“Discouraged but not deterred,” was how Janice Gassam Asare described her reaction to the latest high-profile setback in her efforts to diversify the ranks of higher-education leaders.
When Claudine Gay resigned last week as president of Harvard University, her critics framed it as a win for those who have been fighting to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at colleges nationwide. Harvard’s first Black president was a champion of diversity efforts and an inspiration to many in the field. Her downfall — partly self-inflicted but also largely orchestrated by activists and politicians hostile to what they see as the liberal takeover of higher education — threatened to further destabilize a field that was already on the defensive.
Gassam Asare, who founded and runs a DEI consultancy, BWG Business Solutions, said that the coordinated campaign to oust Gay could dissuade other minority candidates from aspiring to high-profile positions like college presidencies, where they’d likely be scrutinized more closely than their white peers. Gay, she wrote on LinkedIn, was “used as a pawn in the anti-DEI chess game” and denounced as a “diversity hire” despite her strong academic credentials. Gay was dean of Harvard’s largest faculty, as well as a professor of government and of African and African-American studies.
Bill Ackman, a billionaire investor and Harvard alumnus, portrayed Gay on social media as someone who wouldn’t have been considered for the presidency if it weren’t for “a fat finger” on the diversity scale. Harvard and other elite universities, he wrote, limit presidential searches to those who meet the requirements of their DEI offices. “Shrinking the pool of candidates based on required race, gender, and/or sexual orientation criteria is not the right approach to identifying the best leaders for our most prestigious universities,” Ackman wrote.
With attacks on colleges’ diversity efforts only deepening amid the widespread debate over Gay’s hiring and resignation, other minority college leaders should expect to be viewed through a similar skeptical lens, Gassam Asare said in an interview. “When you’re from an underrepresented group, no matter how many journal articles or books you have, you’re under much more scrutiny than your counterparts,” she said. In Gay’s case, “they went out looking for things they could pin her with.”
If potential presidential candidates on other campuses are deterred by the harsh spotlight that shined on Gay, that could spell trouble for faltering efforts to diversify the ranks of college presidents. Even as student bodies have become more diverse, the college presidency remains largely white and male. Presidents of color accounted for a little more than one out of four presidents, and women of color slightly more than one out of every 10 presidents, according to the latest survey by the American Council on Education.
Campus leaders attribute their struggle to hire diverse presidents to a number of perceived barriers, including having too few candidates in the academic pipeline, from undergraduate study to tenure-track positions, and worrying about legal challenges if they consider race in hiring and promotion. Gassam Asare added that minority scholars, because they’re often spread so thin, tend to shoulder heavier burdens mentoring students and serving on committees. That, she said, can make achieving tenure more difficult.
One of the main goals of DEI offices is to identify and help eliminate barriers like these that could prevent more people of color from moving up in the ranks of academe. But in many cases, the people who lead these offices say, they continue to be stymied by limited budgets and skepticism, if not outright hostility, to their work.
It takes a lot of courage and tenacity to stay in there and fight.
Battles over DEI continue to be waged in statehouses around the country. Supporters say their efforts are needed to counter decades of exclusionary policies and practices that have held back people of color. The mostly Republican critics describe such programs as divisive and discriminatory. Gay’s tepid responses during a congressional hearing on antisemitism added fuel to complaints that DEI champions are more concerned with protecting people from other marginalized backgrounds than in protecting Jewish students from harassment. As tensions on campus continue to boil amid the Israel-Hamas war, DEI offices will face continued pressure to explicitly support Jewish, as well as Palestinian students even as the very existence of such offices is being threatened.
The Chronicle is tracking legislation that would prohibit colleges from having diversity, equity, and inclusion offices or staff; ban mandatory diversity training; ban the use of diversity statements in hiring and promotion; or prohibit colleges from using race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in admissions or employment. At least 40 bills have been introduced in 22 states. Seven have become law, most prominently in Texas and Florida. Other states, including Wisconsin and Oklahoma, have restricted DEI efforts outside the legislative process.
Adding to the pressure to roll back or substantially revise diversity efforts was the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in June that struck down race-conscious decisions in admissions.
Conservative activists have made it clear that they see Gay’s resignation as being about more than allegations of plagiarism in her academic writing or her legalistic responses to the congressional committee about whether calls for genocide would violate Harvard policies.
