Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, has resigned after a month of intense scrutiny over alleged plagiarism spanning her career and controversy around her lackluster appearance before a congressional committee.
“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 said in an email to the Harvard community.
Gay’s tenure is the shortest in the Ivy League institution’s history, according to The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, which first reported that Gay would resign on Tuesday. She became the university’s first Black president in July.
Gay had been accused of lifting chunks of text from other works without properly citing the original authors or adding quotation marks. The allegations, which were first reported in December, now span eight works, according to The Washington Free Beacon, which reported on Monday that another complaint had been filed with Harvard. That complaint includes fresh claims of copying language that are “some of the most extreme and clear-cut cases of plagiarism yet,” according to the Free Beacon.
Several scholars played down or dismissed the severity of the claims against Gay in previous interviews with The Chronicle.
The university previously said that it had investigated claims of plagiarism against Gay and concluded she had not violated the institution’s research-misconduct policy, though in some instances her work had “failed to adhere” to Harvard’s guide to using sources. Her “inadequate citations” were “regrettable,” the Harvard Corporation, one of two Harvard governing bodies, concluded, according to a university statement previously provided to The Chronicle. Harvard has said Gay issued corrections to her dissertation and to two journal articles.
Gay was also roundly criticized for her appearance in early December alongside two other university presidents before the U.S. House’s Committee on Education and the Workforce. The presidents testified about antisemitism on campus and other issues, and were pilloried for giving at times equivocal answers. (The committee would soon announce an inquiry into the “learning environments” at the three universities and, later, a review of how Harvard had handled the plagiarism allegations.)
Days after her appearance before the committee, M. Elizabeth Magill resigned as president of the University of Pennsylvania.
In her letter to the campus, Gay said that it had been “painful to witness the tensions and divisions that have riven our community in recent months.” It has also 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.”
In returning to the faculty as a professor of government, Gay pledged “to continue working alongside you to build the community we all deserve.”
Alan M. Garber, Harvard’s provost, was named the university’s interim president, effective immediately.
‘Repugnant,’ ‘Appalling,’ and ‘Disturbing’
In a statement, the Harvard Corporation thanked Gay for her “deep and unwavering commitment” to Harvard and said it was accepting her resignation “with sorrow.”
While 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,” the statement says. Much of that attack came via “repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol directed at her through disgraceful emails and phone calls.”
On X, Lawrence H. Summers, a former Harvard president who’d criticized Gay’s initial response to the Israel-Hamas war, said that he admired her for “putting Harvard’s interests first at what I know must be an agonizingly difficult moment.”
Before her ascent to the Harvard presidency, Gay was a target of critics who questioned, sometimes sharply and crudely, her publication record and her support of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. On Tuesday some conservatives who view higher education as beholden to “woke” ideology celebrated Gay’s departure as a broad win for their movement.
Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who first aired allegations of plagiarism against Gay in his newsletter, posted on X: “Today, we celebrate victory. Tomorrow, we get back to the fight. We must not stop until we have abolished DEI ideology from every institution in America.”
Virginia Foxx, the Republican representative from North Carolina who chairs the House education committee, called Gay’s behavior “academically dishonest” and “appalling” in a statement. While her resignation is “welcome news,” Foxx said, problems at Harvard extend beyond Gay. “There has been [a] hostile takeover of postsecondary education by political activists, woke faculty, and partisan administrators,” she said. The committee’s “oversight” of Harvard, a private university, “will continue.”
As more plagiarism allegations surfaced, calls for Gay to resign came not only from the right. While the initial accusations seemed “small-bore,” wrote Ruth Marcus, a columnist for The Washington Post, her view changed as the claims mounted. “Perhaps the most disturbing example” is from the acknowledgments section of Gay’s dissertation, Marcus wrote. “What does it say about a person who chooses to appropriate another’s language for this most personal task?”
Still, other academics who view Gay’s scholarly offenses as either nonexistent or minor saw her resignation as a sign that Harvard had given in to a right-wing smear campaign and had failed to protect its first African American president. In December, Randall L. Kennedy, a Harvard law professor who has often written about race relations, defended Gay to The New York Times, telling it that “professional vilifiers” were responsible for promoting the allegations against her. Asked what he thought of the new plagiarism claims reported on Monday by the Free Beacon, Kennedy said in a Tuesday email to The Chronicle that he was “unmoved” by them. Rather, he said, they “seem to be part of a well-orchestrated, tragically successful hit.”
Ibram X. Kendi, who directs the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, posted on X: “Racist mobs won’t stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism.”
What happened to Gay “is an extension of what happened to me at UNC, and it is a glimpse into the future,” wrote Nikole Hannah-Jones, the prominent journalist behind The New York Times’s 1619 Project, whose tenure case at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill drew national attention in 2021.
“Academic freedom is under attack,” Hannah-Jones, who is the Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University, wrote on X. “Racial-justice programs are under attack. Black women will be made to pay. Our so-called allies too often lack any real courage.”
D. Stephen Voss, an associate professor of political science at the University of Kentucky, is one scholar whom Gay was accused of having plagiarized, when they were both graduate students at Harvard. Voss previously told The Chronicle that he viewed the language that Gay had copied and had not cited as “technically plagiarism” but a relatively minor offense.
On Tuesday, Voss reflected on the broader lessons to be gleaned from the events that led to Gay’s stepping down. Because Gay became a controversial figure, “her scholarly record was probed at a level of depth that almost no one in academia normally faces,” Voss said. And if the only scholars who are held to tough standards are those who “step on the toes of people outside academia, the result is going to be a very cautious, overly safe academic community.”
Still, there’s a potential silver lining, Voss said. “Anybody who might have been tempted to ignore when they borrowed from the ideas or the words of others,” he said, “will be remembering this tragic outcome for a long time.”
