Claudine Gay

Claudine Gay (born 1970) is an American political scientist and academic administrator who was the 30th president of Harvard University, and is the Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard.

Gay's research addresses American political behavior, including voter turnout and politics of race and identity.

Gay became the first Black president of Harvard after having served as the dean of Social Sciences and the dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

In December 2023, Gay and two other university presidents faced pressure from the public and from a Congressional committee to resign, over responses to allegations of antisemitism on their campuses.

Gay also faced accusations of plagiarism, including a probe by the same committee.

The following month she resigned from the presidency.

Gay grew up the child of Haitian immigrants who came to the United States and met in New York City as students.

Her mother studied nursing and her father studied engineering.

Gay spent much of her childhood first in New York, and then in Saudi Arabia, where her father worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, while her mother was a registered nurse.

She is a cousin of writer Roxane Gay and her family in Haiti owns and runs the largest concrete plant in that country.

Gay attended Phillips Exeter Academy, a private boarding school in Exeter, New Hampshire, graduating in 1988.

She attended Princeton University for one year before transferring to Stanford University, where she studied economics, graduating in 1992.

She received the Anna Laura Myers Prize for an outstanding thesis in economics.

Gay earned her Ph.D. in 1998 from Harvard, where she won the university's Toppan Prize for the best dissertation in political science.

After graduating, Gay was an assistant professor, and later tenured associate professor, in Stanford's Department of Political Science from 2000 to 2006.

In the 2003–2004 academic year, she was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Gay's research addresses American political behavior, including voter turnout, housing policy, and the politics of race and identity.

She was recruited by Harvard to be a professor of government in 2006, and was appointed professor of African American studies in 2007.

In addition to her positions at Harvard, Gay served as a vice president of the Midwest Political Science Association from 2014 to 2017 and a trustee of Phillips Exeter from 2017 to 2023.

In June 2022, Harvard President Lawrence Bacow announced that he would resign from the post in one year.

In 2015, Gay was named the Dean of Social Sciences at the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and the Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies.

In 2018, she was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

As Dean of FAS, which oversees graduate and undergraduate studies, Gay outlined four primary concerns: increasing diversity among faculty, supporting students interested in interdisciplinary studies, encouraging interdepartmental collaboration among professors, and fostering faculty involvement in the university's community.

Gay's priorities during her tenure as dean included anti-racism initiatives and increasing racial diversity on campus among students and faculty.

Harvard Law School professor and Winthrop House faculty dean Ronald Sullivan faced student protests in spring 2019 after joining the legal defense team for Harvey Weinstein, who was on trial for rape.

Gay called Sullivan's response to the controversy "insufficient," citing his "special responsibility" as house dean for the well-being of Winthrop residents.

Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana decided not to renew Sullivan's contract as Winthrop dean, a decision criticized by the American Civil Liberties Union.

In 2019, Gay said that Harvard would seek to hire multiple ethnic studies professors, hiring three in 2022.

In August 2020, FAS hired its first Associate Dean of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging.

Following the June 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which held that race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions were unconstitutional, Gay said that Harvard would "comply with the court's decision, but it does not change our values."

During her deanship, Gay disciplined multiple Harvard professors for alleged sexual misconduct.

She removed emeritus status from retired professors Jorge I. Domínguez and Gary Urton, and placed professors John Comaroff and Roland G. Fryer Jr. on leave, after they each faced accusations of sexual harassment.

Gay also sanctioned professor Martin Nowak for "unprofessional behavior" in his contacts with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

After protests condemning Harvard's denial of tenure to Lorgia García Peña, a scholar of ethnic studies, Gay said in January 2020 that she would initiate a review of the FAS tenure process.

The review, released in October 2021, stated that Harvard's tenure process was largely "structurally sound," but also found "a lack of trust in, and a low morale, about the tenure process” among faculty.

As dean, Gay oversaw the 2021 launch of a new billion-dollar Science and Engineering Complex on Harvard's Allston campus, including a PhD program in quantum engineering.

Harvard faced educational and financial disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

For fiscal year 2020, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences reported losses of $15.8 million.

In early 2021, Gay announced that the cost of the FAS's core academic commitments were greater than its revenues and began processes to reduce expenses.

At the end of that year, the FAS reported a surplus of $51 million, an increase from the projected deficit of $112 million.