month I fell into a well-laid trap. I neglected to clearly articulate that calls for the genocide of Jewish people are abhorrent.” However, Gay said that her critics had “trafficked in lies” motivated by her race.

The Times