More than two years after stepping down as Harvard president, Claudine Gay is returning to the classroom with a course that places the university, and the forces that helped end her presidency, under a microscope.
According to Harvard Government department listings, Gay will teach three courses during the 2026-2027 academic year. Her first, scheduled for the fall semester, is a selective tutorial titled “What is a University?: Purpose and Politics in Higher Education.” The course, listed as GOV 94HE, is capped at 16 students and will examine the history of American higher education before turning to modern debates over curriculum, admissions, research, governance and institutional preservation.
The course description says students will be encouraged to think critically about Harvard and the broader political, social and economic currents shaping universities today. Harvard itself will serve as the course’s main case study, with students examining the institution through “Harvard-specific cases, histories and examples.”
By semester’s end, students will be asked to imagine their own blueprint for the future. The final project calls on them to propose “a vision for institutional reform or reinvention,” turning the classroom into a kind of academic drafting table where Harvard becomes both subject and specimen.
Gay will return to additional teaching duties in the spring. She is set to lead “African American Politics,” a tutorial tracing African American political life from the 1965 Voting Rights Act to the present. She will also co-teach a doctoral seminar, “Politics of Race, Ethnicity and Immigration,” alongside Government professor Jennifer L. Hochschild. That course will explore racial conflict and power in American politics from the nation’s founding through today.
Gay has not taught since entering Harvard’s administration, where she rose from dean of Social Sciences to dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences before becoming Harvard’s 30th president in July 2023.
Her presidency lasted only six months, ending after mounting criticism over her response to antisemitism concerns following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and her testimony before Congress. Now, after a long stretch away from public life, Gay is stepping back onto campus not as Harvard’s captain, but as one of its cartographers, guiding students through the labyrinth she once led.
