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Claudine Gay was named 30th president of Harvard University on Thursday, becoming the first person of color and second woman in the role, the university said.
Gay, a “distinguished scholar of democracy and political participation,” has served as the dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences since 2018, guiding the faculty through the COVID-19 pandemic, the university said in a statement.
The daughter of Haitian immigrants, Gay will join the ranks of other female presidents at universities, including Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania, among others. The leaders of the other Ivy League schools – Columbia, Princeton and Yale – are men.
“Today, we are in a moment of remarkable and accelerating change — socially, politically, economically, and technologically,” Gay said after she was chosen to lead the school, according to the university.
She added: “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.”
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Gay was elected to the presidency by the Harvard Corporation, the University’s principal governing board, with the consent of the University’s Board of Overseers, concluding a monthslong search.
She will succeed Harvard President Lawrence Bacow, who announced in June that he would step down at the end of the academic year after serving as president since 2018. Gay will become president on July 1.
“Over the last five years, Claudine and I have worked very closely together,” Bacow said in a statement. “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.”
As dean of the university’s largest and most academically diverse faculty, Gay “guided efforts to expand student access and opportunity, spur excellence and innovation in teaching and research, enhance aspects of academic culture, and bring new emphasis and energy to areas such as quantum science and engineering; climate change; ethnicity, indigeneity, and migration; and the humanities,” the statement said.
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Harvard legal scholar Laurence Tribe called the selection “great news for Harvard and for higher education.”
“Our new president will be Claudine Gay, a brilliant scholar and inspiring leader, Harvard’s second female president and its first president of color,” Tribe wrote on Twitter. “As Dean of Arts and Sciences since 2018, she has already made a historic mark.”
Gay received her bachelor’s degree in economics from Stanford in 1992 and her Ph.D. in government from Harvard in1998, the university said.
She served as an assistant professor and then tenured associate professor at Stanford and was recruited to Harvard in 2006 as a professor of government, the statement said. She was appointed a professor of African and African American Studies in 2007 and named the Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government in 2015.
As dean, Gay expanded access to Harvard by enhancing financial aid, the statement said. Earlier this year, she announced an increase, to $75,000, of the family income threshold below which students admitted to Harvard College can attend for free, the statement said.
She is also the founding chair of Harvard’s Inequality in America Initiative, which aims to advance scholarship in areas such as the effects of child poverty and deprivation on educational opportunity, inequities in STEM education, immigration and social mobility, democratic governance and American inequality in a global context, the statement said.
“Claudine has brought to her roles a rare blend of incisiveness and inclusiveness, intellectual range and strategic savvy, institutional ambition and personal humility, a respect for enduring ideals, and a talent for catalyzing change,” Penny Pritzker, senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation and chair of Harvard’s presidential search committee, said in a statement.
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