Harvard President Claudine Gay has resigned, the Harvard Crimson student newspaper reported on Tuesday, after she and other presidents of Ivy League schools were widely criticized for their congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus.
Gay’s tenure was the shortest in Harvard’s history, the newspaper said, and followed increasing pressure for her resignation last month, after University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill stepped down.
Gay, Magill and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth testified before a US House of Representatives committee on Dec. 5 about a rise in antisemitism on college campuses following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October.
The trio declined to give a definitive “yes” or “no” answer to Republican Representative Elise Stefanik’s question as to whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their schools’ codes of conduct regarding bullying and harassment, saying they had to balance it against free speech protections.
More than 70 US lawmakers signed a letter demanding that the governing boards of the three universities remove the presidents, citing dissatisfaction with their testimony.
However, Gay received support from some of her colleagues at Harvard. Several hundred faculty members last month signed a petition asking school administrators to not bend to political pressure to fire the school’s president over her testimony.
Other controversies surrounding Gay
Gay has also been hit with accusations of plagiarism. She planned to submit three corrections to her 1997 dissertation after a committee investigating plagiarism allegations against her found that she had made citation errors, a university spokesperson said.