Claudine Gay announced her resignation as the president of Harvard University on Tuesday after a series of academic and leadership debacles. For much of the news media, however, Gay’s resignation was about something else: right-wing racism.
Claudine Gay announced her resignation as the president of Harvard University on Tuesday after a series of academic and leadership debacles. For much of the news media, however, Gay’s resignation was about something else: right-wing racism.
The Washington Free Beacon and others in recent weeks revealed nearly 50 allegations of plagiarism against Gay, implicating half of her academic work, starting with the acknowledgments of her 1997 Harvard dissertation. The plagiarism scandal followed Gay’s Dec. 5 congressional testimony, during which she struggled to defend her disastrous response to an outbreak of anti-Semitism on campus after Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist rampage in Israel. Asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews constituted harassment at Harvard, Gay told lawmakers, “it depends on the context.”
“Amidst all of this, 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,” Gay wrote in her resignation letter.
