Harvard head's exit highlights new challenges

Harvard University President Claudine Gay announced her resignation on Tuesday, following new accusations of plagiarism and previous criticism over her response to antisemitism on campus.

"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," she wrote in a letter to the community. "But, after consultation with members of the (Harvard) 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's tenure as Harvard president, lasting only six months, was the shortest in the nearly 400-year history of the school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, since its founding in 1636. She was the first black president and the second woman to lead the university.

The resignation could potentially influence future donations to the school and affect students' intentions to apply there, according to The New York Times.

"In the face of escalating controversy and conflict, President Gay and the Fellows have sought to be guided by the best interests of the institution whose future progress and well-being we are together committed to upholding," Fellows of Harvard College, the university's governing board, wrote in the statement.

Alan M. Garber, an economist and physician who is Harvard's provost and chief academic officer, will serve as the university's interim president. Gay will return to the Harvard faculty where she has served as a professor of government since 2006.

On Dec 12, the board announced that Gay would continue as president. More than 700 faculty members expressed their support for Gay to remain as president.

The latest accusations against Gay were circulated via an anonymous complaint published on Monday by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online journal. The 30-page complaint introduced further allegations of plagiarism, supplementing around 40 similar accusations that had previously been disseminated in the same manner.

Facing increasing pressure from Harvard student organizations and social media criticism urging her to step down, Gay's position appeared more precarious due to ongoing congressional investigations into the plagiarism allegations, along with accusations of antisemitism.

Gay, along with two other university presidents, the then-president of the University of Pennsylvania, Liz Magill, and the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sally Kornbluth, faced criticism for ambiguously answering whether "calls for the genocide of Jewish people" amounted to bullying and harassment on campus. Magill resigned four days after she testified. MIT said it still supports Kornbluth as president.

Critics argued that the university presidents didn't adequately address incidents of antisemitism on their campuses following the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct 7, and 74 members of Congress wrote a letter demanding their immediate dismissal.

Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican who heads a House committee investigating Harvard, said the inquiry would continue despite Gay's resignation.

'Hostile takeover'

"There has been a hostile takeover of postsecondary education by political activists, woke faculty, and partisan administrators," Foxx said in a statement. "The problems at Harvard are much larger than one leader, and the committee's oversight will continue."

"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," Stefanik posted on X, formerly Twitter.

"Her resignation is a symptom of Harvard being almost entirely beholden to external pressure," Sanaa Kahloon, a junior and pro-Palestinian activist, told the Times.

Without commenting on the merits of the allegations against Gay, Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors, said she fears plagiarism investigations could be "weaponized" to pursue a political agenda.

"There is a right-wing political attack on higher education right now, which feels like an existential threat to the academic freedom that has made American higher education the envy of the world," Mulvey said.

"These allegations of plagiarism have been weaponized by right-wing actors to suppress free speech in higher education, and to continue to suppress free speech with respect to Palestine," Kahloon said.

"This is a terrible moment," Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of history, race, and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, told the Times. "Republican congressional leaders have declared war on the independence of colleges and universities, just as Governor DeSantis has done in Florida. They will only be emboldened by Gay's resignation."

Agencies contributed to this story.