John Rosenberg in Harvard Magazine:
CLAUDINE GAY arrived in Cambridge in the fall of 1992 as a first-year graduate student, lugging the things that seemed most essential to her success: a futon, a Mac Classic II, and a cast iron skillet for frying plantains. The futon, no doubt, was standard grad-student gear. The computer pertained to her status as a nascent social scientist in an era of increasingly quantitative scholarship. And the plantains traced back to her roots, as the daughter of immigrants from Haiti.
Accompanying those things were mental constructs that would really be essential to her success. Higher education figured strongly in her parents’ narrative. They came to the United States with little but managed to put themselves through college while raising their son and daughter. Gay’s mother became a registered nurse, and her father, a civil engineer, “and it was the City College of New York that made those careers possible,” she said when her election as the University’s thirtieth president was announced last December 15. That step up the ladder was accompanied by strong views about the ensuing rungs: “College was always the expectation for me,” she continued. “My parents believed that education opens every door. But of course they gave me three options—I could be an engineer, a doctor, or a lawyer—which I’m sure other kids of immigrant parents can relate to!”
Then, as so often happens, a student given access to outstanding education found her trajectory rerouted. After Phillips Exeter Academy and a year at Princeton, Gay transferred to Stanford (B.A. ’92) and then came back east for her Ph.D. in government, conferred in 1998. Her undergraduate studies “ignited everything for me,” she said in December. “That’s where I discovered the reach of my own curiosity, where I experienced firsthand the detective work that is research and learned for the first time that knowledge is created and not just passed on. And it’s where I found what I wanted to do, what I felt born to do with my life.”
More here.