The Word That Undid Claudine Gay

The Israel-Palestine conflict and American election-year politics are not the only salient context here. Academia seems to be in the grip of a multidimensional crisis that goes beyond ideology, and also beyond Harvard. Higher learning is plagued by opaque admissions policies; runaway tuition costs; administrative bloat; grade inflation; helicopter parents; cancel culture. The list goes on. An assiduous scholar might connect these phenomena with recent events in Harvard Yard. An enterprising writer could weave the whole thing into a bristling campus novel, something worthy of Paul Beatty or Mary McCarthy.

Instead, for now, we will have to make do with Dr. Gay’s letter of resignation — emailed to students, faculty, alumni and others with the subject line “Personal News” — and the message from the Harvard Corporation (the university’s secretive governing body) about her departure.

What is most striking about these texts — each amounting to little more than 600 words, all of them carefully measured, few of them memorable — is their rigorous avoidance of context. No mention is made of Congress, or Gaza, or anything that might actually explain what happened. “We live in difficult and troubling times,” the corporation’s letter asserts, “and formidable challenges lie ahead.” The nature of the trouble is mainly left unspoken, in keeping with an overall commitment to abstraction, as if bland, nonspecific language could wash away the difficulty. It’s only when the letters note what the corporation calls the “repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol” Dr. Gay faced as Harvard’s first Black president that they register some of the rawness and rage of contemporary reality.

Otherwise, the sole concrete reference — virtually the only proper noun — in either letter is Harvard. Dr. Gay opens hers with an affirmation of her “deep love for Harvard,” while the corporation expresses Harvard’s inexhaustible regard for itself. Perhaps that’s to be expected of an institution reeling from a public-relations catastrophe; its dutiful defense of its fallen president — as “a leader, a teacher, a scholar, a mentor and an inspiration to many” — is also in keeping with the demands of the moment and the genre.

What’s curious, though, is that Harvard, which compels its undergraduates to master expository writing in their freshman year, cannot find the language to defend itself. The corporation does not apologize or explain. Instead, it throws up its hands in prayer: “May our community, with its long history of rising through change and through storm, find new ways to meet those challenges together, and to affirm Harvard’s commitment to generating knowledge, pursuing truth and contributing through scholarship and education to a better world.”