Reuters/Brian Snyder
Claudine Gay, the former President of Harvard who resigned on Tuesday amid a plagiarism scandal and backlash over missteps during an antisemitism hearing, admitted to making “mistakes” before Congress but said she stood behind the findings found in her highly scrutinized research.
In an Op-Ed published in The New York Times, Gay said her status as a Black woman leading America’s oldest campus put a target on her back for those apprehensive of demographic changes, adding that she’d been inundated with death threats and been “called the N-word more times than I care to count.”
Gay said she made “mistakes” when she dodged questions by Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, who asked campus leaders during a hearing if calls for Jewish genocide violated their codes of conduct.