World Claudine Gay Resigns as Harvard President After Plagiarism Charges By Julia Carroll - January 2, 2024 Following renewed allegations of plagiarism linked to her academic work, Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University, tendered her resignation on Tuesday. The unduly criticized statements she made to
Congress about antisemitism on campus added fuel to the
fire, making her the second Ivy League head to step down recently. Dr. Gay’s abrupt resignation concludes a tumultuous period at the helm starting from July, the briefest tenure for any Harvard president since its inception in 1636. She was the first Black and second female president to steer 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 conveyed in a letter addressed to the Harvard community. Over the past month, Dr. Gay has faced emerging plagiarism allegations, signaling continuing criticism of her fit to lead the Ivy League institution. This has further embroiled the university in debates on whether both its president and its students are held to equivalent standards. The recent accusations were dispersed via an unpublished complaint released Monday in The
Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online journal. The journal has led a campaign against Dr. Gay in recent weeks. The fresh complaint included supplementary plagiarism charges to approximately 40 previous accusations, presumably from the same source. Dr. Gay’s early presidency began losing support after some perceived the university’s lax initial response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and pro-Palestinian student responses. The reserved approach led to increased dissatisfaction among some Harvard backers. Criticism further mounted in early December, when Dr. Gay’s noncommittal responses to Congress in relation to genocide calls against Jewish people were perceived as evasive. During a congressional hearing, Dr. Gay, along with university presidents Elizabeth Magill and Sally Kornbluth, faced Representative Elise Stefanik’s enquiring questions. “At Harvard,” Ms. Stefanik posed to Dr. Gay, “does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?” Dr. Gay replied, “It can be, depending on the context.”
Social Media quickly spread this exchange, leading to resentment among many with strong university affiliations. The incident, along with a similar one between Ms. Stefanik and Ms. Magill, made waves. A few days later, Ms. Magill, whose support had already dwindled due to her refusal to cancel a Palestinian writers conference, resigned from her presidency at Penn. Dr. Gay endeavored to manage the repercussions by apologizing in an interview with The Harvard Crimson. She stated the regret she felt for any distress her words may have caused. Post her testimony, the Harvard Corporation issued a unanimous statement backing Dr. Gay. This came after a late-night meeting and despite outside pressure calling for her removal from several high-profile Jewish graduates, significant financial donors, and lawmakers. Meanwhile, the university confirmed it had received plagiarism complaints regarding three of Dr. Gay’s academic articles. Following a review, the university found that although the president had not breached their “research misconduct” guidelines, she had committed “inadequate citation” in a few instances. Dr. Gay subsequently requested corrections to the errors. In the face of ongoing plagiarism allegations, mainly driven by conservative media, additional insufficient citation instances were discovered in Dr. Gay’s research, significantly affecting her 1997 Ph.D. dissertation. She committed to making suitable amendments to correct these. Dr. Gay, who returned to teach government at her alma mater nearly a decade after earning her doctorate, saw her support dwindle amidst the antisemitism uproar and mounting plagiarism allegations. The allegations also resulted in unwelcome scrutiny from Congress, as a committee investigating Harvard demanded all documents and communications related to the plagiarism allegations. Cumulatively, the accusations spread by conservative media, including those in articles by activist Christopher Rufo and The Washington Free Beacon’s reportage, claim Dr. Gay plagiarized work from other sources without proper citation in roughly half her 11 journal articles listed on her curriculum vitae and her dissertation. The examples vary from snippets of technical definitions to slightly rephrased paragraphs summarizing others’ research without adequate citation. Specifically, Dr. Gay’s dissertation’s acknowledgments appear to lift two sentences from another scholar, Jennifer L. Hochschild’s 1996 book. As the allegations piled up, faculty members and scholars offered diverse opinions on the transgressions’ severity, with some recognizing a disturbing trend, while others dismissed them as minor or as an orchestrated political attack. Nevertheless, some felt Dr. Gay’s guilt was evident: she had committed plagiarism, and Harvard needed to acknowledge it. Carol Swain, a retired political scientist from Vanderbilt University, was highly critical of both Dr. Gay’s appropriation of her work and Harvard’s staunch defense of their president. Conversely, Steven Levitsky, a government professor at Harvard, saw the plagiarism occurrences as mostly mild instances of carelessness, In his view, most incidents appear within methodological or previous scholarship summary sections, not directly related to Dr. Gay’s primary claims. A quantitative scholar, Dr. Gay focuses on data, not literature reviews according to Levitsky. Levitsky also organized a faculty petition supporting Dr. Gay; it urged the Harvard Corporation not to buckle under political pressures that undermine Harvard’s academic freedom. Assistance in reporting provided by: Dana Goldstein, Sarah Mervosh, and Vimal Patel. Harvard President, Claudine Gay, Steps Down Amid Plagiarism Allegations TAGS charges Claudine gay Harvard plagiarism president resigns
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