The founder of the controversial 1619 Project has claimed the loudest critics calling for embattled Harvard president Claudine Gay’s ouster are “pretending” to be concerned about antisemitism — calling it a cover to further promote “racial division.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones argued that some of the Gay’s toughest critics are using her comments about genocide at a congressional hearing last week as an “opening” to oust the black leader as part of their campaign against Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts on campus.
“They’re using the guise of pretending that this is about concern over antisemitism — which is, of course, something that all of us should be concerned about,” she told CNN’s Abby Phillip Wednesday night.
“It really just furthers their propaganda campaign against racial equality.”
Hannah-Jones said it was unfair to suggest that Gay has survived calls for her to resign solely because of her race — despite claims that she was hired solely because of the university’s DEI initiative.
“it’s racist. I mean, we have — no one has produced a shred of evidence that shows that the sole qualification that President Gay had was that she is a black woman. That’s insulting. It defies logic,” she said.
The scholar went on to highlight Harvard’s historical racial quotas and noted that for 370 years, the Ivy League institution only appointed white men as its presidents.
“When you think about the fact that Harvard, this nation’s oldest university, had about a 370-year explicit racial quota of only hiring white men to be the president, it’s laughable to think the first ever black woman following that unbroken line of white racial quotas is the one who’s unqualified,” Hannah-Jones said.
“I mean, this is kind of the beauty of how racism works.
“If you are black and you don’t achieve, if you don’t succeed at the highest echelon, it’s because you’re lazy and you’re not smart enough. If you do achieve and you do succeed and you do rise to the top of your profession, it’s because you didn’t deserve it.”
Hannah-Jones concluded by saying that calls for Gay to be fired are a distraction, as she called out journalist Chris Rufo — who found several instances in which the Harvard president appeared to have lifted numerous portions of her 1997 Ph.D. thesis in direct violation of Harvard’s academic integrity policies — as “not a serious person.”
“He is a person who has been trying to attack what he calls DEI, but really any efforts to address racial inequality,” she said.
“He has explicitly said that he does ‘propaganda work,’ and the fact that we’re all talking about it means that he’s being successful.”
She also emphasized Gay’s qualifications and attributed the criticisms against her to a broader campaign against initiatives addressing racial inequity.
“She’s clearly qualified,” Hannah-Jones claimed, without offering any specifics.
“And really I’m perplexed to try to figure out what does race have to do with the criticism that she hasn’t handled the protests on her campus correctly.
“They just see this as an opportunity to further sew racial division and to further their campaign of trying to attack any efforts around diversity and antiracism.”
“I hope that we will see courage in the face of these political campaigns,” she added.
Gay first came under fire last week when she, former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth testified that it depends on the context whether calls for genocide violated their schools’ codes of conduct.
In the aftermath, Gay was accused of lifting other scholars’ works in her 1997 Ph.D. thesis and writing four papers published between 1993 and 2017 that did not have proper attribution, the Washington Free Beacon found.
The outlet said scholars it had consulted agreed Gay had “violated a core principle of academic integrity” and said they had found 10 instances where Gay had lifted sentences or paragraphs and only changed a word or two.
The Harvard president has denied these claims, but in a statement on Tuesday, the Harvard Corporation — the Ivy League’s highest governing body — said officials became aware of claims of plagiarism in late October and initiated an independent review.
“On Dec. 9, the Fellows reviewed the results, which revealed a few instances of inadequate citation,” the Corporation said.
“While the analysis found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.”
Still, the Harvard Corporation expressed its support for having Gay retain her position on campus.
“Our extensive deliberations affirm our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing,” the group said.
