Claudine Gay, Harvard University’s first Black woman president, stepped down on January 2, 2024, after a six-month term filled with controversy. Her departure sparked discussions about the responsibilities of educators and administrators in upholding academic freedom and political impartiality in schools. Gay’s leadership was challenged during a House Committee on Education and Workforce hearing. She faced criticism for her response to a question about antisemitic speech by GOP Elise Stefanik, which she described as context-dependent.
Gay was also accused of plagiarism, with claims that she had duplicated others’ work in her academic dissertations. This led Harvard to conduct an investigation, which found instances of repeated language without proper attribution in Gay’s 1997 Ph.D. dissertation. However, the university determined that these citation errors were not serious enough to be classified as misconduct.
Liz Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, also resigned on December 9, 2023. Like Gay, Magill received criticism for her response to Stefanik’s question about hate speech advocating for the genocide of Jewish peoples, which she also described as context-dependent.