More than two years after resigning as president of Harvard, Claudine Gay is slated to return to the classroom this fall, teaching a seminar on university power struggles, using Harvard as a case study.
The fall seminar, titled “What is a University?: Purpose and Politics in Higher Education,” will use examples from Harvard’s history to examine how power players at universities influence decision making.
“Using Harvard as a case study,” the course will explore “the struggle for power among groups that share it,” and how “questions of purpose” shape a university’s “core functions,” according to Harvard’s fall course catalogue.
Gay, the university’s first Black president, weathered a tumultuous six-month tenure marked by a series of crises, including criticism of her responses to the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the campus protests that followed.
That December, she also faced allegations that passages from her scholarly work violated the university’s policy on plagiarism; an oversight board acknowledged instances of “inadequate citation” and “duplicative language” but no violation of standards.
Gay resigned as Harvard president on Jan. 2, 2024. She was on leave from her role as a Harvard professor in recent years, according to Harvard’s African American studies department website.
The fall seminar will be capped at 16 students, according to the course catalogue.
Gay is also scheduled to teach two courses during the spring 2027 semester, including one co-taught with government professor Jennifer H. Hochschild, the catalogue says.
Hochschild said on Wednesday that she’s delighted Gay is rejoining the teaching community in Harvard’s government department.
The two women have co-taught off and on since Gay came to Harvard, and love bouncing ideas between each other, Hochschild said.
Hochschild, a former chair of the government department, pointed to Gay’s “deep knowledge of the field of racial and ethnic politics in the US,” and said the topics have been at the center of Gay’s research and teaching since graduate school.
Gay’s spring 2027 courses, each on racial politics, appear to be in line with classes she previously taught at Harvard, according to 2018 Harvard Gazette article.
One of the spring 2027 courses will be on African American politics since 1965. The second course, co-taught with Hochschild, will be on the politics of ethnicity and immigration since the US’s founding, according to the course catalogue.
“African American Politics” will explore the “opportunities and challenges” that have “defined the African American political experience” after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the course catalogue says.
The class co-taught with Hochschild will examine the “nature of racial domination and contestation since the founding of the United States,” including immigration, the catalogue says. The course will draw on research from across disciplines to examine racial and ethnic features of elections and governance, identity and solidarity and socioeconomics, the description says.
Before becoming president, Gay held roles as dean of Social Sciences and later dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science. Prior to joining the administration in 2015, Gay taught courses in African American studies department.
Hochschild said she looks forward to seeing Gay help student develop ideas and strengthen their analyses of US politics.
“[We] contradict or build on each other’s points, and usually arrive at a position different from what either of us started with,” Hochschild said. “She does the same with students – pushes them to deepen and clarify ideas or analyses of evidence, and shows great appreciation when they respond."
Previous Globe material is included in this report.
Claire Thornton can be reached at claire.thornton@globe.com. Follow Claire on X @claire_thornto.