Students at Harvard University are calling for university President Claudine Gay to resign from her position following scandals involving her response to antisemitism and allegations of plagiarism in several of her past works.
In an editorial by two students published in the Harvard Crimson, the students write that Gay should resign after “scandal after scandal has plagued our beloved university.”
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The students said their doubts regarding her leadership began with Gay’s testimony before Congress and response to antisemitism on campus.
“Our doubts began in the wake of Hamas’ attacks on Oct. 7. Without question, Gay botched her public response to the crisis. She sent out-of-touch email after out-of-touch email to the student body, which totalled five in the end. She bungled her testimony before Congress, to international criticism. Now, on top of these blunders, it has surfaced that Gay plagiarized portions of multiple academic papers,” the students wrote. “The situation seems to worsen with every passing week.”
The editorial also discussed how “Harvard’s failures” have dominated the news and how the academic environment on campus has been interrupted by the scandals.
“One doesn’t need to look far to see that Harvard isn’t running smoothly — these scandals disrupt teaching and research, Harvard’s core missions,” the students wrote. “As students, we are exhausted.”
The two students conclude the editorial by saying that although Gay may be a “good person” and “a praiseworthy scholar, despite the allegations,” she has failed to meet the standard that the president of Harvard University should be held to.
“It is clear to us that the continuation of Gay’s tenure as president only hurts the University. For Harvard’s sake, Gay must go,” the editorial concludes.
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The editorial was a dissent to the rest of the student newspaper’s editorial board, which argued Gay should remain in place — for now. The pair of students argue the rest of the editorial board “avoid reckoning with the severity of Gay’s failures” and dismiss “instances of explicit plagiarism as insufficient to warrant her resignation.”
The calls for Gay to resign began after her congressional testimony alongside two other university presidents on antisemitism on college campuses, which was widely panned. The testimony resulted in University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill resigning, but Harvard decided to keep Gay despite continued controversy.
