Harvard University’s governing board, the Harvard Corporation, controls a $50.7 billion endowment – more than the gross domestic product of more than 120 countries, according to CBS News. However, in its early years, Harvard, by its own admission, received “a substantial portion of its income” from investments in businesses related to slavery and “major gifts from the labor of enslaved people.” Harvard presidents and other employees owned more than 70 enslaved people.

Those are some of the findings by the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery which then President Lawrence S. Bacow created in 2019. As part of the committee’s “reparative recommendations,” Harvard pledged $100 million “to address the injustices.”

And Harvard, breaking with a 386year tradition, appointed the daughter of Haitian immigrants as its first African American president: Claudine Gay, dean of its Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

“Gay is a leading scholar of political behavior, considering issues of race and politics in America,” the university proclaimed. “She has explored such topics as how election of minority shareholders affects citizens’ perceptions of their government and their interest in politics and public affairs; how neighborhood environments shape racial and political attitudes among Black Americans; the roots of competition and cooperation between minority communities, with particular focus on relations between Black Americans and Latinos; and the consequences of housing mobility programs for political participation among poor people.”

Gay assumed the presidency on July 1, 2023, just as the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated Harvard’s affirmative action admissions program. Her role would include “maintaining Harvard’s commitment to diversity,” she stated. “Our commitment to that work remains steadfast, is essential to who we are and the mission that we are here to advance.”

But, six months later, on January 2,

Gay resigned under unrelenting criticism alleging antisemitism and plagiarism and commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

An early campaign to oust her gained momentum after a comment she made before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Donald Trump acolyte, asked Gay: “At Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment?”

Gay: “It can be, depending on the context.” Pressed by Stefanik, she responded, “Antisemitic speech when it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation – that is actionable conduct and we do take action.”

Stefanik: “So the answer is yes that calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard conduct, right?” Gay: “Again, it depends on the context.”

Stefanik: “It does not depend on the context. The answer is yes and that is why you should resign.”

Gay later told the Harvard Crimson that she agreed to attend the hearing “to just convey the depth of both my personal commitment and the institutional commitment to combating antisemitism.” She said she had heard “wrenching testimony about how much pain students are in,” adding, “To contemplate that something I said amplified that pain – that’s really difficult. It makes me sad.”

Despite her contrition, Gay’s detractors sensed the time was ripe to open a second front against her. Christopher Leo, a practitioner of rightwing agitation and propaganda whom Florida’s President Ron DeSantis tapped to lead a counter-revolution in education in his state and is notorious for politically weaponizing critical race theory, accused Gay of plagiarism.

Rufo “had obtained an anonymous dossier” of Gay’s published scholarly work that purportedly contained plagiarism, The Times’ Nicholas Confessore reported. The Washington Free Beacon had claimed, according to Confessore, that the plagiarism “spanned nearly half of her published academic articles.”

The university’s governing board said an analysis “found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections to two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.” Harvard later said it found more instances of “plagiarism concerns” that Gay needed to correct in her 1997 dissertation and that she “will update her dissertation correcting these instances of inadequate citation.” The trustees added that “we reaffirm our support for President Gay’s continued leadership of Harvard University.”

Rufo revealed his true motivation. He called Gay a “dutiful racialist, skilled at the manipulation of guilt, shame and obligation in service of institutional power,” The Times reported.

Enter Harvard billionaire alumnus and donor Bill Ackman, who, early in the campus protests against Israel’s laying waste to Gaza, demanded the release of the names of students who signed a letter of support for Palestinians so he could deny them jobs. Ackman did not dwell much on the plagiarism issue, probably, as Business Insider reported on Friday, his wife Neri Oxman, a scholar, had committed “multiple instances of plagiarism in which she passed off writing from other sources as her own without citing the original in any way.” Instead, Ackman took Rufo’s argument further, claiming a connection between antisemitism and DEI, arguing that DEI promoted “an oppressor/oppressed framework” and had fueled “anti-Israel hate speech and harassment.”

Politico Magazine’s Ian Ward reported, “None of that happened by accident.” Rufo acknowledged to him that Gay’s ouster “was the result of a coordinated conservative campaign . . . It shows a successful strategy for the political right: how we have to work the media, how we have to exert pressure and how we have to sequence our campaigns in order to be successful. . . . This is the beginning of the end for DEI in American institutions.”

Gay, who was on to the coup, was not about to leave quietly. “Those who had relentlessly campaigned to oust me since the fall often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not reasoned argument. They recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament. They pushed a false narrative of indifference and incompetence,” she wrote in The Times.

“For weeks, both I and the institution to which I’ve devoted my professional life have been under attack. My character and intelligence have been impugned. My commitment to fighting antisemitism has been questioned. My inbox has been flooded with invective, including death threats. I’ve been called the N-word more times than I care to count,” Gay wrote.

“It is not lost on me that I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses: a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution.” But she saw it as “merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society.” She was resigning, Gay wrote, to “deny demagogues the opportunity to further weaponize my presidency in their campaign to undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding.”

What Gay did not say is that she resigned because the Harvard board wanted her gone, despite effusively praising her and pledging support for her presidency. And that was after board members had asked her, in the words of The Times, “to help come up with a plan to turn things around.” She and her staff drafted a “spring reset” proposal to have her “appear all over campus, hold office hours and express her empathy. There would be task forces to address antisemitism and Islamophobia.”

Then came reports that an additional 40 cases of plagiarism had been discovered in Gay’s academic work. “When she sent her latest plan to the board the next day, some members told her they liked it but, to others, it showed that she didn’t understand the urgency of the expanding crisis, according to people with knowledge of board members’ thinking,” The Times reported. By the day after Christmas, board members “agreed that they were dealing with a crisis of leadership and that the best path forward for Harvard was without Dr. Gay in the president’s chair,” The Times reported.

The liberal trustees of the liberal university built on the backs of enslaved Africans found it expedient to throw an African American woman scholar to the wolves baying at the door.