Harvard’s president resigns amid controversy

On Tuesday, Harvard President Claudine Gay announced her resignation. The move comes six months after she first took office, representing the shortest presidential term in university history.

While Gay didn’t mention a specific reason for stepping down, her resignation comes one month after receiving backlash for her congressional testimony regarding antisemitism on campus, in which Gay said it “depend[s] on the context” when deciding whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard’s code of conduct.

Days after Gay’s congressional testimony, one of her main detractors, billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, posted a 2022 investigative report claiming she had plagiarized some of her academic work. Harvard published an independent review of Gay’s research following the accusations, which found inadequate citations in a few instances but “no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.”

• On December 15, Gay initially requested corrections to two scholarly articles published in 2001 and 2017 in response to the review.
• One week later, Gay also requested an update to her 1997 PhD dissertation to correct additional instances of “inadequate citation,” which came after Harvard reviewed more of her academic work.

🎓🏛️ Zoom out: Of the three university leaders who received backlash for their congressional testimony regarding antisemitism on campus, MIT President Sally Kornbluth is the only one still in their position. Former UPenn President Liz Magill resigned four days after her testimony.