Former Harvard University president Claudine Gay will return to teaching in the fall, leading a course called What Is a University? Purpose and Politics in Higher Education. The application-only tutorial-style class, offered through the Department of Government, will trace the history of U.S. higher education through current controversies over “curriculum, admissions, research, preservation and governance,” according to details first reported by The Harvard Crimson.
“A central goal of the course is to encourage Harvard students to engage in critical thinking about their own institution and to understand the background political, social and market pressures that influence their college experience,” reads the course description. The class will reportedly end in asking students to propose a vision for institutional reform or reinvention.
Next spring, Gay is set to teach two courses in government: African American Politics and Politics of Race, Ethnicity and Immigration. She did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Gay held two deanships at Harvard before assuming the presidency in 2023 and resigning in early 2024 amid external and internal pressure. Gay, who remained on the Harvard faculty, is currently on leave but hasn’t been entirely out of the spotlight. In January, for example, she delivered the annual Arturo A. Schomburg Lecture and Conversation at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, arguing that knowledge institutions that abandon diversity, equity and inclusion efforts can’t effectively tackle other large-scale problems.
“We can’t defend knowledge while turning our backs on those who have been excluded from producing it,” she said at the time. “Some institutions find ways to advance their missions, even in hostile environments; others surrender before the first shot is fired. The choice of which path to take remains, even now, especially now, within institutional control. How do we rebuild institutional courage in an age of intimidation? What can we learn from institutions that have refused to surrender? How do we nurture the next generation who will carry forward the work of transformation?”
