Harvard President Claudine Gay resigns amid plagiarism, antisemitism scandals

Harvard University President Claudine Gay has resigned from her position after multiple scandals clouded her short-lived administration.   

Gay sent an email to Harvard’s community on Tuesday announcing her resignation, saying that after discussion with the school’s governing board “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.” 

The Harvard Crimson, the school’s newspaper, was the first to report Gay’s resignation, which happened only six months after she was hired, making her term the shortest presidency in school history. 

“It is with a heavy heart but a deep love for Harvard that I write to share that I will be stepping down as president,” Gay said in the statement. “This is not a decision I came to easily.” 

She had faced two major controversies in a matter of weeks: one about the school’s response to growing antisemitism and another more personal matter regarding accusations of plagiarism.  

Dr. Claudine Gay, President of Harvard University, Liz Magill, President of University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Pamela Nadell, Professor of History and Jewish Studies at American University, and Dr. Sally Kornbluth, President of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, testify 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 investigate antisemitism on college campuses. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

The first came after Gay participated in a House hearing on campus antisemitism where she was asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) if calls for the genocide of Jewish people would be considered harassment at Harvard.  

Gay, along with the heads of two other elite universities, said it would depend on the context, refusing at the time to give a cut-and-dry response.

Free speech experts said their answers were legally correct, but the hearing made international headlines, and calls began for the college presidents’ resignations.

The University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill lost her job over the House testimony, while Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth remains at her post.

The Harvard Corporation stuck by Gay, and she stayed in her position until this week.  

In October, The New York Post reached out to Harvard about plagiarism concerns in Gay’s papers spanning decades.  

“While the analysis found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications,” the Harvard Corporation said in a statement. 

But after that statement, more allegations arose and Gay ended up sending in more corrections to her past work, including her dissertation in the 1990s.  

Both controversies led to the announcement of congressional investigations into Harvard’s policies surrounding disciplinary actions for antisemitism and how other students and faculty have been treated when they faced plagiarism concerns.  

“TWO DOWN,” tweeted Stefanik, who had also celebrated Magill’s ouster. She added that Harvard “knows that this long overdue forced resignation of the antisemitic plagiarist president is just the beginning of what will be the greatest scandal of any college or university in history.”

—Updated at 2:03 p.m.