Since the announcement of her presidency, Claudine Gay’s character, qualifications, and intelligence had been consistently put into question. Amidst the mayhem, one refrain wielded throughout her tenure has stuck with me the most—her characterization as a witch. From countless news articles describing the pressure for her to resign as a “witch-hunt,” to comments left by Claudine critics crying “Ding Dong the witch is dead,” the severity of backlash against her from the beginning of her tenure has undeniably been targeted.
Throughout history, the term “witch-hunt” has become a refrain used to derail female empowerment and leadership and ridicule all walks of life for women. The Salem Witch Trials, which occurred in colonial Massachusetts between 1692 and 1693, were a series of investigations that found 14 women guilty of and executed for witchcraft. In the late 19th century, the suffragette Matilda Joslyn Gage asserted something revolutionary: she believed that the persecution of witches had nothing to do with fighting evil or resisting the devil. Instead, she believed that witchcraft was simply entrenched in social misogyny, the goal of which was to repress the intellect of women. “Witch-hunts” have attempted to maintain the established gender hierarchy in a given community; in other words, the patriarchy.
Women with serious political power have historically drawn accusations of witchcraft, going back to Joan of Arc and Cleopatra. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton was dubbed “a witch with a capital B” by the conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, and she was taunted by Bernie Sanders supporters who cried out “Bern the Witch!” The strident hatred that she was shown was undeniably at fault for her audacity to grasp power.
Janai Nelson, the Director-Counsel and President of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, criticized the scrutiny of Claudine Gay leading up to her resignation, writing on X that “her resignation on the heels of Liz Magill’s set dangerous precedent in the academy for political witch-hunts,” referring to the former president of the University of Pennsylvania, who resigned after backlash over her responses to antisemitism at the House hearing.
Gay’s quick resignation comes at a frightening time for higher education in America, following the recent strike-down of race-based affirmative action. The spite that led to Gay’s departure is indicative of how national politics are further becoming inextricably linked to institutions of higher learning.
Her departure inevitably invited partisan reactions. On the left, critics of the uproar against Claudine Gay have argued that the conservative alumni, donors, and lawmakers fueling the backlash are out to advance the political right’s push to tank diversity programming. Opinion columnist Charles M. Blow argues in the New York Times how the campaign against Gay was “never truly about her testimony or accusations of plagiarism” and instead was and is a “defilement meant to reverse progress and shame the proponents of that progress.” On the right, conservative figures sought to dismantle Gay, putting her career under scrutiny with plagiarism allegations, and ultimately claiming credit for her departure. U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik explained on X how Claudine Gay’s resignation as a “plagiarist president [was] long overdue,” and claimed that Gay lacked the “academic integrity required of the President of Harvard.” Likewise, American conservative activist Christopher Rufo, in an interview with Politico, detailed how Gay’s resignation “shows a successful strategy for the political right.”
In a country in which everything is a matter of partisan polarization, the political frustrations at hand here have only continued to divide people and distract from the larger issues at hand. The implications of this behavior reveal how increasingly difficult it is becoming to avert political interference in the educational mission of higher education. College campuses in the United States should not be political battlefields.
We must be able to separate the treatment of Claudine Gay from her actions. In a guest contribution to the New York Times, Gay acknowledged how she has “made mistakes,” recognizing how she “should have stated more forcefully” that Hamas is a terrorist organization that seeks to eradicate the Jewish state, and that she “neglected to clearly articulate that calls for the genocide of Jewish people are abhorrent and unacceptable.” She similarly claims responsibility for the errors in her scholarship, explaining how, when she learned of these errors, she “promptly requested corrections” from the journals in which the flagged articles were published. Despite all of Gay’s serious and undeniable missteps, it is unfair that the campaign against her was defined by a narrative of indifference and incompetence.
I am one voice in a sea of varying, complicated opinions, but I know that I am not the only person who is disappointed, but not surprised. Regardless of your opinion on the decisions made, this precedent reveals the University’s interests about who is worth defending and who is not. Gay’s resignation also reveals a dangerous precedent that politicians and donors still maintain the power to tell us who is fit to lead our education.
Claudine Gay surpassed impossibilities to enter this role, and her presence in such an important position posed a threat to the power conventionally congregated to an elite few. She was held to the “Wonder Woman requirement,” where any imperfection of a powerful woman is inflated to be a fundamental flaw.
I prompt you to question whether this kind of behavior is truly to make higher education stronger or not. Question how this will define Harvard’s storied legacy, and ask yourself, will profit always outweigh morality?
Rania Jones ’27 (rjones@college.harvard.edu) hopes that one day the figure of the powerful woman will no longer be deemed a witch.