Behind the Campaign to Push Harvard’s President Out

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Speaker 1
Harvard University kicked off 2024 with some big news. Claudine Gay, the school's first black president, was stepping down. Here's our colleague, Melissa Corn.

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So Harvard's president Claudine Gay resigned on Tuesday. She has been beset by controversy for a good portion of the time she's been president there.

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Claudine Gay's six month tenure is the shortest of any Harvard president in history. Gay has been heavily criticized for the school's response to protests over the Israel Hamas war.

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Harvard president Claudine Gay has been hit with six new plagiarism charges, bringing the total number of allegations to well over two dozen.

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Gay had only held the position for six months. And Melissa says the fact that this abrupt exit happened at Harvard says a lot.

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Harvard is in a moment of extreme turmoil and a possible moment of self reflection and potentially inflection. So you've got this school that is perhaps the best known brand in the world in terms of higher education. It is kind of held up as the epitome of liberal arts education, a research university, but it's also held up in some kind of corners of the universe as everything wrong with higher ed. Right. That it's this school that has gone too far to the left, they're too woke.

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Right.

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And so the turmoil at Harvard is.

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Sort of a big deal because it's Harvard.

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Yeah. The fact that it's Harvard means that every single thing that happens here is under more scrutiny.

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Speaker 1
Welcome to the Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Thursday, January 4. Coming up on the show, the brief and tumultuous tenure of Harvard's Claudine Gay.

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Speaker 5
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Speaker 1
So tell us a little bit about Claudine Gay. Who is she?

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Claudine Gay is a political scientist. She went to Stanford Undergrad and Harvard for grad school, and then she went back to Stanford to teach for a few years, got tenure there, and then came back to Harvard to join the faculty there.

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Gay's academic work focuses on race and politics in America. At Harvard, she was well liked by many colleagues.

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She was head of the social science faculty, and then after that, since 2018, was dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences, which is kind of the biggest arm of Harvard University. She was somebody who was really warm and engaging and curious and liked to connect people across fields of study.

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In 2022, Harvard's former president announced he was stepping down. And Melissa says the university decided it wanted a trailblazer to fill the vacancy. Gay seemed to fit the bill.

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She was somebody who knew the university, and she was aligned with what the board and other leaders at the university said they wanted Harvard to become and kind of bridge what the school has been for 400 years with what it could be in the future.

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Claudine Gay became president in July of last year. Her appointment made her Harvard's first black president and the second woman to lead the university. Here she is at her inauguration.

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The courage of this university, our resolve against all odds, to question the world as it is and imagine and make a better one. It is what Harvard was made to.

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Do, and this idea that students who maybe thought they didn't really belong at Harvard now could see themselves in her and feel more welcome on campus. This was a big deal that she was a first, or in some cases, a second of anything. But she was non traditional in a few ways in that she hadn't been a president before, and many of Harvard's leaders have been leaders at other institutions in the past. She was quite a bit younger than a lot of prior presidents and just other presidents across the higher ed landscape. Now. She didn't have a really robust body of academic research, and that's one of the kind of big dings against her at this point, that she hadn't contributed a great volume of material to the field, did a fairly limited number of published papers, peer reviewed published papers.

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So she had critics even early on.

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Yes, there was concern by some who didn't like her appointment that they would seem racist if they made a comment about her being chosen as the president. A lot of the disapproval came from people who just didn't like what gay represented and what she stood for, potentially more so than who she actually was as a person. So a number of people, kind of old guard academics within Harvard and outside the university, had plenty to say about how she was an affirmative action pick, that the school was putting its focus on diversity ahead of its commitment to certain academic standards, things like that. But they weren't really saying it out loud all that much. It was whispers.

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Then October 7 happened.

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Hamas, the powerful militant group which controls Gaza, says it has taken Israelis hostage and it has taken them back inside the strip.

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Israel has ordered a complete blockade of the Gaza Strip. It has mobilized 300,000 reservists.

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At least 1300 people in Israel have been killed in Gaza. At least 2100 were killed and 20.

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After the Hamas attack in Israel. Some student groups at Harvard put the blame on Israel for the situation. Other groups were outraged. They said that gay didn't counter that narrative aggressively enough in the statements she made.

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She got heat from one side saying that she didn't go far enough in criticizing Hamas. And then she got criticism from the other side, saying that she didn't do enough to acknowledge the suffering and trauma of Palestinians, especially once the retaliatory attack began in Gaza. So nobody seemed satisfied with her statement. And I should say that was the case at many colleges across the country in those couple weeks. However, the fact that this is Harvard, everyone was looking closer, and some major Harvard alums, some bold faced names, came out publicly. A former president of Harvard came out publicly criticizing her response, and it really escalated from there.

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Republican lawmakers called a congressional hearing. They wanted the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, MIT and Harvard to testify about their efforts to handle anti semitism on their campuses.

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Would you say that was the turning point for Claudine Gay?

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Yes.

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What did she say at that hearing?

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She had a somewhat equivocal answer.

