Harvard University president Claudine Gay on Tuesday resigned amid plagiarism accusations and criticism over testimony at a congressional hearing where she was unable to say unequivocally that calls on campus for the genocide of Jews would contravene the school’s conduct policy.
Gay is the second Ivy League president to resign in the past month following the congressional testimony — Liz Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned on Dec. 9.
Gay, Harvard’s first black president, announced her departure just months into her tenure in a letter to the Harvard community.
Photo: AFP
Following the congressional hearing, Gay’s academic career came under intense scrutiny by conservative advocates who unearthed several instances of alleged plagiarism in her 1997 doctoral dissertation.
The President and Fellows of Harvard College, the university’s governing board, initially rallied behind Gay, saying a review of her academic work turned up “a few instances of inadequate citation,” but no evidence of research misconduct.
Days later, the board said it found two additional examples of “duplicative language without appropriate attribution,” and that Gay would update her dissertation and request corrections.
Her resignation came “with great sadness,” the board said, thanking her for her “deep and unwavering commitment to Harvard and to the pursuit of academic excellence.”
Alan Garber, university provost and chief academic officer, is to serve as interim president until Harvard finds a replacement, the board said in a statement.
Gay’s resignation was celebrated by conservatives who put her alleged plagiarism in the national spotlight — with additional plagiarism accusations surfacing as recently as Monday in The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative Web site.
Christopher Rufo, an advocate who has helped rally Republicans against higher education, said he is “glad she’s gone.”
“Rather than take responsibility for minimizing anti-Semitism, committing serial plagiarism, intimidating the free press and damaging the institution, she calls her critics racist,” Rufo wrote on social media.
“This is the poison” of diversity, equity and inclusion ideology, Rufo said.
Gay, who is returning to the school’s faculty, wrote in her letter that 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.”
Supporters of Gay lamented her resignation.
“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,” award-winning author Ibram X. Kendi, who survived scrutiny of an anti-racist research center he founded at Boston University, wrote in an Instagram post.
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