That obscure outpost of hire higher education just up Massachusetts Avenue from MIT has today made a genuinely major announcement:
Harvard University on Thursday named Claudine Gay, dean of the school’s faculty of arts and sciences, as its next president in a historic move that will give the nation’s oldest college its first Black leader.
On paper, Gay is every anti-woke-ist’s nightmare: Black, a woman, a daughter of immigrants and…
…
Wait for it…
…
A professor with a joint appointment in Government and African American Studies. Which is to say, someone who studies Facts Which Must Not Be Named.
I know nothing about Dean Gay. A quick look at her CV shows a scholar looking at Black political life in America and the functioning of American democracy more broadly, which seems to me damned on point for our current circumstances.
A couple of stray notes: Harvard has had very few scientists at the helm. The most recent one was an important figure: James Conant, chemist and one of those who led the Manhattan Project, was influential in setting up the federal system of support for science after the war, and is one of early advocates for more and better public understanding of science. But his university presidency ended seventy years ago, and there hasn’t been a science-trained head since. Which is neither here nor there, but still, I find it interesting, and a reflection of Harvard’s priorities, centered on the political, economic and social life of the nation and the world. Science is useful; politics essential.
Also, for the second time in recent memory, both MIT and Harvard will have women leaders. Down the street from Gay, Sally Kornbluth is set to take over from Rafael Reif at my shop in about two weeks. In our own disciplinary sweepstakes, Kornbluth is notable in that she is a scientist–which is also a rare distinction in an MIT president; four of our five most recent presidents have been electrical engineers.
Digressions aside: on first glance and with little knowledge to back up this hunch, it looks like Harvard made a good choice. And Gay’s appointment matters far beyond the 02138 zip code, because love it or loathe it, what William Buckley called The Kremlin on the Charles is a major institution in the shaping of US political and intellectual life. Personnel is policy, and what Harvard has done here is express as policy ideas of political inclusion, reckoning with history, and representation. Having a Black woman of Haitian descent as head of what is broadly regarded as the leading educational and research university in the world* is indeed a BFD.
Good news, I think.
And yeah…I’m going to relish the predictable BS that will flow from the usual suspects.
Open thread.
*There are others, including one I’m a member of, that might demur, but in the public mind Harvard ranks very high indeed, again, for good and ill.
Image: Anonymous, Harvard Yard, February 2022.
Gwangung
My only comment is, “What took them?”
Old School
Congrats to Ms. Gay!
Danielx
Couldn’t happen to a more fitting group of people.
Albatrossity
Re scientists and Harvard presidency: My friend Don Kennedy, alumnus of Harvard, former head of Biology and later president of Stanford, would have loved to be president at Harvard. Alas, they never asked him. He was also head of the FDA in the Carter Administration, and then Editor of Science, so he had a distinguished career regardless. But my, how he longed to go back to Harvard as president…
JML
I’m thrilled for Dr. Gay. I wish we could care a little less about the Ivy League in general, especially Harvard & Yale (and their #%$^%&$%#@ law schools)
cain
lol – love it when brains explode!
Hey, anyone been bing-watching Megan and Harry on Netflix? Brilliant. It isn’t just about their story but also just the relationship between royalty and the media. The Daily Mail is one shit publication – if I recall it is owned by Murdock, right?
Fuck these people. These two have gone through so much and they come off looking like such normal people. Really enjoying hearing their story.
BenCisco 🇺🇸🎖️🖥️♦️
GREAT news, although I do feel for whoever has to mop up the mess with all the brains getting all explodey and stuff
Tom Levenson
@Albatrossity: I think I knew that.
If you look at the list of recent Harvard incumbents, it’s pretty clear who the establishment within the university thinks of as presidential material. Since Conant, it’s been a classicist, a lawyer, an English professor, an economist (Larry Effing Summers), a historian, and another economist. Now, with Gay, a political scientist.
You could argue that Stanford got what it wanted out of Kennedy, as it is now firmly established as one of the top 3-5 science/tech research institutions in the US. Harvard is too, though, and ISTM (no insider at all), clearly has a view as to how to maintain its cultural, economic and political pre-eminence.
