Claudine Gay quits as Harvard University president

Claudine Gay has resigned as president of Harvard University, ending the shortest leadership tenure of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious university, relenting to a broad-based partisan attack on US higher education combined with her own personal missteps en route to becoming the institution’s first black leader.

“This is not a decision I came to easily,” Professor Gay said in a letter of resignation nearly a month after a congressional hearing at which she and two other presidents of top US universities were berated by Republican lawmakers over their responses to pro-Palestinian demonstrations on their campuses.

“But, after consultation with members of the corporation,” she said, referring to Harvard’s chief governing board, “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.”

The board, in response, said it accepted her decision “with great sadness” and had chosen Harvard’s provost, Alan Garber, to serve as interim president until a new leader for the institution is chosen and takes office.

Professor Gay is the second of the three university leaders – all female and relatively new in their presidencies – to resign under sustained criticisms from politicians and institutional donors who have faulted US higher education over a range of policies, most effectively of late the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Elizabeth Magill resigned earlier as president of the University of Pennsylvania, while the third president at the congressional hearing, Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has received firm backing from her governing board.

Harvard’s board had also backed Professor Gay, but its commitment weakened as her conservative critics identified a series of instances of apparent plagiarism in her peer-reviewed journal articles and doctoral dissertation dating back to 1997.

Professor Gay is a daughter of Haitian immigrants and a social scientist who was chosen in December 2022 to serve as president and took office last July. She had served as Harvard’s dean of arts and sciences since 2018. She was recruited to Harvard from Stanford University in 2006 to become a professor of government, having earned her bachelor’s degree in economics from Stanford and her doctorate in government from Harvard.

From the moment of her selection, conservative critics suggested her as an unworthy choice driven by concern for racial equity over quality. Such complaints exploded after the October attack by Hamas militants against Israeli civilians, when an array of student groups expressed sympathy for Palestinians besieged by Israeli military forces.

At the December congressional hearing, Republican lawmakers repeatedly and aggressively accused the three university presidents of not doing enough to protect their Jewish students, and the presidents struggled in the heated atmosphere to explain the differences between legitimate political debate and illegal threats of violence.

And shortly afterward, conservative critics began publicising repeated instances in Professor Gay’s scholarly work, running several sentences in length, where she appears to have copied the writings of others without attribution.

That left her and Harvard’s governing board to weigh the severity of those offences and measure them against the cost to the institution and higher education more broadly of relenting to pressure from politicians and philanthropists seeking greater control over academic governance.

“These past several months”, Harvard’s governing board said in its statement, “have seen Harvard and higher education face a series of sustained and unprecedented challenges. 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 uphold.”

In her statement, Professor Gay bemoaned the loss of trust that the political divisions had brought to the university community. “Amidst all of this,” she said, “it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigour – two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am – and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fuelled by racial animus.”

A leader of the Republican campaign, Representative Elise Stefanik, cheered her departure, asserting in a social media post that “this is just the beginning of what will be the greatest scandal of any college or university in history”.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com