A former professor at the California Western School of Law said that Dr. Claudine Gay, Harvard's president, made a career out of attacking Black academics.
In the opinion piece published Wednesday in Newsweek, Winkfield Twyman Jr. said that the backlash to Gay's plagiarism accusations and handling of campus antisemitism were "well deserved."
"Did you know that Claudine Gay during her Harvard career has repeatedly targeted and disrupted the careers of prominent Black male professors?" wrote Twyman, a graduate of Harvard Law School in 1986.
Twyman then pointed out Gay's involvement in the termination of Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. as faculty dean of Winthrop House — the first Black faculty dean of a Harvard College house.
"What was professor Sullivan's offense? Sullivan deigned to represent the disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein — an act of moral conscience, since all are entitled to legal representation in our legal system," Twyman noted.
"Yet legal conscience mattered not to Claudine Gay, who terminated a race pioneer for doing his civic duty," he added.
The former professor also accused Gay of leading a "witch hunt" to remove Black economics professor Roland G. Fryer Jr. from his post after his research found no racial disparities in the killing of unarmed Black men in Houston.
"No one in good faith should defend President Gay because she is the first Black president of Harvard," Twyman contended. "Even if you don't agree with me that our racial struggle is in our past, someone who has targeted Black male professors has waived any benefit of the 'first Black' defense."
The opinion piece comes over a week after Harvard said it found more "duplicative language" in Gay's doctoral dissertation, assuring that she would update it "correcting these instances of inadequate citation."