Here’s what you need to know about Claudine Gay’s firing.

Facing a new round of accusations of plagiarism in her scientific work, Harvard President Claudine Gay announced her resignation on Tuesday. In doing so, she became the second Ivy League leader to lose her job in recent weeks amid a firestorm amplified by their widely derided testimony in Congress about anti-Semitism on campus.

The resignation of Dr. Gay marked an abrupt end to a turbulent term that began in July. Her term was the shortest of any president in Harvard’s history since its founding in 1636. She was the institution’s first black president and the second woman to lead the university.

“It is with a heavy heart but a deep love for Harvard that I write to share that I will be stepping down as president,” wrote Dr. Gay in a letter to the Harvard community.

Over the past month, there have been accusations of plagiarism against Dr. Gay, the president of Harvard, showed up. This indicated that attacks on her qualifications to lead the Ivy League university continued, pushing the university deeper into a debate over whether Harvard places its president and its students on the same level.

The latest allegations were spread through an unsigned complaint published Monday in The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online magazine that has launched a campaign against Dr. Gay led. The new complaint added to about forty accusations of plagiarism that had already been circulated in the same manner, apparently by the same accuser.

The support for the emerging presidency of Dr. Gay began to crumble after what some saw as the university’s initial failure to strongly condemn the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and some pro-Palestinian responses from students. This caution infuriated some Harvard supporters — outrage that grew in early December, after Dr. Gay before Congress gave what critics saw as legal, evasive answers to the question of whether calls for genocide of Jewish people were violations of school policy.

Dr. Gay appeared at a hearing along with two other university presidents, Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During the hearing, Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, bombarded the presidents with hypothetical questions.

“Is at Harvard,” Ms. Stefanik asked Dr. Gay, “calling for genocide of Jews Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment? Yes or no?” Dr. Gay replied: “That may be so, depending on the context.”

That exchange, and a similar back-and-forth between Ms. Stefanik and Ms. Magill, rocketed across social media and angered many people with close ties to the universities. Ms. Magill, whose support had already been shaken in recent months over her refusal to cancel a Palestinian writers’ conference, resigned as Penn’s president four days later.

Dr. Gay tried to minimize the fallout with an apology in an interview published in The Harvard Crimson, the campus newspaper. “When words add to the sadness and pain, I don’t know how you can feel anything other than regret,” she said.

A week after her testimony, the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing body, issued a unanimous statement of support — after a meeting well into the night before — saying it stood firmly behind Dr. Gay stood, despite pressure from major financial backers, prominent Jewish alumni and lawmakers calling for her ouster.”

At the same time, the university acknowledged that it had received allegations of plagiarism in three scientific articles by Dr. Gay. It said an investigation found that she had not violated the university’s standards for “research misconduct,” but that the investigation “revealed a few instances of inadequate citation,” and that Dr. Gay would ask for four corrections to two articles.

Then on December 20, amid continued accusations of plagiarism driven by conservative media, the university said it was reviewing two new cases of insufficient citation in Dr. Gay had found – this time in her 1997 dissertation. Harvard described the problems as “duplicative language without appropriate attribution” and said she would update her dissertation to correct them.

Dr. Gay, who earned her doctorate in government from Harvard in 1998 and returned eight years later to teach government, found her support — already on shaky ground after the anti-Semitism outcry — evaporated as the allegations and findings of the university about plagiarism continued to increase. to assemble.

The allegations also attracted more unwanted attention from Congress, when a committee investigating Harvard sent a letter to the university demanding all documentation and communications related to the plagiarism allegations.

All told, the accusations circulated through conservative media, including in an article by activist Christopher Rufo and in reporting from The Washington Free Beacon, Dr. Gay of using material from other sources without proper attribution in approximately half of the eleven journal articles mentioned on her CVin addition to her dissertation.

The examples range from short excerpts of technical definitions to paragraphs summarizing the research of other scientists, which are only lightly paraphrased and in some cases do not include a direct citation of the other scientists. In an example that attracted particular attention and ridicule online, Dr. Gay’s thesis to contain two sentences from the 1996 book acknowledgments of another scientist, Jennifer L. Hochschild.

As the allegations mounted, Harvard faculty members and scholars elsewhere offered varying assessments of the seriousness of the violations, with some seeing a troubling pattern while others called them minor or dismissed them as a partisan hit.

But for some, the issue was clear: Dr. Gay had committed plagiarism—a word that actually did not appear in the Harvard administration’s first statement on December 12—and Harvard should admit it.

Carol Swain, a political scientist who retired from Vanderbilt University in 2017, said she was “furious” both about Dr.’s use of her work. Gay – Mr. Rufo cited at least two cases in which Dr. Gay the work of Dr. Swain used without attribution – and about Harvard’s defense of her.

But Steven Levitsky, a government professor at Harvard, said the passages in question appeared to be mostly “mild sloppiness.”

Many of these, he said, seemed to occur in parts of the articles that did not address Dr.’s core claims. Gay, but about summaries of methodologies and previous scientific insights.

“She’s a quantitative scientist,” he said. “She cares about the data. These guys don’t spend time fussing over their literature reviews.”

Dr. Levitsky had organized a faculty petition in her support urging the Corporation to “resist political pressures that conflict with Harvard’s commitment to academic freedom.”

Reporting was contributed by Dana Goldstein, Sara Mervosh And Vimal Patel.