Claudine Gay’s resignation is also about the Harvard Corporation

The Harvard Corporation dates back to 1650. The Ivy League university’s most powerful governing board is starting to show its age, after a series of scandals and missteps culminated in president Claudine Gay’s resignation on Tuesday and focused national attention on the university’s antiquated, flat-footed governance structure.

The Corporation, also known by the fusty moniker “Fellows of Harvard College,” was created in Puritan times and explicitly recognized in the Massachusetts Constitution “forever.” It’s analogous to a board of trustees — sort of. It’s smaller than the board at most universities, though, selects its own members, and has historically operated with a minimum of transparency.

That was the cloistered group that hired Gay in late 2022, a move that at the time was hailed as a milestone for the Ivy League university. A political scientist, Gay was the first Black woman to lead Harvard. But her tenure was quickly engulfed by three controversies: criticism of her handling of the university’s response to the horrific Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, her disastrous subsequent testimony during a Congressional hearing on campus antisemitism, and a drumbeat of allegations about plagiarism in Gay’s own past academic work.

Those plagiarism allegations appear to have been what finally sealed her fate. In Gay’s Tuesday email announcing her departure, she said, “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.” She will stay at Harvard as a faculty member.

Gay’s resignation from the presidency may have been inevitable, given the obvious hypocrisy for a university that punishes 19-year-old students for lesser academic integrity offenses, but it is bound to open even more wounds. To many inside and outside Harvard, she was a trailblazer who was unfairly put under a microscope, subjected to racist abuse, and now driven from office.

Watching Harvard slide into further turmoil may have a certain pass-the-popcorn appeal for the university’s many critics. There’s no schadenfreude quite like Harvard schadenfreude. But however pompous it may seem at times, Harvard is an important local employer and vital global institution, one that is to the “great benefit of this and the other United States of America,” as the state constitution puts it.

Right now, the first order of business for the Corporation should be to put aside its allergy to transparency and make a full accounting of how it responded to the plagiarism allegations; it should hold accountable anyone — including any of its own members — who mishandled them. Plagiarism-detection software is widely available; did Harvard vet presidential candidates’ work during the search? If so, how did it miss the instances of copied language in Gay’s papers? After Harvard was contacted by a reporter for the New York Post, why did the university’s lawyers threaten the newspaper and call the allegations “demonstrably” false when it had not in fact investigated them? The Corporation should also release the full report it commissioned into Gay’s academic work and apologize to the Post for its apparent bullying.

Going forward, the Corporation has named Dr. Alan Garber, the school’s provost, as Harvard’s interim leader and said in a message that the search for a new president “will include broad engagement and consultation with the Harvard community in the time ahead.”

But it would be premature for the Corporation to look for a new leader before it takes a hard look at itself — both its membership and its way of doing business.

We don’t pretend to know exactly what reforms Harvard needs. But the last year has to raise legitimate questions about whether the same group of people, operating the same way, under the same board chair (or “senior fellow,” in Harvard-speak), can make the right decisions for the university. A larger board, changes of membership and leadership, and a greater level of interaction with the community should all be on the table as potential changes to the Corporation itself.

Harvard faces serious challenges. Undergraduate early applications dropped last year by 17 percent. The Supreme Court just ruled its affirmative action program was unconstitutional, endangering its efforts to promote racial diversity. Faculty members have been increasingly vocal in expressing their displeasure with the school’s leadership and academic environment.

The war in Gaza will no doubt continue to generate difficult judgment calls on campuses that have to juggle the values of free speech and safe environments for students of all backgrounds.

Those are not problems that Claudine Gay created in her six-month tenure, or ever really got her own opportunity to solve. But they are problems that the university’s leaders need to confront now. The process should start with an honest review of how its governance body failed over the last year — and how it can do better in the future.

It would be premature for the Corporation to look for a new leader before it takes a hard look at itself — both its membership and its way of doing business.