With the appointment of Claudine Gay, a dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, to the position of president on Thursday (15 December), Harvard University welcomed its first African American president. Gay (52) is just the second woman to be chosen to lead the famous and well-known institution in the world.
Gay, a descendant of Haitian immigrants, will become Harvard University’s 30th president on July 1, 2023, according to the university.
Penny Pritzker, chair of Harvard’s presidency search committee, praised Claudine as ‘a brilliant leader who is profoundly devoted to sustaining and strengthening Harvard’s academic excellence.’
In 2018, Gay was appointed dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, leading it through the challenging Covid-19 pandemic.
‘Today, we are in a moment of remarkable and accelerating change, socially, politically, economically, and technologically,’ Gay said after the announcement.
‘So many fundamental assumptions about how the world works and how we should relate to one another are being tested,’ she added.
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