For the first time in its nearly 400-year history, Harvard University will be headed up by a person of color.
On Thursday, the school named Claudine Gay its 30th president. She is also only the second woman to ever hold the position.
“I am humbled by the confidence that the governing boards have placed in me and by the prospect of succeeding President [Lawrence] Bacow in leading this remarkable institution,” Gay said in a press release. “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.
“Today, we are in a moment of remarkable and accelerating change — socially, politically, economically, and technologically,” added Gay, the daughter of Haitian immigrants. “So many fundamental assumptions about how the world works and how we should relate to one another are being tested.”
Gay earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Stanford in 1992, then was awarded a Ph.D. in government from Harvard in 1998, earning the Toppan Prize for best dissertation in political science in the process. She was hired as a professor of government at the university in 2006 and has served as Edgerley Family Dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) since 2018.
“Harvard has a long history of rising to meet new challenges, of converting the energy of our time into forces of renewal and reinvention,” she said of her newest and most prestigious position yet. “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.”
Gay’s predecessor Bacow, who announced in June that he’d step down at the end of the academic year, referred to her as “a brilliant and inspiring leader.”
“Claudine is a person of bedrock integrity,” Bacow said in a release. “She will provide Harvard with the strong moral compass necessary to lead this great university. The search committee has made an inspired choice for our 30th president. Under Claudine Gay’s leadership, Harvard’s future is very bright.”
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