Harvard president Claudine Gay resigns after plagiarism claims, campus anti-Semitism

Claudine Gay has resigned after facing mounting criticism over how she responded to anti-Semitism on campus and new claims that she plagiarised the work of other researchers.

Claudine Gay, President of Harvard University, testifies before the House Education and Workforce Committee in Washington. Picture: AFP,

Harvard University President Claudine Gay has resigned after facing mounting criticism over how she responded to anti-Semitism on campus and, most recently, allegations that she plagiarised the work of other researchers on several occasions.

Gay, a professor of government and of African and African-American studies, became president in July after serving as dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences for around five years. She had been under pressure for weeks regarding her response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. Her remarks at a House committee hearing on the matter in early December drew widespread criticism after she gave an equivocal response to a question about whether calls for the genocide of Jewish people violated the campus code of conduct.

She was also accused of plagiarising other academics in several published papers and her Ph.D. dissertation. The Harvard Corporation, the university’s top governing board, said in December that reviews of her work uncovered some instances of “inadequate citation,” but that the omissions didn’t meet the bar of outright research misconduct.

Gay has requested four corrections on two academic papers and is updating her dissertation in three spots, according to the school, whose board has released statements standing by Gay.

Some said Harvard had been holding Gay to a standard different from the one that its own students are supposed to meet and called into question Gay’s contributions to her field and her integrity as a researcher.

Gay’s resignation comes after Liz Magill said she would step down from the top spot at the University of Pennsylvania, also in the midst of concerns she wasn’t doing enough to combat antisemitic language and actions on campus.

Gay, Magill and Sally Kornbluth, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Dec. 5. They were questioned for hours over what might count as harassment at their schools and how they might punish such behaviour, as well as what actions they have taken to protect Jewish students from hate speech or threats of violence.

In response to a question from Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) on whether calls for the genocide of Jewish people would be considered harassment, all three said it would depend on the context. The exchange made its way into a “Saturday Night Live” episode.

The billionaire investor Bill Ackman, of Pershing Square Capital Management, was among the earliest and loudest critics of how Gay navigated the terrain of supporting free speech while protecting students from harassment. He said she wasn’t doing enough to support Jewish students and was applying the school’s speech policies selectively.

More recently the family foundation of the investor Len Blavatnik paused its donations, according to a person familiar with the matter. The family has given more than $200 million to Harvard.

The Wall Street Journal