Last month, The Harvard Crimson’s editorial board defended Claudine Gay amid a torrent of plagiarism allegations, arguing she should stay in her position for now since they argued the transgressions were “limited and unintentional” and because an “interim president would bring chaos instead of needed stability.”
On Monday, however, the university’s paper published a dissenting opinion from two editorial board members arguing she should resign amid a series of back-to-back scandals that have rocked her short tenure.
Our doubts began in the wake of Hamas’ attacks on Oct. 7. Without question, Gay botched her public response to the crisis. She sent out-of-touch email after out-of-touch email to the student body, which totalled five in the end. She bungled her testimony before Congress, to international criticism. Now, on top of these blunders, it has surfaced that Gay plagiarized portions of multiple academic papers. The situation seems to worsen with every passing week.
Still, the Editorial Board today makes peace with Gay’s series of slip-ups, opposing her resignation even after dozens of allegations of academic misconduct, including, bafflingly, two sentences in the acknowledgements of her dissertation.
Because our peers avoid reckoning with the severity of Gay’s failures, dismissing instances of explicit plagiarism as insufficient to warrant her resignation, we respectfully dissent. (The Harvard Crimson)
The scandals have disrupted teaching and research at Harvard, resulted in a sharp decline in early application numbers, and havae taken a toll on financial contributions to the university.
“President Gay may be a good person. She may even be a praiseworthy scholar, despite the allegations. But that isn’t enough to remain president. The leader of the world’s foremost university must be held to a higher standard, one that Gay has unfortunately failed to meet,” they wrote. “It is clear to us that the continuation of Gay’s tenure as president only hurts the University. For Harvard’s sake, Gay must go.”
The editorial comes after influential Harvard alum Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, said he personally is aware of how much Gay's failures have cost the school financially.
“President Gay’s failures have led to billions of dollars of cancelled, paused, and withdrawn donations to the university,” he wrote in a letter to Harvard. “I am personally aware of more than a billion dollars of terminated donations from a small group of Harvard’s most generous Jewish and non-Jewish alumni. I have been copied and blind copied on numerous letters and emails to the University from alums who have written scathing letters to Gay and/or the Board withdrawing donations.”
But Harvard is also taking a reputational beating, and a congressional investigation by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce into the university will only make matters worse.
The investigation, which initially focused on allegations of antisemitism on campus, has since expanded to include the plagiarism allegations.
In a follow up letter to the Harvard Corporation, the committee’s chairwoman, Virginia Foxx (R-NC), warned the university’s federal funding is at risk.
“As you know, federal funding to Harvard is conditioned upon the school’s adherence to the standards of a recognized accreditor,” the letter stated. “The Committee expects an NECHE-accredited institution to ‘subscribe to and advocate [for] high ethical standards.”