claudine gay and the imperial powers of harvard
the essay that was killed by a major publication
Context: a major publication originally reached out to me to write a piece on how I, a Harvard graduate student, felt about Claudine Gay’s resignation. This essay was killed upon internal review. While my editor advocated for me, the higher ups said it was “too political” to publish and didn’t want the publication to get into those waters.
While disappointing, it’s not surprising. That being said: here is the full essay for Gut Feelings.
Prior to her resignation as Harvard’s president on Tuesday, Claudine Gay had profoundly let down the student body with her inaction to protect the most marginalized on campus.
Since October 7th, a spotlight has been cast on Harvard amid discussions of fractured college climates. As a student of Harvard, I witnessed firsthand how unwilling the Ivy League institution—older than the United States government—was to use their ample resources to denounce the rampant Islamophobia and antisemitism that have risen since the start of the war.
Gay was the first Black woman and the second female ever to be named president of the richest university in America; she also had the shortest tenure of any of her predecessors (Gay’s convocation was this past September).
Like most students at Harvard, I have a complicated relationship with Gay’s leadership. Harvard, for all of its prestige, is a microcosm of the imperial powers of the United States. It has been said, not inaccurately, that Harvard is a small nation-state on its own. For anyone to assume the presidency of such a beast is to inherit its proximity to neoliberalism; Gay, despite being a Black woman, was not only a cog of the Harvard machine, but the public face of it.
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