Larry Bacow, the new president of Harvard University, announced that Claudine Gay will be the next dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the university. Dr. Gay will begin her new duties on August 15.
In accepting her new post, Professor Gay stated that “if we hope to remain at the frontiers of knowledge, doing that is going to require acknowledging that talent takes many forms, that mentoring is integral to academic and professional success, and that people do their best work when they feel their perspectives, experiences, and contributions are valued and respected. And as an elite institution, if we are to retain the trust and faith of the broader society, including the vast majority of the world that will never experience a Harvard education, we must be engines of social mobility both within and beyond our gates.”
Dr. Gay is the Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African American Studies and is the founding chair of Harvard’s Inequality in America Initiative. She has served as dean of social science for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences since 2015. Professor Gay joined the faculty at the university in 2006 after teaching in the department of political science at Stanford University.
The daughter of Haitian immigrants, Dr. Gay grew up in New York and Saudi Arabia, where her father worked for the Army Corps of Engineers. She earned a bachelor’s degree in economics at Stanford University and a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University. She is the co-editor of Outsiders No More?: Models of Immigrant Political Incorporation (Oxford University Press, 2013).