Harvard’s chief academic officer Alan Garber is now the interim President of the institution after the first black President Claudine Gay (pictured above) was pressured to resign on Tuesday.
“After consultation with members of the Corporation, 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,” Gay wrote in a statement.
Dr. Claudine Gay steps down as president of Harvard University, ending a brief and tumultuous tenure marred by allegations of plagiarism and a campus controversy over antisemitism.
Opposition to Gay had been building in the wake of the attack by Hamas, which is designated a terrorist group by the US and European Union.
One of her predecessors as Harvard president, Larry Summers, criticized the university for not speaking out after more than 30 student groups blamed Israel solely for the violence.
Gay subsequently condemned the “terrorist atrocities” and spent weeks reaching out to Jewish groups on campus amid concern over antisemitic incidents.
At the same time, however, another controversy had started to swirl around Gay fueled by articles first reported in conservative-leaning media questioning whether she had committed plagiarism.
Allegations of wrongdoing in research are among the most serious in academia.
In backing Gay on Dec. 12, Harvard Corp. said it had examined her work as a political scientist and found “a few instances of inadequate citation” but no violation of Harvard’s research standards.
Gay’s standing worsened Dec. 20 when Harvard found two more examples of “duplicative language without appropriate attribution.”
The plagiarism allegations that led to Dr Gay’s resignation were surfaced by Christopher Rufo, a right-wing activist best known for the cultural battle over alleged teaching of Critical Race Theory in US schools.
In a December social media post, Mr Rufo laid out what is a now-familiar strategy for conservatives seeking to generate coverage of stories they believe the mainstream media are ignoring.
“We launched the Claudine Gay plagiarism story from the right,” Mr Rufo wrote.
“The next step is to smuggle it into the media apparatus of the left, legitimizing the narrative to centre-left actors who have the power to topple her. Then squeeze.”
Mr Rufo’s efforts were amplified by media outlets that included the New York Post and the Washington Free Beacon, which on Monday published details of a new anonymous complaint filed with Harvard that included additional evidence of alleged plagiarism in Dr Gay’s published work.
In her resignation letter, Dr Gay said she was “subjected to personal attacks and threats fuelled by racial animus”, adding that the last few weeks had made clear that more must be done to “combat bias and hate in all its forms”.
It was a sentiment echoed, with more focused anger, by others on the left.
“So what we’ve learned is this: Bad-faith bigots pretending they’re concerned about antisemitism will happily use women of colour – especially black women – as a scapegoat and lightning rod for large systemic issues,” wrote novelist Celeste Ng on social media. “And that people invested in maintaining those systemic issues will comply.”
