Harvard’s board facing pressure to resign as Ivy League university’s reputation takes ‘substantial hit’
Harvard’s governing board is facing calls from faculty to resign, as critics say the university’s reputation has taken a “substantial hit” over its response to President Claudine Gay’s plagiarism scandal and how she handled a congressional hearing on antisemitism.
Faculty members have urged the Harvard Corporation, the university’s secretive board, to resign or apologize — and one professor has proposed that state lawmakers should appoint one seat to represent the public, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.
“They’re under pressure, that’s obvious,” former Harvard Medical School Dean Jeffrey Flier told the newspaper. “They are the fiduciary body and no one will deny that Harvard’s reputation has taken a very substantial hit in the world.
“It’s on their watch that it’s happening,” he added.
Kit Parker, professor of bioengineering and applied physics, also said the university’s future is in jeopardy and that the board members need to step down.
“The big question now is, how arrogant is Harvard? And when I say Harvard, I mean the Harvard Corporation. Do they think this is going to go away?” Parker told the paper.
Another professor has called on Massachusetts lawmakers to appoint a government official to the board to represent the public interest. It would fall under a clause in the state constitution that reserves authority over Harvard to the state legislature, the newspaper reported.
A spokeswoman for Gov. Maura Healey told the outlet she is aware of the proposal and is looking forward to reviewing it.
The current members include a former US Commerce Secretary, a former CEO of American Express and the president of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Each member serves a six-year renewable term, and the current members select new ones.
Not much is known about the board, which for centuries has steered the university and made it one of the wealthiest universities in the world from behind closed doors with minimal transparency.
But one of its main functions is to select the Harvard president.
Officials said they considered more than 600 nominations and announced Gay would take the helm in December 2022.
It is unclear who on the board was responsible for reviewing her work, or which other academics they enlisted.
Those familiar with the decision said Gay was an appealing candidate because she knew the school intimately and had already run one of its largest entities as the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, sources told the Journal.
She was also young enough to stay in the position for a long time.
Now, however, both critics and supporters say it isn’t clear if Gay can maintain the confidence of other academics — and her fundraising ability may be diminished.
Even some board members have expressed concerns in private conversations with donors and professors, those familiar told The New York Times.
At a recent meeting with corporation members and academics, the overall message was “they kind of agreed with us” that the corporation helped create some of the problems it is now facing, said Steven Pinker, a psychologist at the school.
He said the board’s fiduciary duty “is to safeguard the reputation of the university over the long term, and under their watch, that has not happened.
“There are deep problems, and they are the corporation’s problems,” Pinker said.
The firestorm surrounding Gay began with her hearing before the House Education Committee earlier this month in which she was evasive about whether antisemitic chants violated the campus’ code of conduct.
As she faced pressure to resign over her testimony, it was revealed that the Harvard Corporation had investigated Gay over accusations of plagiarism and the university was issuing corrections to two academic journals, to acknowledge where her work had really come from.
When The Post looked into the accusations at the end of October, it received a threatening legal letter from the school denying Gay engaged in any plagiarism.
The Washington Free Beacon later published a story, highlighting additional incidents of possible plagiarism.
“I stand by the integrity of my scholarship. Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure my scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards,” Gay told The Boston Globe in response.
Harvard Spokesman Jonathan Swain responded to a request for comment about backlash from faculty against the corporation by referring to its Dec. 12 statement of “unanimous support” of Gay.“As members of the Harvard Corporation, we today reaffirm our support for President Gay’s continued leadership of Harvard University. Our extensive deliberations affirm our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing,” the group said in the Dec. 12 statement.
