Scandal-plagued Harvard President Claudine Gay out after 6 months

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Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned Tuesday after six months in office, her presidency rocked by her handling of campus antisemitism and a plagiarism scandal that called into question her fitness to lead the nation’s oldest university.

Ms. Gay, a political scientist, assumed the top job on July 1, making her presidency the shortest in the school’s 387-year history. She will resume her position on the faculty.

After consulting with board members, Ms. Gay said, “It has become clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual.

“Sad as I am to be sending this message, my hopes for the university remain undimmed,” Ms. Gay said in an email to the Harvard community.

Provost and Chief Academic Officer Alan M. Garber will take over as interim president while the board searches for a new leader.

Ms. Gay was Harvard’s first Black and second female president, and the theme of racism figured prominently Tuesday in her announcement and the statement by the Harvard Corp.

“While President Gay has acknowledged missteps and has taken responsibility for them, it is also true that she has shown remarkable resilience in the face of deeply personal and sustained attacks,” said the corporation, which is headed by Biden administration official Penny Pritzker.

“While some of this has played out in the public domain, much of it has taken the form of repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol directed at her through disgraceful emails and phone calls,” said the statement. “We condemn such attacks in the strongest possible terms.”

Ms. Gay said it has been “frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.”

The corporation praised Ms. Gay for her “deep and unwavering commitment” to Harvard, but neither the board nor Ms. Gay addressed in any detail the more than 40 instances of alleged plagiarism unearthed over the past month in her scholarly writings.

Instead, Ms. Gay, who has agreed to make seven corrections to two articles and her 1997 Ph.D. thesis, called it “distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am.”

An update on Harvard University leadership. https://t.co/ky4rwdwDCX

— Harvard University (@Harvard) January 2, 2024

Christopher F. Rufo, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow who has chronicled the alleged examples of plagiarism, said her statement fell well short of addressing the damage done during her brief tenure.

“Rather than take responsibility for minimizing antisemitism, committing serial plagiarism, intimidating the free press, and damaging the institution, she calls her critics racist,” Mr. Rufo said on X. “This is the poison of DEI ideology. Glad she’s gone.”

Harvard is facing a generational threat to its stature as the nation’s preeminent university, ignited by what has been described as its lackluster response to rising campus antisemitism in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on civilians in Israel.

The backlash included a donor revolt led by billionaire alumnus Bill Ackman, who estimated that more than $1 billion in donations has been withdrawn or paused, a House Education and the Workforce Committee investigation into campus antisemitism, and a 17% drop in early admission applications.

Calls for Ms. Gay’s resignation soared after the Dec. 5 committee hearing at which she and two other university presidents said that whether demanding “genocide for Jews” would violate their conduct codes would depend on the context.

The quizzing was led by House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, a Harvard alumna, who said Tuesday that the “resignation of Harvard’s antisemitic plagiarist is long overdue.”

“Claudine Gay’s morally bankrupt answers to my questions made history as the most viewed Congressional testimony in the history of the U.S. Congress,” said Ms. Stefanik. “Her answers were absolutely pathetic and devoid of the moral leadership and academic integrity required of the President of Harvard.”

She predicted that Harvard’s woes were far from over. She said it is “just the beginning of what will be the greatest scandal of any college or university in history.”

Roni Brunn, spokesperson for the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance, said Ms. Gay’s resignation “closes an unfortunate chapter in Harvard’s nearly 400-year history.”

“In her repeated failures to condemn calls for complete and utter obliteration of Jews, Claudine Gay tacitly encouraged those who sought to spread hate at Harvard, where many Jews no longer feel safe to study, identify and fully participate in the Harvard community,” Ms. Brunn said. “It’s our hope that Harvard’s next president begins their term by loudly and clearly stating that antisemitism has absolutely no place on campus.”

One of the other university leaders who testified at the hearing, University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, stepped down on Dec. 9, as did Penn board of trustees chairman Scott Bok.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has stood behind Sally Kornbluth, the third president to testify before the committee.

Ms. Gay, 53, was named the 40th president of Harvard after serving five years as the dean of the arts and sciences faculty, succeeding outgoing President Lawrence Bacow.

She might have survived the threat to her presidency after the disastrous hearing but for the plagiarism charges, which were first raised by Mr. Rufo and journalist Christopher Brunet in a Dec. 10 article in City Journal.

While agreeing to make some corrections, she has yet to speak to dozens of other examples of her nearly verbatim paraphrasing of passages from other sources, which include Carol Swain’s 1993 book “Black Faces, Black Interests.”

Ms. Swain said Tuesday on X that “I found #HarvardUniversity’s statement about Claudine Gay’s resignation as woefully inadequate as the one Gay issued. What we have here is an effort to avoid accountability.”

But Harvard is letting Claudine Gay remain as a professor, even though she was plainly never qualified to be either professor or president.

So it seems Harvard remains incapable of shame. https://t.co/BLNz1fUmGb

— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) January 2, 2024

The Harvard Corp. initially defended Ms. Gay against the plagiarism charges. It said in a Dec. 12 statement that an independent review “found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.”

The charges of academic misconduct are unlikely to recede as Ms. Gay resumes her position on the arts and sciences faculty.

The university was hit Monday with another complaint alleging six more examples of plagiarism, as reported by The Washington Free Beacon.

Even so, the corporation offered strong support for Ms. Gay in her continuing role at Harvard.

“She believes passionately in Harvard’s mission of education and research, and she cares profoundly about the people whose talents, ideas, and energy drive Harvard,” the board’s statement said. “She has devoted her career to an institution whose ideals and priorities she has worked tirelessly to advance, and we are grateful for the extraordinary contributions she has made — and will continue to make — as a leader, a teacher, a scholar, a mentor, and an inspiration to many.”