Claudine Gay, the brave university president

Looking at the brief career of Claudine Gay, who recently resigned as president of Harvard, makes you shudder. The news has gone relatively unnoticed, but we are talking about one of the three presidents of elite universities (the University of Pennsylvania’s president has also resigned) who have appeared before a congressional committee charged with examining antisemitism on campuses as a result of Israel’s war on Gaza. Last July, Gay’s appointment was received as a breath of fresh air by those who still defend liberal ideals in the United States. The daughter of Black Haitian immigrants headed the prestigious institution after the panoply of presidents (all white men, of course) who had preceded her. It’s no small detail that it coincided with the timing of the Supreme Court’s ban on race-based college admissions; nor that the accusations of plagiarism that have caused her resignation, which are strenuously denied by the majority of the alleged plagiarists, go against the work on the importance of minorities occupying political positions. Gay herself wrote that “when historically marginalized communities gain a meaningful voice in the halls of power, it signals an open door where before many saw only barriers. And that, in turn, strengthens our democracy.”

These days we have only talked about plagiarism, a sign of these times where our trust in institutions is thoroughly undermined while we show ourselves incapable of combating lies and obscurantism. Moira Donegan said it in The Guardian, highlighting the clumsiness of the media, which has focused exclusively on Gay’s alleged plagiarism. Donegan pointed out how the media has not been able to adapt to the rise of “an anti-intellectual and anti-democratic right indifferent to the truth.” Instead of displaying their reactionary misdeeds, they would try to maintain an appearance of neutrality “at the expense of frankly telling the truth.” The framework of the debate was, first, Gay’s alleged antisemitism and, later, plagiarism, but the university president rightly spoke of a lynching in a skirmish that was part of “a broader war” against public faith in the pillars of democratic society. This war has education as its strategic objective, precisely because it provides the tools that allow us to see what is reality, and what is propaganda.

The most honorable part of her farewell was the defense of the University as an independent space “where courage and reason come together to advance the truth, regardless of the forces that oppose them.” There is audacity in saying it like this because, deep down, reactionaries are taking advantage of the traps that we have set for ourselves since universities adopted progressivism. Bans or counterclaims based on the offenses felt by students are also a straitjacket that allows the global alt-right to launch accusations of censorship and even racism, foreign flags of convenience that they have cleverly taken advantage of. They are a mirror that puts us face-to-face with our own contradictions, and we should look them in the eye.

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