Spanky
I do find her name to be the cherry on top of this academic sundae, especially for all those “don’t say gay” cranks.
Matt McIrvin
It’s not as if Harvard’s science departments haven’t thrived, regardless (he said with some self-interest).
Another Scott
Good news and well done. Her name reminds me of Hanna Holborn Gray who was my alma mater’s president from 1978 to 1993. Chicago got there quicker, as usual.
;-)
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Tom Levenson
@Spanky: I’m hoping that in the fullness of time she will be remembered so fondly that they name a Harvard dormitory after her, which would thenceforth be known as Gay House.
Spanky
@Gwangung: My guess would be alumni, and to paraphrase another scientist, “education moves forward, one funeral at a time”.
Suzanne
@JML:
Right?!
I find it deeply bizarre that adults over the age of, like, maybe 30 talk about where they went to college at all. It’s like going to a job interview and talking about your middle-school summer camp.
Spanky
@Tom Levenson: My own alma mater benefited greatly from one particular industrialist’s family, and there is now a dorm named Beaver Hall.
College students continue to react predictably.
Spanky
@Suzanne: Band camp!
West of the Rockies
Wouldn’t it be nice if we lived in a world where a POC woman becoming president of Harvard (or the US) wasn’t a big, odd story?
Isn’t it pretty to think so?
ian
@Tom Levenson: I wanted to say thank you for posting so many interesting and wonderful images. Your posts are always a visual treat.
Spanky
@Suzanne: My old roommate was recently asked to provide his transcripts for a job application.
He is 68.
(Reasons for needing a new job at 68 are complicated and to me, infuriating, and I’ll not go into it.)
Tom Levenson
@Matt McIrvin: To the point that Faire Harvard has stopped trying to buy MIT to be its school of science. ;-)
PAM Dirac
@Spanky: The dorm I was in as a freshman at RPI was Hall Hall.
Tom Levenson
@Spanky: Heh.
I’m going out on a limb to suggest that one of Harvard’s earliest presidents, Leonard Hoar, isn’t going to get a house named after him.
Tom Levenson
@ian: My pleasure! I’m glad you enjoy them.
UncleEbeneezer
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if
millions ofthe voices of Ann Althouse, Glenn Reynolds, Amy Wax, John McWhorter etc. suddenly cried out in terror.Spanky
@West of the Rockies: My own alma mater’s new Prez is a woman of Indian descent, and has lit any initial good will on fire.
For instance.
Also for instance.
Old Dan and Little Ann
All those white dudes that are way more qualified left in the cold once again.
Ruckus
@Tom Levenson:
Not sure how you intended this but it got a chuckle out of me.
lollipopguild
@JML: It never ceases to amaze me how many conservatives are ivy league law school grads who are now loud and proud right wing morons.
trollhattan
Heh, nice engineering jab.
I keed, I keed.
Suzanne
@PAM Dirac: When I was in my freshman year, some absolute LEGEND in the Residence Life department assigned every bed in one wing of one of the dorms to guys named Brandon.
LMAO.
Fake Irishman
I was a first-year PhD student at Michigan when we tried to hire her as an associate prof. We were bummed not to get her.
Burnspbesq
More than one way to fight fiercely.
pat
Is that what you meant to write?
Fake Irishman
@Fake Irishman:
her CV had a lot of good stuff on race and politics. I’ve read a bit of it, but it’s been 20 years…
Tom Levenson
@pat: Nope.
zhena gogolia
@cain: I’m enjoying it.
Spanky
@Tom Levenson: Dang! And here I was thinking you threw in another slick turn of phrase.
JPL
@lollipopguild: It’s time to ask them to define WOKE.
CarolPW
My sister entered Radcliffe in 1967, and I entered UC Santa Cruz in 1968. My parents sold the farm (or were bankrupted out of the farm) in 1969. From 1969 on I spent summers in Cambridge. The first time went there on the bus, and spent much of that summer helping rewire the dimmer board at the Loeb Theater. Other trips (via plane because dog and rabbit) involved roadie work schlepping of equipment to various venues including Tanglewood (saw the Who do all of Tommy) and selling hand-dipped candles on the street (I had a Cambridge peddler’s license). Loved Cambridge almost as much as Santa Cruz. Selling candles around Harvard was more profitable than selling them around MIT.
