It just got to be too much…..
Faced with a new round of accusations over plagiarism in her scholarly work, Harvard’s president Claudine Gay announced her resignation on Tuesday, becoming the second Ivy League leader to lose her job in recent weeks amid a firestorm intensified by their widely derided congressional testimony regarding antisemitism on campus.
The resignation of Dr. Gay marked an abrupt end to a turbulent tenure that began in July. Her stint was the shortest of any president in the history of Harvard since its founding in 1636. She was the institution’s first Black president, and the second woman to lead the university.
“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,” Dr. Gay wrote in a letter to the Harvard community.
Over the last month, plagiarism accusations had surfaced against Dr. Gay, the president of Harvard, signaling that the attacks on her qualifications to lead the Ivy League university are continuing, and miring the university deeper in debate over whether Harvard holds its president and its students to the same standard.
The latest accusations were circulated through an unsigned complaint published Monday in The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online journal that has led a campaign against Dr. Gay over the past few weeks. The new complaint added additional accusations of plagiarism to about 40 that had already been circulated in the same way, apparently by the same accuser.
Support for Dr. Gay’s nascent presidency began eroding after what some saw as the university’s initial failure to forcefully condemn the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and some pro-Palestinian student responses. The caution outraged some Harvard supporters — outrage that grew in early December, after Dr. Gay gave what critics saw as lawyerly, evasive answers before Congress when asked whether calls for the genocide of Jewish people were violations of school policies…..
image…Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in Washington in December.Credit…Ken Cedeno/Reuters