Harvard President Claudine Gay Resigns

After a month of criticism, Claudine Gay resigned from her post as Harvard president on January 2. She acknowledged no wrongdoing in her resignation letter, but said she was stepping down “so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual.”

Plagiarism: Gay’s resignation followed weeks of mounting accusations that she plagiarized portions of her academic papers, including her 1997 Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard. The latest accusations were published Monday, adding to about 40 others previously published.

Anti-Semitism: Her resignation also comes a month after she and two other leaders of prestigious universities refused to say that calls for genocide of Jewish people violate campus rules.

Rather than apologizing, Gay played the victim. She said in her resignation letter that it was “frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.”

Getting off easy: Gay will remain on the faculty, where she will still earn around $900,000 annually, if not more. The decision to let her stay on the faculty was met with heavy criticism.

It’s unacceptable when you have students at Harvard who would be expelled for plagiarism to allow a faculty member who has nearly 50 examples of plagiarism in their very slim body of academic work. It’s absurd and everybody knows it. Harvard knows it too.
—Elise Stefanik, House Republican Conference chairwoman and Harvard graduate

The Trumpet says: Gay’s shameful presidency and her light punishment expose a sickness in America’s higher education. This moral decline is the result of a larger spiritual war that is increasingly evident in our world. Read “The Sickness in American Universities Is Worse Than We Thought.”