BBC Deletes Post Claiming Harvard’s Claudine Gay Was ‘Casualty Of Campus Culture Wars’
AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein
BBC News deleted a tweet Wednesday claiming Harvard University ex-president Claudine Gay was a “casualty of the campus culture wars” after drawing fire from journalists within the organisation and a X community note correcting the headline.
The post linked to an article by BBC North America correspondent Anthony Zucker who wrote: “Gay’s resignation as president of Harvard University is being celebrated as a high-profile victory by conservatives who have objected to her on ideological grounds since shortly after she took the job in July 2023.”
Promotion of Zucker’s article on X was met with backlash, however, as readers amended the headline with a community note, a function that allows users to collaboratively add context to potentially misleading posts. The community note, citing a CNBC article, said that Gay “resigned due to several instances of plagiarism being discovered in her academic work.”
BBC deleted the tweet after backlash to its assertion Gay’s resignation was a result of “campus culture wars.” (Screengrab via X)
The article also drew fire from former BBC North America editor and veteran journalist Jon Sopel who branded Zucker’s take “lazy.”
“What brought her down was her inability to say that calling for a holocaust would be offensive to Jewish students,” he wrote.
Gay, the first black president of the university and the second woman, resigned Tuesday amid allegations of widespread plagiarism and controversy over her comments on antisemitism. Gay’s six-month tenure makes it the shortest in the university’s 388-year history.
Her resignation followed intense criticism after her response to questions about antisemitic incidents on campus, particularly during a congressional hearing in December mentioned by Sopel, where she commented on the context of hate speech. Although nearly 700 staff members supported her, pressure from mounting allegations of academic misconduct, including failure to properly cite sources in her academic work, prevailed.
