Harvard president resigns after backlash over testimony on campus antisemitism, and amid plagiarism claims
Gavriel Fiske is a reporter at The Times of Israel

Claudine Gay has announced her resignation as president of Harvard University.
“It is with a heavy heart but a deep love for Harvard that I write to share that I will be stepping down as president. This is not a decision I came to easily… after consultation with members of the Corporation, it has become clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual,” Gay wrote in an email sent out to Harvard staff, students and alumni.
In recent weeks, Gay had faced accusations of plagiarism, which surfaced after increased scrutiny of her published works in the wake of her controversial early December testimony about antisemitism on US university campuses.
Gay, along with the then-president of the University of Pennsylvania and the president of MIT, faced a fierce backlash for their evasive responses to Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s questioning, in which the three presidents refused to explicitly say that calls for genocide of Jewish people violate campus rules on harassment.
Gay said then that it was only when “speech crosses into conduct, that violates our policies.”
Gay subsequently apologized for her remarks.
Her six-month tenure as Harvard president is the shortest in the university’s history, the Harvard Crimson student newspaper reported Tuesday. Gay was only the second woman, and the first Black woman, to lead the Ivy League university. She is expected to stay on as a faculty member.
Gay joins Liz Magill who resigned last month as president of the University of Pennsylvania following a similar uproar over her own responses at the congressional hearing on campus antisemitism.
AP contributed to this report.