Harvard University president Claudine Gay is expected to resign on Tuesday, The Boston Globe reported.
Gay has been embroiled in dual controversies over her response to campus antisemitism at Harvard University in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attacks, as well as accusations that she plagiarized substantial portions of her academic work.
On Dec. 5, Gay was grilled by Republicans on the House Education and Workforce Committee alongside the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania about whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their schools’ respective codes of conduct.
“It depends on the context,” Gay stated.
Penn president Liz Magill announced her resignation on Dec. 9, four days after the hearing. However, Gay and MIT president Sally Kornbluth appeared to have weathered the storm until Tuesday.
Compounding Gay’s troubles were reports from the New York Post and Washington Free Beacon indicating that Gay had plagiarized substantial portions of her academic work. A political scientist, her research focuses on race, identity and voting behavior.
Harvard had previously denied that Gay’s “duplicative language” rose to the level of plagiarism, but the Free Beacon reported six new plagiarism charges against Gay on Jan. 1.
Gay, who is Harvard’s first black president, allegedly plagiarized from other scholars.
The Boston Globe reported that Harvard’s provost, Alan Garber, will become interim president.
Garber, who is Jewish, told The Harvard Crimson that he had regrets about the academic institution’s initial statement about Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. “Our goal is to ensure that our community is safe, secure and feels well supported—and that first statement did not succeed in that regard,” he said.
“Affiliates slammed the university over its initial statement on Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which critics condemned for failing to denounce Hamas and respond to a controversial letter signed by more than 30 Harvard student groups that called Israel ‘entirely responsible’ for the violence,” per the Crimson.
“The criticism prompted Harvard president Claudine Gay to release a second statement less than 16 hours later, in which she explicitly condemned Hamas and distanced the university from the statement signed by the student organizations,” the paper added.
“President Gay’s follow-up statement was important in rectifying some of the misimpressions that we created with that first statement,” Garber told the Crimson.
At just six months and two days, Gay’s tenure as president is the shortest in the Ivy League university’s 388-year history. The search committee also hired Gay “after just five months—Harvard’s shortest search process in almost 70 years,” the Crimson reported.