Harvard President Claudine Gay announced her resignation Tuesday after her presidency was plunged into crisis over allegations of plagiarism and what some called an inadequate response to anti-Semitism on campus following the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel.
In announcing that she would step down effective immediately, Dr. Gay, Harvard’s first black president and the second woman to lead the university, ended a tumultuous tenure that began last July. He will have the shortest tenure of any Harvard president since its founding in 1636.
Alan M. Garber, an economist and physician who is Harvard’s professor and chief academic, will serve as interim president. Dr. Gay will remain a tenured professor of government and African and African American studies.
Dr. Gay became the second university president to resign in recent weeks, after she and the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and MIT appeared at a December 5 congressional hearing in which they appeared to dodge the question of whether students who called for the genocide of the Jews should to be punished.
Penn’s president, M. Elizabeth Magill, resigned four days after that hearing. Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT, has also faced calls for her resignation.
In a letter announcing her decision, Dr. Gay said that after consulting with members of the university’s governing body, the Harvard Corporation, “it has become clear that it is in Harvard’s best interest that I step down so that our community can navigate this at the moment of extraordinary challenge with an emphasis on the institution rather than any individual.’
At the same time, Dr Gay, 53, defended her academic record and suggested she had been the target of highly personal and racist attacks.
“Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have my commitments to counter hate and support scientific rigor — two core values that are fundamental to who I am — doubted, and terrifying to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus. “, He wrote.
Last year, the news of the appointment of Dr. Gay was widely regarded as an important moment for the university. The daughter of Haitian immigrants and an expert on minority representation and political participation in government, she took office just as the Supreme Court struck down the use of racial admissions at Harvard and other universities.
It also became a prime target of some powerful alumni, such as billionaire investor William A. Ackman, who was concerned about anti-Semitism and suggested social media Last month Harvard only considered candidates for the presidency who met “the DEI office’s criteria,” referring to diversity, equity and inclusion.
Dr. Gay’s resignation came after the latest plagiarism allegations against her surfaced in an unsigned complaint published Monday in The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online magazine that has led a campaign against Dr. Gay in recent weeks.
The complaint added to about 40 other accusations of plagiarism already in the magazine. The charges raise questions about whether Harvard was holding its president to the same academic standards as its students.
Lawrence H. Summers, the former US Treasury secretary who resigned as Harvard president under pressure in 2006, suggested that Dr. Gay had made the right decision. “I admire Claudine Gay for putting Harvard’s interests first at what I know must be an excruciatingly difficult time,” he said in an email.
Representative Virginia Foxx, the North Carolina Republican who heads the House committee investigating Harvard and other universities, said the investigation would continue despite Dr. Gay.
“There has been a hostile takeover of postsecondary education by political activists, awakening professors and party administrators,” Ms. Fox said in a statement, adding, “The problems at Harvard are much bigger than one leader.”
On Harvard’s campus, some expressed deep dismay at what they described as a politically motivated campaign against Dr. Gay and higher education more broadly. Hundreds of faculty members had signed public letters asking Harvard’s board of trustees to resist pressure to remove Dr. Gay.
“This is a terrible moment,” said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of history, race and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. “Republican leaders in Congress have declared war on college and university independence, as Governor DeSantis did in Florida. They will only be emboldened by Gay’s resignation.”
Some faculty criticized the way Harvard’s secret society handled the political attack and plagiarism allegations.
Alison Frank Johnson, a history teacher, said she “couldn’t be more disappointed”.
“Instead of making a decision based on established scientific principles, we had here a public prosecution,” he said. “Instead of hearing voices of scholars in her field who could speak to the importance and originality of her research, we heard voices of derision and hatred on social media. “Instead of following the established university process, we had a company giving access to self-appointed consultants and conducting audits using mysterious and unknown methods.”
The rumors of problems in the work of Dr. Gays circulated for months on anonymous message boards. But the first widely publicized report came on Dec. 10, before Harvard’s board of trustees met to discuss Dr. Gay, after her damning testimony at the congressional hearing.
That evening, conservative activist Christopher Ruffo published an essay in his Substack newsletter highlighting what he described as “problematic patterns of usage and reporting” in Dr. Gay in 1997.
The Washington Free Beacon followed with several articles detailing allegations about her published scientific articles and reported two formal complaints filed with the School of Arts and Sciences’ Office of Research Integrity.
In a Dec. 12 statement saying Dr. Gay would remain in his position, the board acknowledged the allegations and said it was made aware of them in late October. The council said it had carried out an investigation and found “some instances of inadequate reporting” in two articles, which it said would be corrected. However, the transgressions, the council said, did not rise to the level of “research misconduct”.
Dr. Gay was already under pressure for what some had said was the university’s inadequate response to the October 7 attacks in Israel.
After initially remaining silent when student groups wrote an open letter saying Israel was “entirely responsible” for the violence, Dr Gay and other officials released a letter to the university community acknowledging “feelings of fear, sadness, anger and more” . After an outcry over what some saw as lukewarm language, Dr Gay issued a more forceful statement condemning Hamas for “terrorist atrocities”, while urging people to use words that “enlighten, not inflame”.
At the congressional hearing, Representative Elise Stefanik, R-New York, fired hypothetical questions at Dr. Gay and the other university presidents.
“At Harvard,” Ms. Stefanik asked Dr. Gay, “does calling for the genocide of the Jews violate Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment? Yes or No?”
“It might be, depending on the context,” Dr. Gay replied.
That exchange, and a similar exchange between Ms. Stefanik and Ms. Magill, took off on social media and angered many people with close ties to the universities.
Dr. Gay moved to play down the fallout by apologizing in an interview published in The Harvard Crimson, the campus newspaper. “When words amplify heartbreak and pain, I don’t know how you could feel anything but sadness,” she said.
A week after her testimony, the Harvard firm issued a unanimous statement of support — after the late-night meeting — saying it stood firmly behind her.
But there were signs that the controversy may have damaged Harvard’s reputation. The number of students who applied this fall under the university’s early action program — allowing them to make an admissions decision in December instead of March — dropped about 17 percent, the university said last month.
The report was made by Dana Goldstein, Rob Copeland, Annie Karni and Vimal Patel. Kirsten Noyes contributed to the research.
