Former Harvard President Claudine Gay is reportedly back at the Ivy League school nearly three years after stepping down in disgrace due to plagiarism accusations . This time, Gay will teach a course about Harvard itself.
Claudine Gay is back in the classroom, and she is teaching a course about Harvard, using the elite school as a case study to examine broader debates in U.S. higher education and the power struggles inside universities, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.
The former Harvard president — who resigned on January 2, 2024 following antisemitism scandals at the school, a disastrous congressional testimony, and scores of unearthed plagiarism allegations about her own work — is teaching three courses during the 2026-2027 academic year, the Harvard Crimson reported in March.
Through one of her courses, Gay — whose six month tenure as president marked the shortest tenure in Harvard’s history — will reportedly ask students to scrutinize the very university where she is teaching.
Her fall class, GOV 94HE: “What is a University?: Purpose and Politics in Higher Education,” follows the development of higher education in the United States, then analyzes present-day fights over “curriculum, admissions, research, preservation, and governance.”
The course is a selective tutorial, capped at only 16 students.
“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 is expected to end with a final project in which students propose “a vision for institutional reform or reinvention.”
Gay will also teach another two courses during the spring 2027 semester — GOV 94GC: “African American Politics,” and GOV 2576: “Politics of Race, Ethnicity and Immigration.”
“African American Politics” is a tutorial that starts with the 1965 Voting Rights Act and looks at the opportunities and limits that have shaped black political life in the years since, and assesses the extent of black influence on the political process.
“Politics of Race, Ethnicity and Immigration” is a doctoral seminar Gay will be teaching alongside professor Jennifer L. Hochschild.
The course is set to explore “racial domination and contestation” from the country’s founding to the present, with a focus on themes such as the “racial and ethnic features” of elections and governance.
Gay — who has largely remained out of public view since stepping down nearly three years ago — has never held a teaching role at Harvard.
In addition to once having been Harvard’s president, Gay previously served as the university’s dean of Social Sciences, and dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Breitbart News reported extensively on Gay’s plagiarism scandal, including a Boston Globe op-ed calling her and the university out:
“The statement seems contradictory. If Gay didn’t violate any standards of research, why would she need to correct anything?” the paper asks.
The Globe goes on to note that Harvard seems to have set a standard that clearly makes Gay’s “inadequate citation” examples of plagiarism.
In Harvard’s own “What Constitutes Plagiarism?” notation on its website, plagiarism is defined in a way that should damn Gay’s work: “…it is considered plagiarism to draw any idea or any language from someone else without adequately crediting that source in your paper.”
Still, in another section of the website, Harvard makes room for a looser standard by noting that a finding of research misconduct requires said misconduct to be committed “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly.”
For the Boston Globe, these contradictory policies are troublesome.
Breitbart News will continue to report on Harvard University.
Alana Mastrangelo-Wrask is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.