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Claudine Gay resigned from her position as Harvard’s president in a Tuesday announcement to the Harvard community.

Gay, the first person of color ever selected to lead Harvard, began her term on July 1, 2023 and was inaugurated on Sept. 29, 2023. Her resignation, first reported by the Harvard Crimson, marks the end of her roughly six-month presidential tenure — the shortest in Harvard’s nearly 388-year history. When selecting Gay, the Harvard Corporation —  Harvard’s board of trustees — considered more than 600 candidates over a five-month search process. This marked Harvard’s shortest presidential search in over 70 years, also according to the Crimson. 

Harvard Provost Alan Garber will serve as interim president as the university searches for a new leader. 

Gay’s resignation announcement comes amid allegations of plagiarism and weeks of turmoil at Harvard — and peer institutions — following indirect and legalistic testimony during a Dec. 5 Congressional hearing on campus antisemitism. 

Gay was joined at the hearing by Massachusetts Institute of Technology president Sally Kornbluth and then-University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill ’88. All three university presidents said that whether calls for the genocide of Jewish people would break or not break with their schools’ bullying and harrassment policies was context-dependent. 

Magill, who also testified during the hearing and faced similar criticism as Gay for her remarks, stepped down as president of the University of Pennsylvania last month — as did Scott L. Bok, chair of the Penn Board of Trustees. Kornbluth still remains in her post at MIT. 

“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,” Gay wrote. “When my brief presidency is remembered, I hope it will be seen as a moment of reawakening to the importance of striving to find our common humanity—and of not allowing rancor and vituperation to undermine the vital process of education.”

Yale’s spokesperson declined to comment on behalf of University President Peter Salovey and the University on Tuesday afternoon.

Gay, who faced additional allegations on Monday, has submitted corrections to two articles published in 2001 and 2017  after a Dec. 12 statement from the Harvard Corporation unanimously in support of Gay following her congressional testimony acknowledged the allegations of plagiarism and noted it had “found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.” 

Gay and Magill’s announcements come at a time of high presidential turnover in higher education. One day into the 2023-2024 academic year at Yale, Salovey announced that he will step down from Yale’s presidency this summer. 

Stanford University is also currently undergoing a presidential search, as former president Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned this summer after a Stanford-sponsored investigation found a “manipulation of research data” in several of his papers. Stanford’s report concluded that Tessier-Levigne “did not personally engage in research misconduct” in any of the 12 research papers that prompted the allegations; it also notes that Tessier-Levigne “failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record” when concerns arose over two decades and at three different labs.

On Dec. 31, the Stanford Daily reported that Tessier-Lavigne and co-authors had retracted a 2009 paper published in the journal Nature. This was his fourth retraction following the Stanford-sponsored investigation which found “serious flaws” with five articles on which he was principal author. 

Last January, Columbia University named Nimat “Minouche” Shafik as the successor to former president Lee C. Bollinger, who announced in April 2022 that he planned to step down this past June. Dartmouth College announced in July 2022 that Sian Leiah Beilock would be its 19th president, following a six-month search process for outgoing president Philip J. Hanlon’s successor. 

Like Gay, Columbia’s Shafik and Dartmouth’s Beilock also began their terms on July 1, 2023.

Update, Jan. 2: This piece has been updated to offer more details about the Stanford report on Tessier-Lavigne’s work and subsequent retractions that he has made to his work, as well as on Gay’s alleged plagiarism and her subsequent corrections.