Back in the Classroom, Claudine Gay Will Ask Harvard Students to Rethink Harvard

More than two years after her resignation, former Harvard President Claudine Gay will return to teaching — beginning with a course that asks students to scrutinize the very institution that shaped, and ultimately unraveled, her presidency.

Gay is scheduled to teach three courses during the 2026-2027 academic year, according to Government department listings.

Her fall course — GOV 94HE: “What is a University?: Purpose and Politics in Higher Education” — is a selective tutorial capped at 16 students. It will trace the evolution of American higher education before turning to present-day disputes over “curriculum, admissions, research, preservation, and governance.”

“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,” the course description reads.

The course will place Harvard as its center, using “Harvard-specific cases, histories and examples” as a lens for examining broader debates in higher education. It will culminate in a final project asking students to propose “a vision for institutional reform or reinvention.”

Gay will also teach two courses in the spring.

The first, GOV 94GC: “African American Politics,” is a tutorial that begins with the 1965 Voting Rights Act and examines the opportunities and constraints shaping African American political life in the decades since. The course will assess the extent of African American influence on the political process and is open to all undergraduates.

She will also co-teach GOV 2576: “Politics of Race, Ethnicity and Immigration,” a doctoral seminar with Government professor Jennifer L. Hochschild. The seminar is slated to explore “racial domination and contestation” from the nation’s founding to the present, with particular attention to themes like the “racial and ethnic features” of elections and governance.

The return to teaching follows a turbulent period in Gay’s career. She has not held a teaching role at the University since joining Harvard’s administration, where she served as dean of Social Sciences and later dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences before becoming Harvard’s 30th president in July 2023.

Her presidency ended after just six months. In the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, Gay faced escalating criticism — first for her initial public silence, and later for her December 2023 testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, where she declined to say that calls for the genocide of Jewish people would automatically violate Harvard’s conduct policies. She resigned on Jan. 2, 2024.

Since stepping down, Gay has largely remained out of public view. She reappeared last fall at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, where she criticized University President Alan M. Garber ’76 for what she described as a posture of “compliance” toward the Trump administration. In February, she issued a rare comment to the Boston Globe that Harvard should more quickly address its ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey E. Epstein and sever connections with former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers.

A sample reading list for the fall course includes selections from David Labaree’s “A Perfect Mess” and Rebekah Nathan’s “My Freshman Year,” as well as the Report of the Presidential Committee to Articulate Principles on Renaming, commissioned under former Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow.

Applications for the fall tutorial are due April 3, with decisions to be released April 8.

—Staff writer Hugo C. Chiasson can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at hcc.35. Follow him on X @HugoChiassonn.

—Staff writer Elise A. Spenner can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at elisespenner.82. Follow her on X @EliseSpenner.