Claudine Gay, the brave rector

Looking at the brief career of Claudine Gay, the recently resigned president of Harvard, produces a shudder. The news has gone relatively unnoticed, but we are talking about one of the three presidents of elite universities (another of them, Pennsylvania, has also resigned) who have appeared before a congressional committee in charge of examining anti-Semitism on campuses as a result of the war in Gaza. Gay's appointment was received in July as a breath of fresh air by those who still defend liberal ideals in the United States. The black daughter of Haitian immigrants headed the prestigious institution after the panoply of rectors (of course, white and male) who had preceded her. It's no small detail that it coincided with the timing of the Supreme Court's ban on race-based college admissions; nor that the accusations of plagiarism that have caused her resignation, denied by the majority of the alleged plagiarists, are against a work on the importance of minorities holding political positions. That historically marginalized communities have a relevant voice in the corridors of power “opens a door where many previously only saw barriers, and that, in turn, strengthens our democracy,” Gay has written.

These days we have only talked about plagiarism, a sign of these times where our trust in institutions is thoroughly undermined while we show ourselves incapable of combating lies and obscurantism. Moira Donegan said it in The Guardian, pointing out the clumsiness of the media, focused exclusively on Gay's alleged plagiarism. Donegan pointed out how the media has not been able to adapt to the rise of “an anti-intellectual and anti-democratic right indifferent to the truth.” Instead of displaying their reactionary misdeeds, they would try to maintain an appearance of neutrality “at the expense of frankly telling the truth.” The framework of the debate was, first, Gay's alleged anti-Semitism and, later, plagiarism, but the rector rightly spoke of a lynching that has as its background “a broader war” against public faith in the pillars of democratic society. . This war has education as its strategic objective, precisely because it provides the tools that allow us to see reality, avoiding propaganda.

The most honorable part of his farewell It was the defense of the University as an independent space “where courage and reason come together to advance the truth, regardless of the forces that oppose them.” There is audacity in saying it like this because, deep down, reactionaries take advantage of the traps that we have set for ourselves since university progressivism. Bans or counterclaims based on the offenses felt by students are also a straitjacket that allows the global Alt-Right to launch accusations of censorship and even racism, foreign flags that they cleverly take advantage of. They are a mirror that puts us before our own contradictions, and we should look them in the face.