Harvard Crimson Dissenters: President Gay Should Resign

Harvard President Claudine Gay should resign due to weeks of allegations regarding antisemitism and plagiarism, students wrote in an editorial in the university’s “Harvard Crimson” newspaper over the weekend.

“Harvard’s presidency is no mere empty honor; it is a deeply challenging managerial job with deeply challenging duties, not least of which is navigating national outcry,” Crimson opinion writers Brooks Anderson and Joshua Kaplan wrote in a dissenting op-ed. “In each of these respects, Gay has failed, The Harvard Corporation must find a leader who can do better.”

The paper explained at the end of their article that “occasionally, the Crimson editorial board is divided on an issue, giving dissenting board members the opportunity to express their opposition in a separate editorial.

The dissenting students wrote that “the situation seems to worsen with every passing week” after Gay first “botched her public response” to the massive Hamas terrorist attack against Israel on October 7, then “bungled her testimony before Congress, to international criticism” and now faces revelations that she “plagiarized portions of multiple academic papers.”

Anderson and Kaplan made it clear that “because our peers avoid reckoning with the severity of Gay’s failures, dismissing instances of explicit plagiarism as insufficient to warrant her resignation, we respectfully dissent.”

The writers pointed out that “donors are tripping over each other to sever ties with the university… Congress has launched – and now expanded an investigation into Harvard [and] early application numbers have dropped sharply compared with peer institutions, perhaps in response to the turmoil.”

The dissenting writers acknowledged that “Gay may be a good person. She may even be a praiseworthy scholar, despite the allegations. But that isn’t enough to remain president. The leader of the world’s foremost university must be held to a higher standard, one that Gay has unfortunately failed to meet.”