When Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard University president in early January, pundits credited her departure to a successful removal campaign led by conservative activists.
The strategy behind Gay’s ousting wasn’t new, and has been used to advance conservative agendas, influence school curriculum and demonize Black people throughout history. What was different this time was the quick efficacy of the takedown, which, according to some political scientists, historians and lawyers, emboldened conservative activists and could have dangerous implications for the future of education.
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Sustained and coordinated pressure through media coverage helped kick off the campaign against Gay. Critics, mainly conservative activists, used social media and news outlets to claim that she responded inadequately to congressional questioning about antisemitism on campus. Soon thereafter, they levied allegations that she plagiarized some of her work.
Weeks prior to Gay’s resignation, the rightwing activist Christopher Rufo publicized the plan to remove her from office: “We launched the Claudine Gay plagiarism story from the Right. The next step is to smuggle it into the media apparatus of the Left, legitimizing the narrative to center-left actors who have the power to topple her. Then squeeze.” In an interview with Politico after Gay vacated her post, Rufo described his successful strategy as a three-pronged approach of “narrative, financial and political pressure”.
Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, an associate professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University, noted the effectiveness of the plan, and warned of what it could portend considering that these actors have “seen the impact that they can have when they are able to marshal pressure from the media, donors and others”.
He pointed to similar strategies employed in the conservative movement to reshape state legislatures, where activists and lobbyists leverage understaffed and under-resourced statehouses by providing them with research and advice for bills in order to sway them. In his book State Capture, Hertel-Fernandez wrote about how the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council drafts and disseminates bills to apply political pressure. “They can have an outsized impact by diagnosing the weak spot in the institution and going after that,” said Hertel-Fernandez. “Just as they did in the case with Harvard.”
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His post, according to Leah Watson, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, serves as an invitation for conservatives to use DEI as a dog whistle in the future, to invalidate anything from the progress of historically marginalized communities to medical research.
Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, an associate professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University, noted the effectiveness of the plan, and warned of what it could portend considering that these actors have “seen the impact that they can have when they are able to marshal pressure from the media, donors and others”.
He pointed to similar strategies employed in the conservative movement to reshape state legislatures, where activists and lobbyists leverage understaffed and under-resourced statehouses by providing them with research and advice for bills in order to sway them.
He collaborated with Governor Ron DeSantis to draft the “Stop Woke Act”, which banned schools and workplaces from teaching critical race theory, an academic and legal framework that examines structural racism in policies and institutions.
The specific language used to characterize Gay was one of the most important tools in the conservative plan, according to John Tilghman, an associate professor and interim department chair of history and political science at Tuskegee University.
Tilghman sees parallels in Rufo’s strategy with those used by the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater, who helped George HW Bush win the 1988 presidential election against then Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis.
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