Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard’s president after months of crises.

The first Black leader of the most esteemed university in the country, Harvard University President Claudine Gay, tendered her resignation to the Harvard community on Tuesday afternoon.

Harvard University

After battling interconnected crises involving the Israel-Hamas conflict, antisemitism on college campuses, and claims of plagiarism in her academic writings for several months, she announced her resignation.

The Harvard Corporation declared in a separate statement on Tuesday that Dr. Alan Garber, the provost of Harvard, will take over as interim president.

Harvard University honoured Claudine Gay, the first Black person and only second woman to hold the role, when it named her its 30th president in July. In the midst of a scandal, Gay resigned from the position after just six months and two days, earning a new record for the shortest term of any Harvard president.

According to a Globe staff, her short tenure is unusual at the oldest university in the country, where presidents frequently hold office for up to ten years. Cornelius Conway Felton served as Harvard’s president for the shortest period of time before, taking office in 1860 and passing away in 1862 from a heart ailment. Charles William Eliot, who oversaw the school from 1869 until 1909, had the longest tenure.

Gay’s decision was, of course, largely prompted by an academic plagiarism scandal; however, Mary Churchill, associate dean of Boston University’s Wheelock College of Education and Human Development, noted that the swiftness of her departure and the strong public outcry underscored the turbulent political climate that exists in higher education nationally at the moment.

The Director of Boston University’s Centre for Antiracist Research, Ibram X. Kendi, denounced Claudine Gay’s resignation from Harvard, claiming that it was the result of “anti-Black” attacks carried out by a “racist mob.”

In a string of Tweets published on X, Kendi claimed that Gay’s claims of plagiarism were only a pretext for demoting her from her position of authority. Using the claims, he claimed, racial detractors could refute that they were evaluating Gay based only on her colour.

“Whether Dr. Gay committed any misconduct is not the question to determine whether this was a racist attack,” Kendi wrote. “The question is whether, had the Harvard president in this case been White, all of these people would have looked into, surveilled, harassed, written about, and attacked her in the same way.”

The academic stated that he didn’t believe so.

After firing almost half of the center’s employees in the fall, Kendi himself came under fire for the financial management of his establishment. Internal auditing at BU turned up no proof of financial mismanagement.

Kendi added, “Racist mobs won’t stop until they remove every Black person from influential and powerful positions who isn’t supporting the system of racism.”

While some students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology believe that Gay’s resignation means MIT president Sally Kornbluth will also step down, other students told the Globe that they believe Kornbluth would remain in her position because of the board’s “complete and unwavering support.”

Not a single student who talked to The Globe demanded that Kornbluth step down. While some felt Kornbluth was putting antisemitism first, others claimed the president appears to be spearheading coordinated attempts to protect Jewish and Palestinian students from what they saw as a challenging managerial position. Kornbluth stated in November that she was launching a new anti-hate campaign that will initially target antisemitism while also addressing bias and hatred towards Arabs and Muslims.

Students noted that, in spite of these initiatives, there was antisemitic and Islamophobic speech on campus, and that any college management should not put up with such discourse.