Albatrossity
@Tom Levenson: Yeah, scientists do not seem to have the cachet that the Harvard folks want in the president’s office. Or maybe they have offered the appointment to some, and they sensibly turned it down :-)
Stanford was certainly on an upward trajectory when Don was appointed president there, but he kept that trajectory going, for sure. In my time there I was able to take classes taught by Nobel Prize winners, and meet plenty more of them when they came to campus to give lectures or seminars. And they have added plenty more since then!
MazeDancer
Smith, too, will have a Black woman at the helm, new next year. Though, Smith has been led by a Black woman before.
But MA looking good, as ever, in higher ed.
Tony Jay
@cain:
It’s owned by Jonathan Harold Edmond Vere Harmsworth, Viscount Rothermere, who is exactly as toxic as he sounds and continues the family tradition of using the Daily Heil to spew fascist hatebile into British ears while he enjoys a very pleasant life in France and the Caribbean.
Paul Dacre is the Editor, and all you can say about him is that Flobalob wanted him to head up Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator (the selection board of Tory plants basically said they’d kill themselves and their families rather than rubber stamp his selection) and he’d be entirely at home editing Fox News.
Cheryl from Maryland
@Another Scott: U of C? I was there from 1979 to 1983 as a graduate student Really felt good about her as President (mainly because I had to endure some sexism, and I felt her presence mitigated some of it.
Tom Levenson
@Spanky: I wish I were as clever as some of my typos.
hueyplong
@UncleEbeneezer: I had forgotten that G Reynolds exists, so you did me no favors with the reminder.
Barbara
Congratulations to Ms. Gay. I hope she no longer cares what the naysayers think.
Bill Arnold
@Tony Jay:
I had to drop my decades-long subscription to New Scientist because “Jonathan Harold Edmond Vere Harmsworth, Viscount Rothermere” bought it. I will not pay money to fascist scum, and he is such. IMO, of course.
Also, it has always been on the edge of cringe and Jonathan can be expected to be (maybe has been) pushing it to cover right-wing “science” and to de-emphasize those parts of science right-wingers find it fashionable to belittle.
zhena gogolia
She looks nice. I like her glasses.
UncleEbeneezer
@hueyplong: (robot noises)
Kristine
@Bill Arnold: Damn–I read New Scientist for years. That’s a shame.
Tony Jay
@Bill Arnold:
One thing I’ll always be grateful to Mango 45 for (hear me out) is how he personified, encapsulated and popularised the general right-wing preoccupation of turning anything and everything they touch into shit.
Thanks for clarifying that, you buffoon. That was useful. They really do wreck everything they get their hands on.
The Lodger
@Tom Levenson: I remember General Hoar from one of the recent wars in the Middle East… although it’s a shame no one remembers Major Payne, Colonel Knowledge and Corporal Punishment.
Dangerman
@BenCisco 🇺🇸🎖️🖥️♦️: I have just the thing. A Flock of Seagulls. Natures vacuum cleaners.
For those into nature (and noise, and, no, not referencing that other Flock of Seagulls), the Elephant Seal Rookery of San Simeon is entering peak birthing season; right around Christmas, IIRC (peak mating is conveniently around Valentines). To see the newest of the newborns, watch the Seagulls. They arrive on scene immediately.
If you into the extremes of nature, SS can be done same day as the Monarch butterfly grove of Pismo Beach. Make a day of it and see the Lighthouse restored by a bunch of dedicated/crazy/crazy dedicated folks, too.
scav
@The Lodger: Didn’t Private Parts serve under General Hoar?
The Moar You Know
I’ve never met a conservative, and that includes conservatives from the Ivies, that didn’t hate college education. This will give them something else to be tiresome about, nothing more.
Ruckus
@West of the Rockies:
Isn’t it pretty to think so?
