Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned Tuesday after weeks of criticism of her scholarship and leadership on the campus, saying it would help the university move forward “with a focus on the institution rather than any individual.”
She was the second Ivy League president to resign in the wake of a congressional hearing last month on campus antisemitism, a sign to some of the power that politicians and donors can wield. Gay was also confronted with dozens of allegations of plagiarism from her academic work. University leaders said last month she did not engage in research misconduct, and some scholars were skeptical of the claims. Some questioned whether Gay — who in July became Harvard’s first Black president — was being held to a different standard because of her race. But critics, and even some who have long supported Gay, said the mounting questions made her position increasingly untenable.
The fallout intensified national debates over freedom of speech, diversity in schools and who should shape education in this country.
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At the hearing, Gay, University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill and MIT president Sally Kornbluth declined to state plainly that a call for genocide against Jews would violate their university’s code of conduct. The college presidents repeatedly defended freedom of speech and said they would punish harassment or bullying. But their responses were criticized by many as tone-deaf and overly legalistic.
The House Education and the Workforce Committee opened an investigation into the three schools soon after the hearing, later expanding its inquiry to include the plagiarism allegations against Gay. A letter signed by more than 70 members of Congress called on Harvard, Penn and MIT to remove the presidents. Magill resigned Dec. 9 after pressure from donors, the board of trustees, the Pennsylvania governor and others. Meanwhile, MIT’s governing body has expressed its “full and unreserved support” for Kornbluth.
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Building on the work of powerful Harvard alums who questioned Gay’s credentials and wondered aloud if she was a so-called “diversity hire,” conservative crusader Chris Rufo accused her of plagiarizing passages of her dissertation just days after Gay’s congressional testimony. The accusations set off a firestorm that resulted in Gay publicly requesting corrections in two articles. Since then, conservative groups, including the Heritage Foundation, have made a meal of attacking Gay’s academic record, claiming her ascension to the presidency was without merit. She reflected on these attacks in her farewell letter, writing that it has been “frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.”
Her resignation not only shakes things up at the most prestigious university in the country, it also exposes a larger trend of racial regression that picked up in the years following the 2020 uprisings as Black leaders have been installed in positions of power only to find themselves undermined by the systems they sought to save. Love it or hate it, Harvard sets the tone for national and international debates. To conservative activists celebrating on Twitter, Gay’s ouster is part of a larger project to purge progressive Black leaders from public institutions. Or as Chris Rufo put it, to abolish “DEI ideology from every institution in America.” In the end, Gay’s presidency has created yet another first: Harvard’s first Black female president was also its shortest-serving.
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