Harvard University threw its support behind President Claudine Gay in the face of growing calls for her to resign over her handling of campus antisemitism while addressing the plagiarism allegations that have compounded concerns about her leadership.
The Harvard Corporation, the university’s highest governing body, said “we unanimously stand in support of President Gay” in a highly anticipated statement Tuesday morning following days of speculation about her future.
“As members of the Harvard Corporation, we today reaffirm our support for President Gay’s continued leadership of Harvard University,” the board said in the statement. “Our extensive deliberations affirm our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing.”
The university said that it learned of plagiarism allegations in October regarding three of Ms. Gay’s articles, concluding after an independent review that the concerns did not rise to the level of research misconduct. Even so, she has issued corrections.
“On December 9, the Fellows reviewed the results, which revealed a few instances of inadequate citation,” the statement said. “While the analysis found no violation of Harvard‘s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.”
The university did not say whether the review included her 1997 doctoral thesis, which became the focus of plagiarism allegations following a Monday report in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal that said she paraphrased passages “nearly verbatim” from other sources without giving adequate credit.
The statement signed by the Fellows of Harvard College means that Ms. Gay has escaped for now the fate of former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, who announced her resignation Saturday following a donor revolt and a disastrous House of Representatives hearing on campus antisemitism.
The Dec. 5 hearing featuring Ms. Gay, Ms. Magill and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth saw all three say that whether calling for “genocide of Jews” violates campus rules would depend on the context.
Ms. Gay apologized afterward, saying “I am sorry. Words matter,” while the corporation acknowledged that the university’s early statements following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israeli civilians fell short.
“So many people have suffered tremendous damage and pain because of Hamas’s brutal terrorist attack, and the University’s initial statement should have been an immediate, direct, and unequivocal condemnation,” the Tuesday statement said. “Calls for genocide are despicable and contrary to fundamental human values.”
Ms. Gay is the first Black and second woman president of Harvard, a post she assumed in July after serving as dean of the faculty of arts and sciences.
“President Gay has apologized for how she handled her congressional testimony and has committed to redoubling the University’s fight against antisemitism.”
Those who have demanded Ms. Gay’s resignation include more than 70 members of Congress and billionaire donor and Harvard grad Bill Ackman, who said that he knows of $1 billion in giving that has been suspended or withdrawn over the antisemitism uproar.
In Ms. Gay’s corner are more than 600 faculty members who signed a statement of support, the Harvard Alumni Association, and a group of hundreds of Black alumni and allies.
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.