Harvard leader resigns amid antisemitism, plagiarism claims
Claudine Gay, who made history as Harvard University’s first Black and second female president just about a year ago, resigned Tuesday afternoon.
“After consultation with members of the Corporation, 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,” Gay wrote. “It has been 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 — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.”
Gay will resume her faculty position at Harvard, according to an email sent to the Harvard community by the Harvard Corporation minutes after Gay sent hers.
The decision comes after Gay and Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Pennsylvania presidents faced calls for their resignations in the wake of a congressional hearing last month on campus antisemitism. During the hearing, Gay equivocated over a question about whether calls for genocide violated Harvard’s code of conduct. Gay had said that those calls would depend on the context.
Gay apologized for how she handled her congressional testimony.
In her resignation email to the Harvard community, Gay said the university needs to “combat bias and hate in all its forms, to create a learning environment in which we respect each other’s dignity and treat one another with compassion, and to affirm our enduring commitment to open inquiry and free expression in the pursuit of truth.”
Dr. Alan Garber is expected to become the interim president, according to the corporation’s email. Garber has been the provost and chief academic officer at Harvard for 12 years and is an economist and physician, according to the email.
After the congressional hearing in December, University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill resigned from her position. Sally Kornbluth, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received support from the institute’s governing body shortly after the
hearing.
Gay also received support from Harvard’s governing board to stay in her position following calls for her removal, but politicians and alumni continued to call for Gay and other presidents who testified at the hearing to resign.
In Tuesday’s email from the Harvard Corporation, the body reaffirmed its support of Gay.
“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. 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. We condemn such attacks in the strongest possible terms,” the email said.
The House passed a bipartisan resolution condemning all three presidents’ testimonies before Congress, calling the presidents “evasive and dismissive.”
Gay has also been accused of plagiarizing in her published works and dissertation.
The Harvard Corporation said President Gay didn’t violate the university’s standards for “research misconduct.” At the same time, there were “a few instances of inadequate citation” and she will be requesting “four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications,” according to the statement.
In a Dec. 20 letter, Harvard said there would be more updates to Gay’s work after discoveries of “duplicate language in her dissertation, the Globe reported.
More accusations of plagiarism have surfaced in the The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online journal, on Monday.
“When my brief presidency is remembered, I hope it will be seen as a moment of reawakening to the importance of striving to find our common humanity — and of not allowing rancor and vituperation to undermine the vital process of education,” Gay wrote in her resignation email.