I’ve had a peculiar perspective on the whole thing, having started my academic career alongside Gay three decades ago. In 1992, Gay, her now-husband, my then-roommate, and I constituted the “American Government” doctoral cohort in the Harvard Government Department’s Ph.D. program. Over the next five years (I finished my Ph.D. in 1997, she completed hers a year later), I probably spent more than 150 hours in seminars, methods classes, and talks with Gay. I didn’t know her well and haven’t spoken to her in the past quarter century, but I’ve known of her and observed her academic journey as an old classmate.
I’m disinclined to revisit the plagiarism charges or the Harvard Corporation’s efforts to bury the whole thing. I’ll just say that it seems clear that Gay’s scholarly issues were a reasonable cause for termination, Harvard’s conduct has been horrendous, and this whole thing will one day be a textbook case of crisis mismanagement. What I want to do here is offer three reflections that I’ve found myself repeatedly sharing of late.
First, as much as Gay has been depicted as a DEI crusader, I don’t recall her being one at the start of her career. I was pretty sensitive to such things and frequently annoyed by the progressivism and pioneering critical race theory that held sway at Harvard. But I don’t recall Gay saying anything that stuck in my craw. Even her much-discussed dissertation on black representation, as I remember, was less an ideological endeavor than an exhausted grad student’s attempt to use some econometric gee-whizzery to get the degree. Maybe Gay was a discreet radical but I tend to suspect that, like so many others, Gay embraced higher ed’s DEI groupthink mostly as a means of personal advancement. Gay has spent most of her time at Harvard as a bureaucrat, not a scholar. I mean, in 2022, when charged with implementing a Faculty of Arts and Sciences anti-racism initiative, Gay sent an email to the faculty seeking “requests for denaming” of campus buildings or programs. I wonder whether she just saw herself as an effective bureaucrat. Did she even appreciate how Orwellian it all sounded? I’ve found many of these fights turn out to be less about ideologues than, with apologies to Hannah Arendt, the banality of campus illiberalism.