Harvard stands by President Claudine Gay despite calls for her removal

Harvard University threw its support behind embattled President Claudine Gay on Tuesday, rejecting demands to remove the college’s first Black president after less than six months on the job despite rising campus antisemitism and plagiarism allegations.

The Harvard Corporation, the university’s highest governing body, said, “We unanimously stand in support of President Gay” in a highly anticipated statement following days of speculation about her future.

“As members of the Harvard Corporation, we today reaffirm our support for President Gay’s continued leadership of Harvard University,” the board said in the statement. “Our extensive deliberations affirm our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing.”

The decision was swiftly condemned by those leading the calls for her removal, starting with Rep. Elise Stefanik, New York Republican, who stated bluntly that “President Claudine Gay should have been fired.”

“This is a moral failure of Harvard’s leadership and higher education leadership at the highest levels,” said Ms. Stefanik, a Harvard alumna, at the House leadership’s Tuesday press conference.

The university said it learned of plagiarism allegations in October regarding three of Ms. Gay’s articles, concluding after an independent review that the concerns did not rise to the level of research misconduct. Even so, she has issued corrections.

“On Dec. 9, the Fellows reviewed the results, which revealed a few instances of inadequate citation,” the statement said. “While the analysis found no violation of Harvard‘s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.”

The university did not say whether the review included her 1997 doctoral thesis, which became the focus of plagiarism allegations following a Monday report in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal that said she paraphrased passages “nearly verbatim” from other sources without giving adequate credit.

The statement signed by the Fellows of Harvard College means that Ms. Gay has escaped, for now, the fate of former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, who announced her resignation Saturday following a donor revolt and a disastrous House hearing.

The Dec. 5 hearing featuring Ms. Gay, Ms. Magill and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth saw all three say that whether calling for “genocide of Jews” violates campus rules would depend on the context.

Ms. Gay apologized afterward, saying, “I am sorry. Words matter,” while the corporation acknowledged that the university’s early statements on the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israeli civilians fell short.

“So many people have suffered tremendous damage and pain because of Hamas’s brutal terrorist attack, and the university’s initial statement should have been an immediate, direct and unequivocal condemnation,” the Tuesday statement said. “Calls for genocide are despicable and contrary to fundamental human values.”

Sen. Tom Cotton, a Harvard College and Harvard Law School alumnus, accused the university of selectively applying its rules on academic integrity as well as conduct.

“To Harvard, as long as you toe the progressive line and promote toxic wokeness, plagiarism is acceptable,” the Arkansas Republican said on X. “And tolerating calls for genocide against the Jews—as long as the context is right—is also acceptable. What privilege.”

Ms. Gay is the first Black person and second woman to be Harvard’s president, a post she assumed in July after serving as dean of the faculty of arts and sciences.

“President Gay has apologized for how she handled her congressional testimony and has committed to redoubling the university’s fight against antisemitism,” the university board said.

Those who have demanded Ms. Gay’s resignation include more than 70 members of Congress and billionaire donor and Harvard alumnus Bill Ackman, who said that he knows of $1 billion in giving that has been suspended or withdrawn over the antisemitism uproar.

In Ms. Gay’s corner are more than 600 faculty members who signed a statement of support, the Harvard Alumni Association, and a group of hundreds of Black alumni and allies.

In the City Journal article, Ms. Gay was accused of lifting passages from works including former Princeton and Vanderbilt professor Carol Swain’s 1993 book “Black Faces, Black Interests.”

Ms. Swain, a prominent conservative scholar, called the decision to retain Ms. Gay “a terrible blow to civil rights and academic standards.”

“What signal does it send to young people and the world?” she asked on X. “Shame on Harvard!”