Harvard keeps Claudine Gay as president, despite growing concerns

Harvard University’s governing board has unanimously agreed to keep Claudine Gay as the Ivy League institution’s president, despite concerns over her handling of student protests over Israel and new allegations of plagiarism in her doctoral dissertation.

The 13-member Harvard Corporation, after an extended late-night session, agreed not to fire Professor Gay five months into her presidency, but noted she would make multiple corrections to the 1997 Harvard political science thesis.

“Our extensive deliberations”, the governing board said in concluding its assessment, “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 Harvard board acted just days after University of Pennsylvania forced out its president, Elizabeth Magill, largely as a response to a congressional hearing the previous week where Professor Gay and Professor Magill were portrayed by Republican lawmakers as insufficiently interested in censoring students supportive of Palestinian civilians.

The Capitol Hill hearing was part of a longer-running campaign by political conservatives and donors to higher education broadly looking to expand their power over curricula and campus activities in a post-secondary environment they see as unacceptably liberal in orientation.

As part of the strategy, the Republican lawmakers called for the hearing – ostensibly on the topic of protecting students from antisemitic rhetoric and abuse – to involve only relatively new female presidents of elite campuses. The Harvard and Penn leaders were joined by the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sally Kornbluth, who also has faced calls from Republican lawmakers for her resignation. The president of Columbia University, Dame Minouche Shafik, also was invited to attend the hearing, but already had made plans to attend the global climate summit in the United Arab Emirates.

Professor Magill, previously the provost of the University of Virginia, was seen as especially vulnerable at Penn because of her lack of long-term relationships at the institution. Professor Gay, by contrast, earned her PhD from Harvard in 1998, returned in 2006 as a professor of government, and became dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 2018. More than 700 faculty signed a petition on her behalf.

The uncertainty over Professor Gay, however, was magnified after the congressional hearing by allegations – made public by right-wing activists Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet – that her 1997 dissertation contained “an entire paragraph nearly verbatim” from a paper by Lawrence Bobo, now the dean of social science at Harvard, and Franklin Gilliam, now chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro; and failed to cite other work, including writings by her dissertation adviser, Gary King, a Harvard professor of government.

The Harvard board, despite agreeing to retain Professor Gay as president, expressed reservations on both sets of concerns raised against her. With regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – a matter that has led wealthy donors to withdraw support from Harvard and other US universities – the governing board said the university’s initial statement about the October attack by Hamas “should have been an immediate, direct and unequivocal condemnation”.

As for the plagiarism charges, the board said the university first learned of the matter in late October, leading to an internal review. The results received over this past weekend, the board said, showed “a few instances of inadequate citation”.

“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 Harvard Corporation said. The statement was signed by all 11 current members other than Professor Gay.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com