Harvard’s Gay: I Faced Racial Slurs, Death Threats Before Resigning

Outgoing Harvard President Claudine Gay said leading up to her resignation Tuesday, she received death threats and was “called the N-word more times than I care to count.”

Writing in The New York Times on Wednesday, Gay said the “campaign” against her, which led to her resignation, was a “symptom of a larger ‘war’ in the U.S. on expertise and trusted institutions,” Axios reported.

Gay also argued the issues at stake are larger than “one university and one leader.” As a Black woman who defended diversity, she wrote she makes “an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses,” and she fell into a “well-laid trap” when she was questioned during a House hearing last month over whether examples of on-campus antisemitism would violate Harvard’s code of conduct.

Questions by Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., chair of the House Republican Conference, during the hearing, put Gay and the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania (Liz Magill, who has since resigned) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sally Kornbluth) on the spot about antisemitism on their campuses,

Stefanik responded to Gay’s essay in a post Wednesday night on X.

“This was not a “well laid trap” [to properly cite the disgraced @Harvard former president Claudine Gay],” Stefanik wrote. “Let me remind everyone of the simple moral question I posed to the former presidents of @Harvard @Penn and [will be former] president of @MIT. Q: Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university’s code of conduct on bullying or harassment? Answer: ‘It depends on the context.’ A pathetic, shameful, and historic answer – the sickening groupthink of all three.

“Contrary to their attempts to distract and assign responsibility elsewhere, everyone knows this was not a ’well laid trap’ as one disgraced former university president desperately claimed. It wasn’t a trap. It was the university president’s cataclysmic failure on the global stage to answer a straightforward moral question. Good riddance.”