Page 52 - EW February 2023
P. 52
International News
UNITED STATES pathway to equity that still lies ahead. They include Gloria
Harvard's first black woman president Blackwell, chief executive of the American Association of
University Women, which awarded Prof. Gay a postdoctoral
fellowship nearly 20 years ago at Stanford. Gay’s fellowship
was one of 13,000 that the association has funded since its
founding in 1881, and her career success “is quite gratify-
ing”, says Blackwell. “Harvard is the gold standard, obvi-
ously, for so many people, not just in their own country,
but around the world.”
Harvard seems to have taken a systematic and sustained
approach in its pathway to placing Prof. Gay in its top post,
says Andrea Silbert, president of the Eos Foundation, which
funds work in areas of gender and racial diversity. The
university says that it has chosen its new president after a
five-month search process that assembled and considered
600 nominees. Yet, Silbert says the university also appears
to have guided Gay into positions that would improve her
readiness for the presidency.
Dr. (Prof) Claudine Gay: top academic credentials The dean of arts and sciences heads the university’s
largest and most academically diverse collection of fac-
IN MAKING ONE OF THE BIGGEST professional ulty, and Gay’s experiences in that job included handling
and symbolic breakthroughs in all of US higher several high-profile sexual harassment complaints against
education — becoming the first black female presi- prominent Harvard professors, and overseeing revisions to
dent of Harvard University — Claudine Gay is getting some promotion and tenure policies designed to reduce biases.
predictable help on identifying what comes next. “I think Harvard felt like it needs to lead by example,” says
Dr. (Prof.) Gay, to be clear, brings top academic creden- Silbert “and make sure that everybody who goes to Harvard
tials to the job. She earned an undergraduate degree in eco- feels like they are represented at the very top.”
nomics from Stanford University, winning the Anna Laura Although a black woman as president of Harvard is un-
Myers Prize for best undergraduate thesis. She earned a precedented, women presidents are not. Dr. Gay’s prede-
doctorate in government from Harvard, winning the Top- cessor in the corner office was Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust. A
pan Prize for best dissertation in political science. She be- hard-as-nails achiever, Faust churlishly declined to meet
came a tenured faculty member at both institutions, before with your editor who travelled all the way to Boston. Nev-
her promotions by Harvard to become dean of social science ertheless we wrote a cover story (EW, June 2009) on the
and then dean of the faculty of arts and sciences. world’s most respected university. It’s unlikely Dr. Gay will
And yet within moments of the announcement that she be a softer touch.
will head the nation’s oldest university, one of the predict-
able responses for a nation still steeped in racism — harsh CHINA
political pushback — arrived. Fiercely conservative outlets Internal brain drain
began publishing critiques citing anonymous sources ques-
tioning Gay’s qualifications and suggesting that her career THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT HAS ORDERED
success, instead of marking achievement by black women, universities in the east of the country not to use tal-
was built on unfair favouritism towards them. ent funding to poach academics from the nation’s
Amid a lifetime of navigating such experiences, Gay mid-west and north east, which is causing an internal brain
embraced the milestone with an introductory speech that drain. The ministries of education and finance sought to of-
celebrated her Haitian-born parents and their faith in the fer some encouragement to university autonomy in funding
power of education and then gently reminded her fellow management in a notice, but said talent funding “must not
academics of the toxic political atmosphere surrounding be used by institutions in the east,” where cities such as
them. Today’s high-tech world offers “endless access to in- Beijing and Shanghai are located, “to bring in talent from
formation”, she told her colleagues in a jammed foyer of the mid-west and north east regions”.
Harvard’s Smith Campus Center. “But it’s getting harder Previously, in the 2017 version of the notice, institutions
to know what to believe.” were “not encouraged” to do so. The tone became stricter in
Some of the many advocates of equity who long stood be- a 2019 central government missive on promoting science,
hind Gay made it clear that they are overjoyed by Harvard’s which aimed to “support the central and western regions to
decision and by its potentially transformative power over all stabilise their talent building”.
of US higher education, and yet are fully aware of the long “It is difficult to really stop the mobility of talent, because
52 EDUCATIONWORLD FEBRUARY 2023