BOSTON (AP) — Harvard University announced Thursday that Claudine Gay will become its 30th president, making her the first black person and the second woman to lead the Ivy League school.
Gay, currently the university’s dean and democracy scholar, will become president on July 1. He replaces Lawrence Bacow, who resigned and said he wanted to spend more time with his family.
“It’s crazy, isn’t it?” said a beaming Gay as he was introduced to applause in the center of the Smith campus. He is currently the Edgerley Family Dean of the Harvard College of Arts and Sciences.
“I am absolutely humbled by the trust placed in the board,” she said. “I am also incredibly humbled by the prospect of succeeding President Bacow and leading this incredible institution.”
The son of Haitian immigrants, Gay is seen as a leading voice on the issue of American political participation. Among the issues he has explored is how a range of social and economic factors shape political opinion and voting. She is also the founding chair of Harvard’s Inequality in America Initiative, which studies issues such as the effects of poverty and child deprivation on educational opportunity and American inequality from a global perspective.
“Claudine is an outstanding leader who is deeply committed to supporting and strengthening Harvard’s academic excellence by promoting both the value and values of higher education and research, expanding opportunities, and strengthening Harvard as a source of ideas and a force for good. around the world,” said Penny Pritzker, a Harvard senior fellow and chair of the Harvard Presidential Research Committee, in a statement.
In his speech, Gay called for greater collaboration between Harvard’s schools and said there was an urgent need for the university to become more engaged with the world and “bring bold, courageous and pioneering thinking to our greatest challenges.” .
“The ‘Ivory Tower’ Idea: This Is the Past, Not the Future of Academia. We do not exist outside of society but as part of it,” he said. “This means that Harvard has a duty to support, engage and serve the world.”
With Gay’s appointment, women will outnumber men as principals of eight Ivy League schools. Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania nominated women earlier this year, joining Brown and Cornell. Columbia, Princeton, and Yale are run by men. Drew Faust was the first woman to serve as president of Harvard. Historical note of the American South and the Civil War, she resigned in 2018 after 11 years.
Gay will be the only black president currently in the Ivy League and the second black woman in history, after Ruth Simmons, who led Brown University from 2001 to 2012.
Gay’s appointment is notable in part because relatively few U.S. universities are led by black presidents, said Eddie R. Cole, a historian of university presidents and race at the University of California, Los Angeles. Harvard has enormous influence in higher education, he said, and other universities need to take note.
“At a time when everyone is still looking at Harvard, this presidential entrance will undoubtedly be one of the most important in American higher education for years to come,” Cole said.
As Harvard’s president, Gay will shape decisions that can have local, state and federal impact, Cole said. This includes racial issues the campus has faced in recent years, including affirmative action and the school’s history with slavery.
Bacow, who assumed the presidency in 2018, expanded and updated the university’s teaching and research missions and encouraged interdisciplinary cooperation to address issues such as climate change and inequality.
Under his leadership, Harvard joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a legal challenge to the Trump administration’s decision to force international students to leave the country if they planned to take online classes in the fall of 2020 amid the pandemic. He criticized the policy for “cruelty” and “carelessness”.
Harvard also faced challenges during his tenure. The university survived a legal challenge to its admissions policies in United States District Court, a case that is now being heard by the Supreme Court.
It was also revealed that financier Jeffrey Epstein has visited Harvard’s campus more than 40 times since his 2008 sex crime conviction — well before Bacow’s tenure — and even got him his own office.
Gay’s first challenges may include the fallout from the Supreme Court’s examination of the use of race in admissions. The court is considering challenges to lawsuits by Harvard and the University of North Carolina that consider race among many factors in student selection.
Lower courts upheld the practices at both universities, rejecting claims that they discriminated against Asian-American applicants. But in oral arguments this year, the six conservative High Court justices expressed doubts about the practice, which has been supported by Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1978.
Associated Press training writer Collin Binkley in Washington contributed to this report.
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