Christopher F. Rufo, the right-wing activist who’s claimed credit for being part of a team that pushed for Gay’s resignation, promised, in a post on X, to widen the attack. “Today, we celebrate victory. Tomorrow, we get back to the fight. We must not stop until we have abolished DEI ideology from every institution in America.”
The conservative commentator Liz Wheeler piled on with more militaristic analogies. “Claudine Gay RESIGNS from Harvard in a crushing loss to DEI, wokeism, antisemitism & university elitism,” she posted on X. “The way to defeat wokeism is to be SAVAGE and relentless. If we are, morality will triumph over Marxism.”
Another DEI consultant described the frustration and exhaustion many in the field are feeling, especially after Gay’s resignation. “To recognize that this is viewed as another step in the eradication of this important work is scary and disappointing,” said Syrine A. Reese-Gaines, founder of Brainy HR Solutions, a human-resources provider which specializes in diversity, equity, and inclusion.
“As a woman of color who does this work, this has been a very difficult and heart-wrenching situation to follow,” she said.
“We always know there will be an extra layer of scrutiny. You have to be twice as good” and the mistakes you make will cost you twice as much, Reese-Gaines added. “It takes a lot of courage and tenacity to stay in there and fight.” Many people, she predicted, will leave the field. “Only the strong will survive.”
Gassam Asare said that people from marginalized backgrounds who rise to positions of prominence often feel exposed and vulnerable, particularly when their identities are tied to concepts that are under attack. “There’s a sense that when you come in as a first, you don’t always feel protected and supported,” she said. “Particularly with DEI roles, a lot of us come in and are asked to transform these institutions and systems but are not given the tools we need to do that. We become the perfect scapegoats” when changes aren’t happening fast enough.
We need a different approach to how we talk about these issues. The discussion has become weaponized.
Reese-Gaines believes that Gay “was pushed into an arena without the appropriate armor.” The presidents who testified before the House committee were heavily prepped by lawyers and were careful — too careful, critics said — to limit their responses to legalistic parsing of emotionally charged questions about antisemitism. They clearly weren’t adequately prepared to speak on a more empathetic level when confronted with what many considered a predictable ambush from the right.
Gay, in an essay in The New York Times, wrote that “It is not lost on me that I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses: a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution. Someone who views diversity as a source of institutional strength and dynamism.”
One of the most persistent criticisms of colleges’ diversity efforts, which have resurfaced with recent complaints over colleges’ handling of antisemitism, is that they divide people into camps of oppressors and oppressed, with white people, including most Jews, relegated to the former role.
Even those who describe that critique as unfair and an oversimplification of their work to make all students feel included and respected concede that colleges need to retool the way they frame diversity efforts.
“We need a different approach to how we talk about these issues,” Reese-Gaines said. “The discussion has become weaponized. There are longstanding injustices and inequities that exist, but as we point them out, we also have to share stories that empower people” and don’t just present them as victims.
In a blog post shortly after Gay’s resignation, Patricia A. McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, wrote that those who are celebrating Gay’s resignation are actually seeking “to put a stake through the heart of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, the practice of affirmative action in admissions and hiring, and all other efforts to promote racial and social justice in this nation, efforts they denounce under the all-encompassing penumbra of ‘wokeness.’”
McGuire acknowledged that plagiarism is a serious offense and that she was in no way excusing Gay’s conduct for reportedly lifting chunks of others’ works without proper citations or quotation marks. The former Harvard president, she wrote, was “a flawed standard bearer” whose “academic mistakes came back to haunt her and Harvard.”
But McGuire added that “We have to ask, with sadness and regret, whether Dr. Gay’s story will discourage Black women from pursuing high office in universities and corporations and public positions,” because of the fear that anti-DEI activists “will terrorize and debilitate their ability to lead, eventually hounding them out of office to the satisfaction of the wolfpack.”
That, she wrote, should not be allowed to happen. McGuire added that college leaders, who’ve been accused of too often staying silent when their diversity efforts are under attack, should do a better job of defending them. Otherwise politicians, she wrote, will continue to expand their efforts to dictate “what to teach, who to admit, who to hire and who to fire.”
