Harvard announces Claudine Gay will be its next president

Harvard has named its next president: Claudine Gay will be the first person of color to hold the university’s top job.

Gay, a social scientist who studies democracy and political participation, is the university's current Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

The daughter of Haitian immigrants, she will be the first Black person to lead the country's oldest college.

Speaking to faculty and administrators on campus in Cambridge, Gay choked up when she was announced. She told the room that the role of president is all about harnessing the power of ideas and then supporting the people who pursue them.

“The idea of the ‘ivory tower’ — that is the past, not the future, of academia,” she said. “We don’t exist outside of society but as part of it, and that means that Harvard has a duty to lean in and engage and be of service to the world.”