(Headline USA) Harvard University President Claudine Gay resigned Tuesday amid plagiarism accusations and criticism over testimony at a congressional hearing where she was unable to say unequivocally that calls on campus for the genocide of Jews would violate the school’s conduct policy.
Gay is the second Ivy League president to resign in the past month following the congressional testimony. Gay, Harvard’s first black president, announced her departure just months into her tenure in a letter to the Harvard community.
Following the congressional hearing, Gay’s academic career came under intense scrutiny by conservative watchdogs who unearthed several instances of plagiarism in her 1997 doctoral dissertation.
Under pressure from former President Barack Obama, Harvard’s governing board initially rallied behind Gay, claiming a review of her scholarly work turned up “a few instances of inadequate citation” but no evidence of research misconduct.
Days later, the Harvard Corporation revealed that it found two additional examples of “duplicative language without appropriate attribution.” The board said Gay would update her dissertation and request corrections.
The Harvard Corporation said the resignation came “with great sadness” and thanked Gay for her “deep and unwavering commitment to Harvard and to the pursuit of academic excellence.”
Alan M. Garber, provost and chief academic officer, will serve as interim president until Harvard finds a replacement, the board said in a statement. Garber, an economist and physician, has served as provost for 12 years.
Gay’s resignation was celebrated by the conservatives who put her plagiarism in the national spotlight. Christopher Rufo, the journalist whose work has helped expose the infiltration of critical race theory and other cultural issues in the classroom, said he’s “glad she’s gone.”
“Rather than take responsibility for minimizing antisemitism, committing serial plagiarism, intimidating the free press, and damaging the institution, she calls her critics racist,” Rufo tweeted.
He added that “this is the poison” of diversity, equity and inclusion ideology.
This is Claudine Gay's resignation letter. Rather than take responsibility for minimizing antisemitism, committing serial plagiarism, intimidating the free press, and damaging the institution, she calls her critics racist. This is the poison of DEI ideology. Glad she's gone. pic.twitter.com/WlqMKLn6pA
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) January 2, 2024
Scholars developed critical race theory during the 1970s as a means to transpose America’s historic racial inequalities onto the Marxist class divisions that helped usher in revolution in Europe. It centers on the idea that racism is systemic in the nation’s institutions, which function to maintain the dominance of white people in society.
By doing so, it allows the true oppressors—wealthy elitist 1 percenters—to abdicate their blame and responsibility through virtue-signaling while fomenting a racial discord between lower- and middle-class blacks and whites, none of whom are inherently privileged.
The elites are able, hence, to maintain their own wealth and lord over a sort of feudal serfdom or plantation society in which they alone benefit from the aristocratic privilege of being above the laws and social mores.
Minority elites, such as Gay, are particularly able to disregard all of society’s standards with impunity and are known to shamelessly and flagrantly play the race card should any consequences eventually catch up with them.
Gay, in her letter, said it has been “distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor—two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am—and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.”
But Gay, who is returning to the school’s faculty, added “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.”
Gay and the presidents of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania came under fire last month for their tone-deaf answers to a line of questioning from New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, who asked whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” would violate the colleges’ code of conduct.
The three presidents had been called before the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce to answer accusations that universities were failing to protect Jewish students amid rising fears of anti-Semitism worldwide after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Gay said it depended on the context, adding that when “speech crosses into conduct, that violates our policies.” The answer faced swift backlash from Republican and some Democratic lawmakers, as well as the White House.
The hearing was parodied in the opening skit on Saturday Night Live, which further exacerbated matters after the show controversially opted to lampoon Stefanik instead of the three university presidents.
Gay later apologized, telling The Crimson student newspaper that she got caught up in a heated exchange at the House committee hearing and failed to properly denounce threats of violence against Jewish students.
“What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community—threats to our Jewish students—have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged,” Gay said.
The episode marred Gay’s tenure at Harvard—she became president in July—and sowed discord at the Ivy League campus.
Rabbi David Wolpe later resigned from a new committee on anti-Semitism created by Gay, tweeting that “events on campus and the painfully inadequate testimony reinforced the idea that I cannot make the sort of difference I had hoped.”
The House committee announced days after the hearing that it would investigate the policies and disciplinary procedures at Harvard, MIT and Penn.
Separate federal civil rights investigations were previously opened at Harvard, Penn and several other universities in response to complaints submitted to the U.S. Education Department.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
