New York Times Columnist Calls On Harvard President Claudine Gay To Resign

AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein

An opinion writer for The New York Times has called on Claudine Gay to resign her post as Harvard’s president in light of an ongoing plagiarism scandal.

John McWhorter, an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University, wrote the opinion piece titled, “Why Claudine Gay Should Go,” which appeared in Friday’s Times. He joined a growing number of notable voices calling on Gay to step down.

The opinion piece began:

Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, should resign.

I don’t love thinking so and hoped we would not reach this tipping point in the controversy over whether she should be retained in her position. But a tipping point it is.

Harvard has a clear policy on plagiarism that threatens undergraduates with punishment up to the university’s equivalent of expulsion for just a single instance of it. That policy may not apply to the university’s president, but the recent, growing revelations about past instances of plagiarism by Dr. Gay make it untenable for her to remain in office.

McWhorter posited that “scholarly ethics” and “academic honor” depended on Gay’s resignation since it’s a university’s leadership that sets an “example for students.”

The allegations against Gay first surfaced after she and other elite university presidents testified before Congress about anti-Semitism on campus. Media outlets and some right-wing activists delving into Gay’s career and reported the allegations of plagiarism earlier this month. Harvard had already begun investigating Gay’s work in October, and concluded there were some “inadequate citations by Dr. Gay” but “no violations” of the school’s plagiarism policy. Gay “corrected” the original pieces she was accused of plagiarizing, but new allegations have since surfaced dealing with papers Gay wrote in the 1990s, including her Ph.D. dissertation.

Before the latest revelations, Gay defended her work, saying in a statement that she stood by “the integrity” of her scholarship.

Read the NYT Op-ed here.