Harvard President resigns on new plagiarism allegations

Force out Claudine Gay is a backlash over Harvard’s response to antisemitism on campus that led to increased scrutiny of Harvard’s President Claudine Gay’s academic record. Faced with a new round of accusations over plagiarism in her scholarly work, she 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. 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. 

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.