In a campus chapel, Claudine Gay gave her first public remarks as Harvard’s president since stepping down in January. Her words didn’t come from lecture notes in a classroom.
During Wednesday morning prayers at Harvard Yard’s Memorial Church, Gay related her mother’s inspirational story of arriving in Boston as a Haitian immigrant.
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Gay, who quit amid controversy over the Israel-Hamas conflict, anti-Semitism on campus, and claims that she plagiarized academic writings, is still an instructor at the Ivy League school.
She mentioned that her mother left Haiti to immigrate. “buoyed by a clear and urgent vision for her future,” and an agency placed her with a family in the Boston area, for whom she served as a live-in nanny with the understanding that they would help enroll her in English language courses, but the agreement was never honored.
“It was not long before she realized that the family did not share her vision,” Gay stated, as per a transcript of her statements that Harvard Magazine released. Her duties around the house increased. Her mobility diminished. Her questions about ESL courses went unanswered. All of the assurances that had emboldened my mother to leave Haiti were swept aside to impose what felt, at best, like indentured servitude.”
According to Gay, her mother subtly started preparing to move out of the house and live with her sister in New York. She started going to the post office once a week to ship little parcels of her possessions to her Brooklyn-based sister.
“Eventually, a day arrived when she set out for her weekly errands, carrying nothing more than her purse, and this time walked past the post office and continued on to the bus station where, heart racing and determined, she boarded a Greyhound for New York to begin again,” Gay stated.
Gay claimed that when she was younger and heard this story, she thought it was “an epic adventure story” and was “captivated mostly by the subterfuge and [her mother’s] cleverness,” but as she grew older, “the adventure receded as the focal narrative.”
“I wondered instead about how she decided what to send ahead and what to leave behind. What was important to her, what mattered most for her future,” Gay remarked.
Gay had already mentioned her mother in statements made at the church in September of last year; she passed away in May. On April 10, 2024, Gay stated that she has been thinking about her mother’s trip lately, “about her resilience through setbacks, about the courage to pursue a bold vision for her future despite forces intent on her diminishment, about the hope that allowed her to begin again.”
She stated that her mother’s story is now perceived “less as entertainment” and more as “a reminder of what lies within us in out-of-the-way places of the heart, and what may lie ahead if we dare to let go of the past and trust in the process of renewal.”
She concluded, “As I stand on the threshold of a new chapter, I miss my mother’s voice, but I find comfort in the knowledge that I am my mother’s daughter with her resilience, courage, and hope, with a soul that delights in beginnings, and that is enough to step into the unknown with confidence.”
