Claudine Gay has resigned from her position as Harvard president after just six months at the helm, making her the shortest-tenured official ever to lead the top university. In a statement on Tuesday, Gay wrote that “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.”
Her resignation comes after a month of turbulence that began with calls for her ouster in early December following a botched hearing before the House on antisemitism at top U.S. colleges. Conservative media also unearthed potential examples of plagiarism from her work as a political-science professor. And on Monday, new reporting from the Washington Free Beacon found more alleged violations, increasing the number of plagiarism examples to nearly 50.
The Beacon’s reporting centers on a paper from 1999, “The Effect of Minority Districts and Minority Representation on Political Participation in California,” in which Gay allegedly cribs sentences from University of Wisconsin political-science professor David Canon. One of Gay’s footnotes is copied nearly verbatim from Canon’s endnotes:
Gay had already corrected three of her prior publications, including her 1997 doctoral dissertation, after a Harvard inquiry found what it called “duplicative language without appropriate attribution.” But the Free Beacon, citing a complaint filed on Monday by an unnamed professor at another university, detailed an additional example of alleged plagiarism from the dissertation. In the paper, Gay uses almost a whole sentence from her thesis adviser Gary King to describe a mathematical model of precinct perimeters without citing him.
Gay’s supporters have argued that there are only so many ways to word technical language in academic writing. King, the head of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, told the Daily Beast last month that the allegations of plagiarism were “absurd.” And Canon came to Gay’s defense, telling the Washington Examiner that “this isn’t even close to an example of academic plagiarism.”
Either way, the controversy hasn’t died down. Harvard students have been calling for Gay’s resignation in the Harvard Crimson, claiming the president must be held to the same academic standards as they are. And some Harvard researchers told the Boston Globe that the university’s support of Gay is a clear double standard. The school’s governing board, the Harvard Corporation, wrote on December 12 that it supports Gay — who became president in July 2023 — and that its inquiry into her alleged plagiarism showed that her work did not violate “Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.” In a statement following Gay’s resignation, the Harvard Corporation wrote that it accepted Gay’s resignation “with sorrow.” (Some Harvard professors are also calling for the resignation of the Harvard Corporation’s chair, Penny Pritzker, a former Obama administration official and billionaire.)
“While President Gay has acknowledged missteps and has taken responsibility for them, it is also true that she has shown remarkable resilience in the face of deeply personal and sustained attacks,” the statement read. “While some of this has played out in the public domain, much of it has taken the form of repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol directed at her through disgraceful emails and phone calls. We condemn such attacks in the strongest possible terms.” The Harvard Corporation wrote that the search for a new president will “begin in due course.”
