Harvard University President Claudine Gay is expected to resign from her position on Tuesday amid a bevy of scandals, according to the Harvard Crimson:
Harvard President Claudine Gay will resign Tuesday afternoon, bringing an end to the shortest presidency in the University’s history, according to a person with knowledge of the decision
It is not clear who will be appointed to serve as interim president.
University spokesperson Jonathan L. Swain declined to comment on Gay’s decision to step down.
Gay’s resignation — just six months and two days into the presidency — comes amid growing allegations of plagiarism and lasting doubts over her ability to respond to antisemitism on campus after her disastrous congressional testimony Dec. 5.
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The Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — is expected to announce the resignation to Harvard affiliates in an email later today. Gay is also expected to make a statement about the decision.
Gay became the subject of controversy last month when she claimed antisemitic speech calling for genocide against the Jewish people did not violate the university’s rules during testimony before Congress. This came amid widespread debate over the war in Gaza as pro-Palestinian protesters held demonstrations in universities across the country. Her comments were met with fierce backlash and placed her in the spotlight.
Shortly after the congressional hearing, allegations of plagiarism cropped up. There were suspicions that she had plagiarized parts of her Ph.D dissertation. In other instances, she took full paragraphs and sentences from other people’s work.
The article lists numerous examples of Gay “borrowing” other people’s work and presenting it as her own; here’s but one:
But in at least 10 instances, Gay lifted full sentences—even entire paragraphs—with just a word or two tweaked.
In her 1997 thesis, for example, she borrowed a full paragraph from a paper by the scholars Bradley Palmquist, then a political science professor at Harvard, and Stephen Voss, one of Gay’s classmates in her Ph.D. program at Harvard, while making only a couple alterations, including changing their “decrease” to “increase” because she was studying a different set of data.
Most recently, six new allegations of plagiarism were made against the former Harvard president.
Now, things are going from bad to worse for the once-respected university as six new charges of plagiarism have been leveled.
Harvard University president Claudine Gay was hit with six additional allegations of plagiarism on Monday in a complaint filed with the university, breathing fresh life into a scandal that has embroiled her nascent presidency and pushing the total number of allegations near 50.
Seven of Gay’s 17 published works have already been impacted by the scandal, but the new charges, which have not been previously reported, extend into an eighth: In a 2001 article, Gay lifts nearly half a page of material verbatim from another scholar, David Canon, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin.
This latest news means that of Gay’s 17 published works, nearly half of them include examples of blatant plagiarism. As noted above, in one case, she stole almost “half a page of material verbatim from a political science professor from Wisconsin.
Gay is expected to make a statement regarding her resignation on Tuesday.
