The National Association of Scholars urges Harvard to oust Claudine Gay

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is calling for the removal of Harvard President Claudine Gay following her congressional testimony in which she failed to directly condemn antisemitic speech at the university.

Gay was widely lambasted for her testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Dec. 5, but NAS argued there are additional reasons she should be removed from her post, including:

• Her shoddy professional work, which would by normal standards disqualify her for any academic appointment at Harvard. 
• Her record of plagiarism. 
• Her promotion of racist policies. 
• Her vindictive and arbitrary administrative punishment of Harvard college members. 

Citing a 2020 memorandum, NAS criticized Gay’s “radical vision” for Harvard which included a “transformational project” to advance “racial justice.”

“Staff leaders of color remain significantly underrepresented in the FAS [Faculty of Arts and Sciences], and we are missing out on this talent to our own detriment,” Gay wrote. “The benefits of diverse teams for organizational performance are well-documented, from spurring innovation and creative problem solving to challenging the assumptions and conventional wisdom that limit our thinking.” 

NAS pointed out the irony of Gay’s reaction to the Hamas terrorist attack, saying it “exhibited a moral obtuseness that marries intolerance for all dissent from the diversity, equity, and inclusion regime to insensitivity to Jews faced with anti-Jewish harassment.” 

Additionally, Christopher Rufo and Chris Benet obtained documentation demonstrating that Gay plagiarized passages in her doctoral thesis from political scientist Carol Swain.  

NAS argued that Gay’s lack of academic book publications also raises doubts about her suitability as a Harvard professor, let alone its president.  

“The time has come to bring down the curtain on a presidential appointment that plainly had the support of campus activists and a fair number of faculty members—but which was from the beginning ill-founded, and is now a national embarrassment,” the group concluded.