Harvard University remains divided after president Claudine Gay’s resignation

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In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks, 33 student groups at Harvard touched off a campus firestorm with a statement saying Israel was solely to blame for the massacres. Earlier this week, the university’s president resigned amid a mounting political pressure campaign. In between, the U.S.’s oldest university found itself rent by a battle stretching from the Yard to the halls of Congress, involving accusations of racism, antisemitism and plagiarism and raising tough questions about academic independence.

“My deep sense of connection to Harvard and its people has made it all the more painful to witness the tensions and divisions that have riven our community,” Claudine Gay wrote in her letter resigning Harvard’s presidency after just six months, the shortest-serving leader in the university’s history. The first Black person to run the school, she said she was subjected to “threats fuelled by racial animus.”

Dr. Gay’s ouster came after sustained pressure by conservative politicians, activists and donors who accused her of being soft on antisemitism and of plagiarizing phrases in her academic writings. The episode was also part of a larger U.S. culture war over diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, particularly in education.

On the university’s ivy-covered campus, hundreds of professors signed open letters calling on the governing body, the board of the Harvard Corporation, to resist the campaign. Dr. Gay’s actions, they argued, should be subject to independent evaluation and not tried in the court of public opinion.

“Anybody who is accused of doing something wrong deserves a fair hearing, a free examination of the issues, and she didn’t get that. She got people who wanted to force her out to make a political point,” Ryan Enos, a political scientist at the university, said in an interview. “They don’t care about plagiarism. They want to attack the independence of universities.”

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Dr. Enos compared the pressure campaign with moves by authoritarian leaders around the world to subject higher learning to political control. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, for instance, has shut down a major university and put other academic institutions under the direct authority of his government.

“Harvard is being attacked in a way that really compromises the independence of its educational and research mission. It’s being told that people have to act a certain way, that they have to say certain things, or they’re not going to be allowed to serve,” he said.

In the early days after Oct. 7, Dr. Gay took flak for not condemning the pro-Palestinian student group letter that failed to acknowledge Hamas’s brutality. Then, when she spoke out against the Palestinian “from the river to the sea” slogan, she was criticized for taking a position on the parameters of the protests.

Meanwhile, some Jewish students at Harvard said they felt attacked by pro-Palestinian protests that disrupted classes and by rhetoric that painted Israel and Zionists as uniformly bad.

“I don’t think it’s antisemitic to criticize what Israel is doing in Gaza. But the portrayal of Israel as a representative of evil, of all that is wrong in the world, that is antisemitic to me,” Charlie Covit, a first-year undergraduate student, told The Globe and Mail.

Under grilling from Republican Representative Elise Stefanik at a congressional hearing last month, Dr. Gay refused to say directly that calls for the genocide of Jewish people would be against school codes of conduct. Dr. Gay later apologized for her equivocation.

Then, conservative writers Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet detailed instances in Dr. Gay’s doctoral dissertation and journal articles in which she used language from other scholars’ work without proper attribution. The New York Post, Washington Free Beacon and two anonymous complaints to Harvard pointed out others.

Billionaire donors held back their contributions. Chief among them was Bill Ackman, who alleged Dr. Gay got her job because of her race. Mr. Ackman and other opponents of DEI said Dr. Gay’s publication record of 11 articles in two decades was too thin for the job she held.

Ms. Stefanik and Mr. Rufo are also anti-DEI campaigners. Mr. Rufo, who wrote a book titled America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, was appointed to a college board by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has curtailed discussions of structural racism in his state’s classrooms.

“This really isn’t about plagiarism and antisemitism – although those issues are real and they are serious – what’s really going on is a conversation about race and diversity and anger on the right wing against the direction that elite universities have taken,” said Derek Penslar, a history professor and director of Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies.

Dr. Penslar argued that Dr. Gay and other Harvard leaders handled the fallout from Oct. 7 poorly. They should have organized forums for people to discuss Israeli-Palestinian issues in a respectful fashion, for instance, rather than taking a relatively hands-off approach, he said. But he said this failure of leadership was not necessarily a firing offence. And he contended plagiarism accusations should be investigated by experts, not decided via public pressure.

The Harvard Corporation did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did pro-Palestinian groups that organized the campus protests.

In a statement, Getzel Davis, the rabbi for the university’s Hillel chapter, said the group hoped to work with the administration to “ensure that Jewish students are able to safely express their identities on our campus.”

Alex Bernat, a third-year computer science student at Harvard who is Jewish, said Dr. Gay’s resignation is “a step in the right direction” because she had “lost the ability to lead.” Among other alarming instances of antisemitism, he said, he saw fellow students post social-media messages after Oct. 7 accusing Israel of faking Hamas’s atrocities.

Mr. Covit, for his part, contends that disagreeing with the people who drove the criticisms of Dr. Gay does not necessarily invalidate the criticisms themselves.

“Two things can be true at the same time. It can be true that this was a right-wing hit job, an attack on higher education and it might even have been racially motivated in some ways. It can also be true that, when you look at Claudine Gay’s record, she had 11 academic articles and six of them had problems with attribution,” he said. “Reasonable people can say ‘was she ever the right person for the job?’”