Dear Members of the Harvard Community,
Four score and seven semesters ago, our board brought forth on this great campus a new leader conceived in equity and dedicated to the proposition that all women are to be believed – unless they are black, apparently.
Now, we are engaged in a great culture war, testing whether this campus or any university so conceived and so diverse, can long endure. I was met on the great battle-field of this intolerant patriarchy. I have come to dedicate a portion of my scholarship, now a final resting place of those who gave me their loosely transcribed intellectual property as duplicative language that my doctorate might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this in solidarity.
But, in a larger sense, I cannot dedicate – nay consecrate – nor even hollow – this ground. In other words, there is not a shovel big enough to bury the past when your work is publicly documented. The brave men and women and non-binary people, living and dead, who are committed to the struggle of not plagiarizing, have consecrated it far above my poor power to add or detract a citation here or an attribution there. The world will little note, nor long remember what I wrote here, assuming these words are mine, but it can never forget what I did. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who submitted it for peer review have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that we are committed to our truths that we hold to be self-evident. That all Ivy League presidents are not created equal because of white supremacy, no matter how great the endowment by their alumnus, in the pursuit of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one President, me, to dissolve the political bands which has connected she/her with a university and to assume among the Powers of the Earth the separate and equitable station to which the Laws of Nature and the State entitled me via Title IX and the one about Civil Rights, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Womankind requires that I should declare the causes which impel to the Separation or be fired for ethics violations as my attorneys suggested would happen if I didn’t resign. So be it, amen.
As we welcome a new year and a new semester, I hope we can all look forward to brighter days and try to remember what my grad-pappy once told me. He said, “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” Or my cousin Snarf Snarf, who said, “Words are just words until action actually starts. But actions speak louder than words, but at the same time, words speak louder actions because sometimes it’s the right thing to do.” Very cool.
I’ll never forget these words, please don’t forget mine.
In closing, I would like to remind everyone of the great calling Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave us when he said, “Ask not what you can do for your country but what your country can do for you.”
Sincerely,
Claudine Gay
