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Claudine Gay has resigned as president of Harvard University after her widely criticised appearance at a congressional hearing plunged the elite institution into a bitter national debate on campus antisemitism and prompted scrutiny of plagiarism allegations against her.
Gay was Harvard’s first black president and only the second woman to lead the university. She took office only in July, making her tenure the shortest in the university’s history.
In a statement issued on Tuesday afternoon, Gay said it had “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”.
She also noted that it had been “distressing” to have her scholarly rigour questioned and “frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fuelled by racial animus”.
In a separate statement, the fellows who run Harvard’s governing corporation expressed their “great sadness” at her decision to step down and praised “her deep and unwavering commitment to Harvard and to the pursuit of academic excellence”.
Alan Garber, Harvard’s provost and chief academic officer for the past 12 years, has been named interim president until a new leader is identified.
Gay’s resignation, first reported by the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, follows that in December of Elizabeth Magill, the former president of the University of Pennsylvania, who also testified at the hearing before a US House of Representatives committee.
In one exchange, the two presidents — along with Sally Kornbluth, their counterpart from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — struggled to respond when asked if calling for the genocide of Jews violated their campus codes of conduct. Pressed repeatedly by Elise Stefanik, the New York Republican, both said it depended on “the context”.
That response prompted fury from some donors and alumni, who had decried the elite institutions’ failure to issue a clear condemnation of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and address the rising antisemitism it unleashed.
The presidents and their defenders have argued that they were trying to balance their public statements against the need to protect free speech on campus. That explanation, though, was unsatisfying for many critics in light of the heightened sensitivity on US campuses in recent years to any speech that students said made them feel uncomfortable.
Gay issued an apology following her December 5 testimony. After an emergency meeting, the university’s board issued a statement that month saying she enjoyed its unanimous backing. But the scandal focused fresh attention on complaints about Gay’s scholarship, specifically numerous passages in her research papers in which the language was similar to that of other academics.
A Harvard committee at first cleared Gay, saying that she had failed to provide proper citations in limited instances. But further allegations surfaced, as did complaints that her transgressions would have resulted in harsh sanctions if committed by a Harvard student.
Gay, the daughter of Haitian immigrants, was a professor of political science at Stanford University before joining the faculty at Harvard, where she had earned her doctorate. Her research focused on minorities’ voting behaviour. Her appointment last year as the university’s 30th president, after an exhaustive search led by Penny Pritzker, was considered a watershed moment for America’s oldest university as the nation wrestled with a legacy of racial injustice and inequality following the police murder of George Floyd in 2020.
At the forefront of the campaign against Gay was Bill Ackman, the Harvard alumnus and prominent hedge fund manager who founded Pershing Square Capital Management. The forceful tactics employed by him and other billionaires have prompted complaints about the degree of influence that wealthy donors should be permitted to wield at academic institutions.
In a statement, Stefanik said Gay’s resignation was “long overdue” but pledged to continue a congressional investigation into how elite universities address antisemitism.