OPINION: Former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s resignation is now a reminder of the irreconcilability of successful Black womanhood with powerful, wealthy and predominantly white institutions.
Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more
The scrutiny manifests in multiple ways. Black women university presidents exhibit a longer time between aspiration to presidential leadership and application, and they report less overall transparency from universities and boards about expectations and institutional conditions. And the scrutiny and challenges come at great personal and professional cost.
As a Black Puerto Rican-Dominican Caribbean Latina scholar currently serving as a departmental chair, I know the academic path. Being an undergraduate at Harvard in the 1990s always came with questions — within and beyond — about capacity, belonging, being intelligent enough and being an “affirmative action” student. The questions haven’t stopped, though they might have changed in style. Later, in my first graduate department, I was asked to leave by a department that, at the time, saw most students of color as incapable of earning a Ph.D. Indeed, I have managed to disprove many but not all of these structural blocks to continue an academic career. The questions, as a scholar and a leader, nonetheless, creep in.
The educational road for academics of color through political climates continues to make us susceptible to whatever adaptable policies, practices and language of racism emerge, whether it’s the attack on affirmative action, diversity, equity and inclusion, critical race theory or accusations of being a “diversity hire,” or “unprofessional behavior” and “incompetence,” etc. The story of racism is not only about how scholars of color are overly scrutinized. It is also about how our non-Black counterparts hardly ever face the same levels of scrutiny. How many Harvard presidents’ works have been scrutinized at such levels as Claudine Gay’s? Given the documented widespread racial disparities in evaluation across a wide variety of society’s institutional settings, it is not hard to understand the disparate lens applied to research. As scholars of race know, the findings about racial disparities are numerous and conclusive.
Being aware of the vast landscape of racial disparities proves daunting. When I consider putting myself up for professional scrutiny of any ilk, I think of the experiences of Black people and people of color in all sectors. The personal, health and professional costs of such relentless sieges and discrimination are as true for the common citizen as they are for the academics and academic leaders. I can only imagine the professional and personal dimensions of the storm that has enveloped Dr. Gay. Her and the Harvard Corporation’s letter briefly hint at the racial content of the attacks. I can not imagine what kinds of attacks have been privately levied at Dr. Gay from the moment of her appointment as Harvard president.
More than a century ago, a young African-American man from Massachusetts by the name of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois became the first African-American to earn a Master’s and a Ph.D. degree from Harvard after earning a college degree there in 1890. W.E.B. Du Bois would bring great glory to Harvard, but only in hindsight. For many years and into the 21st Century, Du Bois has been recognized as the founder of the NAACP and perhaps most famously known for making an impossibly prescient declaration in 1903 that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”
More recently, as a corrective to the history of American science, Du Bois has been lauded as one of the founders of American sociology. Praise for Du Bois is unending, though, in his time, Du Bois struggled to get an academic position in the top institutions such as the one that trained him. His published study on the Black community in Philadelphia, “Philadelphia Negro,” conducted as a temporary assistant in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, is now celebrated as a masterpiece of social scientific research. On the occasion of honoring the 150th anniversary of Du Bois’ birth, the Harvard Gazette describes him as one of “America’s intellectual giants” and “a revolutionary thinker far ahead of his time.” On the topic of attending Harvard, Du Bois famously said: “I’m in Harvard, not of it” and, upon completion of his Ph.D., “The honor, I assure you, was Harvard’s.”
With the rabid political and social push to undo the gains in inclusion that Claudine Gay’s appointment as president signaled, universities and all institutions need to decide who they want to be. If they value a democratic, inclusive and diverse society, they need to do the work and take preemptive, actionable steps to safeguard those values. This means taking responsibility and educating themselves in the machinations of gendered racism to understand the protections and support needed to ensure the success of Black and underrepresented leaders, students, staff and faculty. And they have to be firm, clear and unapologetic about how unacceptable the alternative is for all, and especially our future generations.
No amount of evidence is sufficient to convey the devastating impact that comes from Claudine’s Gay resignation. Are we, as Lorde reminds us, not meant to belong and survive in these environments, despite the gains we have supposedly made across centuries? I hope that history will prove Du Bois’ point right and that Harvard remains proud and does the work to retain the honor of naming Claudine Gay as president and signaling to the world, and to those of us who have an affiliation with the university, that we indeed are “of” and not merely “in” those institutions. One way or another, we will survive, as we have always, even when we weren’t meant to.
Zaire Z. Dinzey-Flores is a sociologist and urban planner specializing in the study of race, class, and the built environment. She is currently an associate professor in sociology and the Department of Latino and Caribbean studies, where she serves as chair. She is the author of “Locked In, Locked Out: Gated Communities in a Puerto Rican City” (University of Pennsylvania Presss, 2013).
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