Gay is the second Ivy League president to resign in the past month following the congressional testimony. Gay, Harvard’s first Black president, announced her departure just months into her tenure in a letter to the Harvard community.
Following the congressional hearing, Gay’s academic career came under intense scrutiny by conservative activists who unearthed several instances of alleged plagiarism in her 1997 doctoral dissertation. Harvard’s governing board initially
rallied behind Gay, saying a review of her scholarly work turned up "a few instances of inadequate citation" but no evidence of research misconduct.
WASHINGTON, DC - DECEMBER 05: Dr. Claudine Gay, President of Harvard University, testifies before the House Education and Workforce Committee at the Rayburn House Office Building on December 05, 2023 in Washington, DC. The Committee held a hearing
to...
Days later, the Harvard Corporation revealed that it found two additional examples of "duplicative language without appropriate attribution." The board said Gay would update her dissertation and request corrections.
The Harvard Corporation said the resignation came "with great sadness" and thanked Gay for her "deep and unwavering commitment to Harvard and to the pursuit of academic excellence."
Alan M. Garber, provost and chief academic officer, will serve as interim president until Harvard finds a replacement, the board said in a statement. Garber, an economist and physician, has served as provost for 12 years.
Gay and the presidents of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania came under fire last month for their lawyerly answers to a line of questioning from New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, who asked whether "calling for the genocide of Jews"
would violate the colleges’ code of conduct.
The three presidents had been called before the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce to answer accusations that universities were failing to protect Jewish students amid rising fears of antisemitism worldwide
and fallout from Israel’s intensifying war in Gaza, which faces heightened criticism for the mounting Palestinian death toll.
Gay said it depended on the context, adding that when "speech crosses into conduct, that violates our policies." The answer faced swift backlash from Republican and some Democratic lawmakers as well as the White House. The hearing
was parodied in the opening skit on "Saturday Night Live."
Gay later apologized, telling The Crimson student newspaper that she got caught up in a heated exchange at the House committee hearing and failed to properly denounce threats of violence against Jewish students.
"What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will
never go unchallenged," Gay said.
The episode marred Gay’s tenure at Harvard — she became president in July — and sowed discord at the Ivy League campus. Rabbi David Wolpe later resigned from a new committee on antisemitism created by Gay, saying in a post on X,
formerly Twitter, that "events on campus and the painfully inadequate testimony reinforced the idea that I cannot make the sort of difference I had hoped."
The House committee announced days after the hearing that it would investigate the policies and disciplinary procedures at Harvard, MIT and Penn. Separate federal civil rights investigations were previously opened at Harvard, Penn
and several other universities in response to complaints submitted to the U.S. Education Department.
Harvard president Claudine Gay resigns amid antisemitism, plagiarism controversies
Harvard President Resigns
New Plagiarism Allegations Force Out Claudine Gay
Backlash over Harvard’s response to antisemitism on campus led to increased scrutiny of her academic record.
Harvard president Claudine Gay on campus last month.Credit...Adam Glanzman for The New York Times
Jennifer Schuessler, Alan Blinder and Anemona Hartocollis
Here’s what to know about Claudine Gay’s resignation.
Faced with a new round of accusations over plagiarism in her scholarly work, Harvard’s president Claudine Gay announced her resignation on Tuesday.
She became the second Ivy League leader to lose her job in recent weeks amid a firestorm intensified by their widely derided congressional testimony regarding antisemitism on campus.
Here are the details:
Dr. Gay’s resignation marked an abrupt end to a turbulent tenure that began in July. Her stint was the shortest of any president in the history of Harvard since its founding in 1636. She was the institution’s first Black president,
and the second woman to lead the university. Read her resignation letter.
The latest accusations against Dr. Gay were circulated through an unsigned complaint published Monday in The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online journal that has led a campaign against Dr. Gay over the past few weeks. The
new complaint added additional accusations of plagiarism to about 40 that had already been circulated in the same way, apparently by the same accuser.
Support for Dr. Gay’s nascent presidency began eroding after what some saw as the university’s initial failure to forcefully condemn the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and some pro-Palestinian student responses. Outrage grew in early
December after Dr. Gay gave what critics saw as lawyerly, evasive answers before Congress when asked whether calls for the genocide of Jewish people were violations of school policies.
The December congressional hearing also led to the ouster of Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, whose support had already been shaken in recent months over her refusal to cancel a Palestinian writers conference.
She resigned as Penn’s president four days later.
Harvard President Resigns After Mounting Plagiarism Accusations