Cambridge — In a message to the Harvard community on Tuesday, President Claudine Gay, a native of Haiti who ascended through the acerbic politics of higher education to become the first Black leader of the country’s most esteemed university, announced her resignation.
After battling interconnected crises over the Israel-Hamas conflict, antisemitism on college campuses, and claims of plagiarism in her academic writings for several months, she is resigning.
She wrote, “I did not come to this decision easily.” “It has truly been extremely challenging…”
However, she stated that it has become evident to her that “my resignation is in the best interest of Harvard, so that our community can navigate this extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual.”
In a separate statement delivered to the Harvard community on Tuesday, it was announced that Dr. Alan Garber, the provost of Harvard, will take over as interim president.
Gay’s resignation, which sparked uproar after her term had only lasted six months, is a disgrace to the nearly 400-year-old university and its influential oversight body, the Harvard Corporation, which chose Gay and assisted in arranging her rise to prominence.
Since October 7, Gay has wavered between controversies, never being able to put the last one to rest before the new one surfaced.
Her initial weak and tardy remark regarding the attack on Israel led by Hamas drew harsh criticism, and the situation worsened when it was claimed that she took too long to react to claims of renewed antisemitism on campus. Following her legalistic responses to queries regarding whether or not demands for the annihilation of Jews would violate Harvard’s policies during a congressional hearing on December 5, the public’s pressure for her removal grew.
Lastly, accusations that she plagiarized several of her academic writings surfaced last month. Gay completed her doctoral dissertation in the government department at Harvard in 1997, and two of her peer-reviewed journal papers and her PhD dissertation both contained instances of “inadequate citation” and “duplicative language,” which Harvard has publicly acknowledged.
Gay’s choice comes at a turbulent and uneasy time for American higher education, particularly for the nation’s most prestigious universities. Leaders on the right criticize universities for being breeding grounds for a dogmatic progressive ideology that is incompatible with meritocracy and free speech. Justices of the Supreme Court and legislators have taken action to politically repress what they perceive to be excesses on the part of colleges.
These conflicts provided the setting for an unprecedented political firestorm in recent weeks, in which Harvard academics denounced attempts by legislators to meddle in university matters, while conservatives attacked Gay for her academic failings and mocked her as a diversity, equity, and inclusion pedagogue.
Partisan animosity and a perception that conservative forces were using Gay’s errors as a weapon in other ideological conflicts jumbled internal discussions, particularly among academics, concerning the seriousness of the plagiarism allegations and the error she made at the congressional hearing.
When asked at the hearing if advocating for the extermination of Jews would be against Harvard policy, Gay responded, “It depends on the context.” Later on, she expressed regret.
Similar testimony was given during the hearing by Liz Magill, the president of the University of Pennsylvania at the time, who resigned on December 9 in response to criticism of her comments. Days following the hearing, Sally Kornbluth, the president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who also gave a similar response and came under fire, was given a public and unqualified vote of confidence by the MIT governing board executive committee. She’s made it through the scandal thus far.
A number of Harvard academics and students believed that racism was a driving force behind the backlash following Gay’s speech. A few others saw the discovery of the plagiarism claims as part of a political effort to malign a university with a reputation for having left-leaning principles and to discredit a figurehead who has supported affirmative action and diversity programs in college admissions. (The claims of plagiarism were initially made public by a conservative news organization and activist.)
Upon reviewing the claims, the Globe discovered that a number of sentences and sections in Gay’s writing were almost exact replicas of text from other sources. A number of academics claimed that some of the paragraphs were plagiarized.
In her speech on Tuesday, Gay said, “It has been frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animosity and 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.”
The lifeblood of what we do is scholarship and teaching, and Gay will now “return to the faculty,” she added.
Since taking office as Harvard’s provost in 2011, economist and physician Garber has assisted the university in navigating the COVID-19 pandemic. He graduated from Stanford University with a medical degree and three degrees from Harvard.
The 11 members of the Corporation, formally known as the Fellows of Harvard College, said, “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.”
However, they also accepted Gay’s errors. Harvard “should have been an immediate, direct, and unequivocal condemnation” of the Hamas-led onslaught, which claimed the lives of almost 1,200 people and including sexual assault and the killing of families in their homes, the authors stated in their statement.
“Proclamations advocating for genocide are vile and in opposition to essential human principles,” they said, seemingly alluding to her evidence before Congress.
A separate evaluation of Gay’s scholarly works, according to the Fellows, found “a few instances of inadequate citation,” and two of her papers would be fixed. “No violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct was found,” the statement reads.
However, a second round of revisions to Gay’s academic work was announced by Harvard the next week, on December 20, citing the discovery of “duplicative language” in her doctoral dissertation. Once more, the institution insisted that Gay had not engaged in improper research practices. (Research misconduct is defined as any intentional, knowing, or careless transgression, according the guidelines established by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.)
“Sad as I am to be sending this message, my hopes for Harvard remain undimmed,” Gay wrote in an email on Tuesday. I hope that the memory of my brief presidency will serve as a wake-up call to the significance of pursuing our shared humanity and of preventing hatred and vitriol from undermining the essential educational process.
We will be updating this story as it breaks.