Former Harvard University President Claudine Gay recounted Wednesday the ordeal that led up to her resignation, insisting she was targeted by a campaign of lies and personal insults.
Gay stepped down Tuesday after coming under ferocious attack over plagiarism accusations that only came to light following her response to alleged anti-Semitism on campus amid Israel's brutal war on Gaza.
"Those who had relentlessly campaigned to oust me since the fall often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not reasoned argument," she wrote in The New York Times.
"They recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament. They pushed a false narrative of indifference and incompetence."
"It is not lost on me that I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses: a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution. Someone who views diversity as a source of institutional strength and dynamism."
Claudine Gay was criticized in recent months after reports surfaced alleging that she did not properly cite scholarly sources in her 1997 doctoral dissertation. The most recent accusations came Tuesday, published anonymously in a conservative online outlet.
Gay was also engulfed by scandal after she declined to say unequivocally whether calling for genocide of Jews would violate Harvard's code of conduct, during testimony to Congress alongside the heads of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania last month.
Gay, who made history as the first Black person to be president of Harvard said she was targeted because she believed "that a daughter of Haitian immigrants has something to offer to the nation's oldest university."
Gay, 53, was born in New York to Haitian immigrants and is a professor of political science.
Her downfall comes after the powerhouse university in Cambridge, Massachusetts's governing Harvard Corporation had initially backed her after the public relations disaster of the congressional testimony.
But the body did criticize the university's initial response to the Oct. 7 Hamas incursion of Israel that killed 1,140 people.
Israel's offensive, in response, has reduced much of Gaza to rubble and killed at least 22,313 people, mostly women and children, according to Gaza's Health Ministry.
The university's governing Harvard Corporation said that Gay had "shown remarkable resilience in the face of deeply personal and sustained attacks."
