Harvard University has announced that Claudine Gay will become its 30th president. (Stephanie ... [+]
Harvard University has announced that Claudine Gay will become its new president. She will begin her duties as the university’s 30th president on July 1, 2023.
Gay will succeed current Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow, who announced earlier this year he should be stepping down as president after serving in the role for five years. The daughter of Haitian immigrants, she will be the first person of color and only the second woman to lead Harvard.
Gay has been the Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard since August 2018. Prior to that she was the university’s dean of social science from 2015 to 2018. Gay was an assistant professor and then associate professor at Stanford before joining Harvard in 2006 as a professor of government.
She was also appointed a professor of African and African American Studies in 2007 and named the Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government in 2015, when she became Harvard’s dean of social science.
Gay earned her bachelor’s degree in 1992 from Stanford, where she majored in economics and won the Anna Laura Myers Prize for the best undergraduate thesis. In 1998, she received her Ph.D. in government from Harvard, where she won the Toppan Prize for best dissertation in political science.
“Claudine is a remarkable leader who is profoundly devoted to sustaining and enhancing Harvard’s academic excellence, to championing both the value and the values of higher education and research, to expanding opportunity, and to strengthening Harvard as a fount of ideas and a force for good in the world,” said Penny Pritzker, senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation and chair of Harvard’s presidential search committee.
Quoted in the Harvard Gazette, Gay said, “I am humbled by the confidence that the governing boards have placed in me and by the prospect of succeeding President Bacow in leading this remarkable institution. It has been a privilege to work with Larry over the last five years. He has shown me that leadership isn’t about one person. It’s about all of us, moving forward together, and that’s a lesson I take with me into this next journey.”
She added, “Today, we are in a moment of remarkable and accelerating change — socially, politically, economically, and technologically. So many fundamental assumptions about how the world works and how we should relate to one another are being tested.”
“Yet Harvard has a long history of rising to meet new challenges, of converting the energy of our time into forces of renewal and reinvention. With the strength of this extraordinary institution behind us, we enter a moment of possibility, one that calls for deeper collaboration across the University, across all of our remarkable Schools. There is an urgency for Harvard to be engaged with the world and to bring bold, brave, pioneering thinking to our greatest challenges.”
You can hear her discuss her appointment and her aspirations for Harvard here.
Gay is well known for her research on American political participation. She is the founding chair of Harvard’s Inequality in America Initiative, a multidisciplinary effort that has researched the effects of child poverty, inequities in STEM education, immigration and social mobility, democratic governance, and American inequality.
Gay is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addition, she has been a fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She serves on the boards of the Pew Research Center, Phillips Exeter Academy, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She also served as a member of the American Association of Universities advisory board on racial equity in higher education.
Lawrence Bacow praised Gay’s selection. “Over the last five years, Claudine and I have worked very closely together,” he said. “She is a terrific academic leader with a keen mind, great leadership and communication skills, excellent judgment, and a basic decency and kindness that will serve Harvard well. Perhaps most importantly, she commands the respect of all who know her and have worked with her... The search committee has made an inspired choice for our 30th president. Under Claudine Gay’s leadership, Harvard’s future is very bright.”
