Why Claudine Gay Resigned as Harvard University President and What Led to The Fallout? | Explained

Harvard University President Claudine Gay announced her resignation just six months into her presidency amid a firestorm of controversy over plagiarism accusations and criticism over testimony at a congressional hearing.

Gay’s resignation comes amid a period of extreme turmoil at one of the most prestigious universities and marks the end of the presidency of the first Black president and second woman in Harvard’s 400-year history. She said in her resignation letter that she’d been subjected to personal threats and “racial animus.”

The Harvard President is the second Ivy League head to resign in the past month following the congressional testimony after Liz Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, had already been forced to resign on December 9.

Why Claudine Gay Resigned?

Claudine Gay, 53, was born in New York to Haitian immigrants and is a professor of political science who in July became the first Black president of 368-year-old Harvard University, in Cambridge, outside Boston.

However, she has been engulfed by criticism in recent weeks after she declined to say unequivocally whether calling for genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s code of conduct as she testified before Congress alongside the heads of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania.

As per media reports, the Harward president in the congressional testimony in December failed to explicitly say calls for genocide of Jewish people constituted bullying and harassment on campus. There was widespread criticism that the Harward President didn’t do enough to ensure the safety of Jewish students and others at the school.

Gay, in her response, noted 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.”

In the US, the controversy come amid a rise in attacks and violent rhetoric targeting Jews and Muslims, including at universities, since the Israel-Hamas war erupted in October last year. Tensions surged in some college campuses following the October 7 terror attacks by Hamas against Israel. There have been several protests and counterprotests on college campuses, with some of them turning violent.

Who Said What?

The controversy around Harvard also drew in CEOs, billionaires, powerful donors and even leaders of Congress. More than 70 lawmakers, including two Democrats, demanded her resignation, while several high-profile Harvard alumni and donors also called for her departure.

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of has also claimed that a “whopping wave of anti-Semitism” has “seeped onto university campuses.”

In Harvard, the faces and names of some students allegedly linked to anti-Israel statements were displayed on billboards near the campus.

Former student and multi-million-dollar donor Bill Ackman claimed in a letter to Harvard’s governing boards that “President Gay’s failures have led to billions of dollars of cancelled, paused, and withdrawn donations to the university.”

However, more than 700 Harvard faculty members had signed a letter supporting Gay and her job had appeared to be safe.

Plagiarism Scandal

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.

The Harvard Corporation, Harvard’s governing board, initially rallied behind Gay, but, later it said that it found two additional examples of “duplicative language without appropriate attribution.”

Harvard recently announced that Gay planned to submit corrections to her 1997 PhD dissertation to correct instances of “inadequate citation”. Her resignation was celebrated by the conservatives who put her alleged plagiarism in the national spotlight.

The Congressional Hearing That Led to Resignation

Harvard University President Claudine Gay, MIT’s president Sally Kornbluth and University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill had been called last month before the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce to answer accusations that universities were failing to protect Jewish students amid fears of antisemitism and fallout of Israel-Hamas war.

Gay, Magill and Kornbluth came under fire for their lawyerly answers to questions from New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, who asked whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” would violate the colleges’ codes of conduct.

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 episode marred Gay’s tenure at Harvard — she became president in July — and sowed discord at the Ivy League campus.

The House committee announced days after the hearing that it would investigate the policies and disciplinary procedures at Harvard, MIT and Penn.