On Tuesday, I made the heartbreaking however obligatory resolution to step down as Harvard’s president. For weeks, each I and the establishment to which I’ve devoted my skilled life have been below assault. My character and intelligence have been impugned. My dedication to combating anti-Semitism has been questioned. My inbox has been flooded with invective, together with dying threats. I have been known as the N-word extra occasions than I care to rely.
My hope is that by resigning I’ll deny demagogues the chance to additional weaponize my presidency of their marketing campaign to undermine the beliefs which have animated Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, reality.
As I journey, I have to supply a couple of phrases of warning. The marketing campaign in opposition to me was about multiple college and one chief. This was only one skirmish in a broader struggle to unravel public religion within the pillars of American society. Campaigns of this nature usually begin with assaults on schooling and experience, as a result of these are the instruments that finest equip societies to see by means of propaganda. However such campaigns don’t finish there. Trusted establishments of all sorts—from public well being businesses to information organizations—will proceed to fall sufferer to coordinated makes an attempt to undermine their legitimacy and destroy the credibility of their leaders. For the opportunists who drive cynicism about our establishments, no single victory or toppled chief exhausts their zeal.
Sure, I made a mistake. In my first response to the atrocities of October 7, I ought to have said extra forcefully what all folks of fine conscience know: Hamas is a terrorist group that seeks to eradicate the Jewish state. And at a congressional listening to final month, I fell right into a well-laid entice. I uncared for to state clearly that requires the genocide of Jews are abhorrent and unacceptable, and that I might use each instrument at my disposal to guard college students from that type of hatred.
Most lately, the assaults have centered on my scholarship. My critics discovered cases in my educational writings the place some materials copied the language of different students with out correct attribution. I consider that every one students deserve full and applicable credit score for his or her work. Upon studying of those errors, I instantly requested corrections from the journals wherein the flagged articles have been printed, in line with how I’ve seen comparable school instances dealt with at Harvard.
I’ve by no means misrepresented my analysis outcomes, nor have I ever claimed credit score for different folks’s analysis. Moreover, the quotation errors mustn’t obscure a basic reality: I stand proudly by my work and its impression on the sector.
Regardless of the obsessive scrutiny of my peer-reviewed writings, few have commented on the content material of my scholarship, which focuses on the importance of minority positions in American politics. My analysis gathers concrete proof to indicate that when traditionally marginalized communities achieve a significant voice within the halls of energy, it alerts an open door the place many beforehand noticed solely limitations. And that, in flip, strengthens our democracy.
By this work, I requested questions that had not been requested, used then-cutting-edge quantitative analysis strategies, and established a brand new understanding of illustration in American politics. This work was printed within the nation’s main political science journals and spawned necessary analysis from different researchers.
I by no means imagined I must defend decades-old and broadly revered analysis, however the previous few weeks have laid waste to the reality. Those that had relentlessly campaigned to oust me for the reason that fall usually traded in lies and advert hominem insults, not reasoned arguments. They recycled drained racial stereotypes about black expertise and temperament. They pushed a false narrative of indifference and incompetence.
It’s not misplaced on me that I make a super canvas on which to mission any anxieties in regards to the generational and demographic modifications unfolding on American campuses: a black girl chosen to steer a serious establishment. Somebody who sees range as a supply of institutional energy and dynamism. Somebody who has championed a contemporary curriculum that spans the frontier of quantum science to the long-neglected historical past of Asian Individuals. Somebody who believes a daughter of Haitian immigrants has one thing to supply the nation’s oldest college.
I nonetheless consider that. As I return to educating and scholarship, I’ll proceed to combat for entry and alternative, and I’ll convey to my work the advantage I mentioned in my presidential inauguration speech: braveness. As a result of that’s the braveness that has sustained me all through my profession, and that’s the braveness it takes to face as much as those that search to undermine what makes universities distinctive in American life.
Having now seen how shortly reality can turn out to be a casualty within the midst of controversy, I might urge a broader warning: In tense moments, every of us have to be extra skeptical than ever of the loudest and most excessive voices in our tradition , regardless of how nicely organized or nicely linked they could be. Too usually they pursue self-serving agendas that needs to be met with extra questions and fewer credulity.
School campuses in our nation should stay locations the place college students can study, share and develop collectively, not areas the place proxy fights and political grandstands take root. Universities should stay impartial locations the place braveness and cause unite to advance reality, whatever the forces arrayed in opposition to them.
Claudine Homosexual is a former president of Harvard College, the place she is a professor of presidency and African and African-American research.
The Occasions is obliged to publish a wide range of letters to the editor. We wish to hear what you consider this or any of our articles. Listed here are some Suggestions. And right here is our electronic mail: letters@nytimes.com.
Observe the New York Occasions Opinion part on Fb, Instagram, TikTok, x and Thread.