Claudine Gay announced on Tuesday that resigned from his position. The reasons were the amount of criticism received for his testimony before Congress on anti-Semitism on campuses.
After having the shortest mandate in the history of harvardClaudine Gay was pressured since last month to step aside, with the precedent of his counterpart from the University of Pennsylvania, Liz Magill, who also resigned.
Gay, Magill and Sally Kornbluth, who chairs the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, testified on December 5 before a committee of the United States House of Representatives about the growing antisemitism on campuses university students, after war between Israel and Hamas.
The three presidents they refused to answer the question from Elise Stefanik, a Republican representative, about whether calling for the genocide of the Jews would violate the codes of conduct of their schools, in relation to bullying and harassment, giving as justification that they had to take into consideration the protection of freedom of expression.
As a result, more than 70 US legislators they signed a letter in which they demanded that the boards of trustees of the three universities remove the presidents, citing their discomfort with the testimony.
Despite the letter, Gay received support from some of his colleagues at Harvard. Hundreds of teachers signed a petition last month asking her not to give in to political pressure to fire her.
Gay issued a statement confirming his resignation
The resignation, first reported Tuesday by the Harvard Crimson student newspaper, was confirmed shortly after by Gay herself. “With great regret but with deep love for harvard I write to share that dI will leave the position of rector”, Gay said in a statement.
Plagiarism accusations against Harvard president
Additionally, Gay had a history of plagiarism accusationsin relation to his thesis 1997, where he planned to submit three corrections since a committee discovered dating mistakes.
Source: Ambito