Yes, yes it is. But that would take away a dramatic amount of hate in the world, and a lot of the world is built upon at least some level of hate. Hate of “others.” Hate of “the unknown.” Hate of “That doesn’t look like me in the mirror so that lessons me rather than reminds me that I’m (insert whatever here). We are all human – supposedly, and we all have human failings and foibles. We don’t all look at something/anything, someone/anyone and always see the same exact thing or person. We all have prejudices and points of view and they cloud our visions. Most of us here are relatively similar in our views, but I’d bet there is almost never an actual, 100% consensus. That is the nature of humanity, and we all need to understand that some will always be in the in group and some will always be in the outside group. Survival of a species often demands a level of sameness but our current level of humanity, doesn’t always give us a good enough example to follow or we are all made up of non followers.
Sister Golden Bear
Time to mix myself a drink — because the tiny tears of impotent rage are always so delightful and refreshing.
bbleh
Excellent work! Now we must turn our attention to the War on Christmas. We’re late on this one! (Damn Woke Agenda just has too many items…)
Ruckus
@Spanky:
I got a new job at 63 and retired at 72. Sometimes life doesn’t treat everyone the same and sometimes life is made more difficult by assholes who want to lead but are 10000% incapable of being a reasonable leader. For examples look at conservatives in our politics. Most of them couldn’t seemingly lead a gold fish to water.
My point is that life does not treat everyone the same, no matter if you were born with a gold spoon in your mouth, and often far worse if you weren’t.
There are a number of things that need changing, one of them is that wealth makes you a better person. It doesn’t. It does often make one a worse person. I can give you examples. I imagine you can give me some as well.
Steeplejack
@The Lodger:
General Disarray (Dougie O’Connell) is the sidekick of Butters’s supervillain persona Professor Chaos on South Park.
NutmegAgain
@cain: Normal people who live in mega millions mansions on the California coast, and travel by private jet? Please. I don’t follow the Kardashians, and I also have no interest in the British Royal family, so called, or its spin offs. I think the idea of a hierarchical aristocracy capped by royalty as in the British case is the living apotheosis of embodied racism–how can it not be? It’s all about worshipping the sanctity of blood, and bloodline. Theirs, obvs.
Apropos of President-to-be-Gay — good for Harvard, which I never thought I’d say in this lifetime. (I have stories.) I wish her the best, and sincerely hope nobody immediately pulls her aside to tell her that, “Larry Summers was right, you know.”
Roger Moore
@Suzanne:
I assume a lot of it is that at the “elite” universities, much of the value is from the networking, not the education. Alumni of an Ivy League school are supposed to help each other out, which can only happen if you advertise your background. So yeah, when you hear someone bragging about their alma mater, it’s frequently a way of asking for help, rather than just bragging. It’s a great example of how privilege works.
bbleh
@NutmegAgain: … sincerely hope nobody immediately pulls her aside to tell her that, “Larry Summers was right, you know.”
I dunno, might be amusing if somebody tried. And it would be even better if we could get the video.
Roger Moore
@Dangerman:
I will have to keep that in mind. I am planning a New Years trip to visit Hearst Castle and the elephant seal beaches. Seeing some monarchs along the way would be excellent.
kalakal
When Mussolini invaded Abyssinia in 1935 the British Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare & French Prime Minister Pierre Laval came up with a secret peace deal – the Hoare Laval Pact – that basically gave the place to Mussolini. When details leaked to public outrage both men were sacked. George V summed it up
“No more Hoares to Paris”
Miss Bianca
@CarolPW: Wow!
Another Scott
@Cheryl from Maryland: I was there the same time, undergrad in physics. Small world. :-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Omnes Omnibus
@zhena gogolia: BTW you know Lawrence’s current president is also an AA woman, right?
JanieM
@CarolPW: I started at MIT in 1968 and stayed there for most of my summers. Maybe we passed on the street! Did you know Patty Nelson at Santa Cruz? She was my best friend when we were in grad school at Yale. We lost touch eventually, but she did very well indeed as an academic, while I took a different path
ETA: One of my favorite Santa Cruz stories from Patty was that she took one of her core courses from Norman O. Brown, and the course was called “The Pursuit of Truth in the Company of Friends.” I thought that sounded like a rather different college experience from the one I’d had. ;-)