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Here's republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik questioning gay at the hearing and Dr.

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Gay at Harvard. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?

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It can be, depending on the context.

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What's the context?

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Targeted as an individual.

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Targeted as when the question is specifically about genocide. The word genocide against jewish people, nobody wants that kind of big picture, lofty, intellectual answer.

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It did not land well.

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It did not. I mean, it landed so poorly that it ended up on Saturday Night live that weekend.

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After the hearing, criticisms of all three university presidents reached a crescendo. Bill Ackman, a billionaire investor and Harvard alum, had already been a vocal critic of the university's response to anti semitism. Now he was calling for the three presidents who testified to resign. Other major donors followed. Days later, Liz McGill at UPenn stepped down, but Claudine Gay was hanging on, and the Harvard Corporation, which is the university's top governing board, defended her.

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The board came out with a statement saying, we stand by her. She is the right person for this job in this moment. And then you also had many people saying, she needs to step down. This is inappropriate. It's a distraction for the school. They've lost her trust. So these are two very loud camps now, kind of digging in.

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The final straw for Claudine Gay. That's after the break.

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Speaker 5
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Disapproval of Claudine Gay mounted after her congressional testimony. Harvard stuck by her. But in its letter defending her after the hearing, the board mentioned something it hadn't publicly addressed before.

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What about the plagiarism allegations? Where and when do those come in?

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Harvard Corporation, which is the governing board of the university, says that they first learned of plagiarism allegations in late October, when a reporter from the New York Post reached out with some questions.

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For months, there have been rumors circulating in online chat groups for various academic disciplines. People were raising questions about how gay cited the sources in her work. When the New York Post asked about those allegations in October, Harvard's board decided to conduct a review.

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They had some outside folks, as well as some members of the board, review her work and determined that she had omitted citations. In a few cases. Could have been better at adding quotation marks when using language from others, but it didn't reach the level of research misconduct and that she would make some updates and end of story. That was the hope, right?

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But that's not exactly what happened, right?

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No, this did not die out quietly, and everyone moves along here. That was kind of the first of a few waves of allegations of plagiarism.

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One of the critics leading the plagiarism charges was someone who had long spoken out against diversity efforts at universities.

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Christopher Rufo works at the Manhattan Institute. He is a bit of a rabble rouser and very active on social media. He was not shy about his intentions with focusing on, you know, his goal was to get her out office and to amplify his concerns about Harvard's and other schools focus on diversity at the cost of, in their mind, quality or tradition or meritocracy.

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After the allegations against gay went public, Rufo and others started building a list of instances where they felt gay had.

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Poached other people's work, essentially saying there are dozens of instances in which she didn't cite her sources correctly, didn't give credit to the original author, where due things that are generally frowned upon in academia, and would in many cases get a student serious discipline if they were to try to do that. And that's when the next round of public allegations or plagiarism came out.

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Since Gay's testimony, a number of journalists started looking into Gay's past, including her dissertation, the Washington Free Beacon, and independent journalist Christopher Rufo, called attention to a few passages. There are many, but consider these similarities.

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Would you say this round of plagiarism allegations, was that the final straw for her?

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For many, yes, it was. Whether or not they were upset by the actual allegations of plagiarism, many people saw this as a bridge too far. There was concern that she was too much of a distraction. And how could she continue fundraising for the university, which is a major part of a president's job, if she's brought this much kind of negative attention to the institution?

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By early this week, it had all become too much. Gay announced her resignation yesterday. She published an op ed in the New York Times where she talked about her decision. Gay said she should have been more forceful in condemning all forms of antisemitism. After the October 7 attack, she stood by her academic research and said she'd already amended her work where needed to add proper attribution. She also added that she'd had racial slurs thrown at her and received death threats. And she noted that as a black woman, she makes, quote, an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on american campuses. Gay isn't leaving Harvard completely. Instead, she'll be rejoining the faculty. In a statement, Harvard's governing board said that it accepted Gay's resignation with sorrow and that it'll begin a search for Gay's successor in due course.

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In the meantime, Melissa says the school will have a lot to prove.

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There are tons of questions of how do they show to the public that they still care about diversity while staying on the right side of the law and not being dragged through the mud again with whatever moves they make to reinforce what they see as important values in higher education?

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Do you think this could translate into a larger conversation within higher Ed?

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I anticipate seeing a lot of discussion of higher Ed and the direction of higher Ed and the role of diversity initiatives in schools. Harvard specifically, campus anti semitism, all of those things coming up. This is something that conservative politicians are really grabbing. Know, they can play that testimony over and over in advertisements and say, see, I got results. I got Claudine Gay kicked out of the presidency. So this was a bit of a wake up call to schools like them that turning up their noses at the criticism that has been lobbed against them for years, that they were veering too far to the left, that they were radicalizing, that they didn't allow diversity of viewpoints because conservative voices were being shut out of campus. This was kind of the moment of reckoning it.

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Additional reporting in this episode by Doug Belkin and Ariane Campo Flores, you. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. Close.