The parlous situation in which Harvard found itself over the past weeks probably found many observers exhibiting a full dose of schadenfreude--pleasure at seeing the oldest and probably most prestigious American university roasted over the coals of truly bad publicity. After its governing body, the President and Fellows of Harvard College, known as the Harvard Corporation, had stood behind the university president, Claudine Gay, when she and the presidents of MIT and Penn had fallen into a trap before a Congressional committee intent on taking them down and using the schools' weak response to anti-Semitism on their campuses as a means of attack, it was getting harder for the governing board to keep supporting Gay.
They had named a special committee to investigate some charges of plagiarism by the president. As expected, this inquiry cleared her. But further allegations of plagiarism or miscitation or no citation kept dribbling out. This, more than the concentrated attacks from major donors and right-wing agitators, made the board increasingly unwilling to keep backing the president as it seemed she was digging herself deeper each day.
It's likely that the Harvard Corporation had resisted the pressure initially because of the Harvard attitude that it didn't take direction from outsiders, and especially not from politicians, such as the Congresswoman who had shown up the three presidents and was herself a Harvard graduate. This is the university where, long ago, when a caller asked to see the then-president of Harvard, Charles Eliot, his secretary responded, "The President has gone to Washington to see Mr. Taft."
Harvard seems to have had little experience in crisis management. A large portion of the faculty had registered its support of President Gay. But it would appear that no one on the governing board or its staff had taken the time to explore with Gay whether there was more to the plagiarism charges. There was. Thus the Corporation was caught in the worst kind of posture: more charges and evidence dribbling out when they had thought they had doused the fire.
This turn of events also diminished the Corporation's reliance on Harvard's long-established hauteur. Unlike most institutions, Harvard's natural response to anyone criticizing the university was to ignore allegations as beneath its dignity even to respond. Since the charges didn't go away even after the Corporation had initially cleared Gay and reiterated its support, the rarely challenged Corporation had no place to go but to fold.
It now appears that Gay was told to get her resignation statement ready and the Corporation prepared its own announcement. Fortunately for the governing board, a qualified Provost was on hand to serve as interim President. When the leading critics--representing right-wingers and major donors--were savoring their victory, a counterattack was launched at MIT, whose leader, the third president at the hearing, had withstood pressure to resign. It turned out that an MIT academic who was the wife of one of the loudest major donors had been accused of plagiarism similar to what Gay had been accused of, and had apparently skated through the inquiry.
The donor responded by promising to launch a plagiarism investigation of the MIT President and just about everyone on the faculty at the school. This may have been an unwise feint in that it seems inevitable that any such inquiry would take time--presumably the donor could afford the significant cost--and would likely result in all kinds of difficult cases that inevitably arise in this area of academic misbehavior. The institutions could hold out while this fishing expedition searched through huge amounts of paper, all of which would need to be evaluated.
Lastly, the defense of free speech offered by the three presidents at the hearing was vitiated by the sorry history of the institutions' hypocrisy. They insisted that statements favoring genocide and that were thus anti-Semitic might not be held violations of the schools' conduct codes unless the speech became conduct. This is an admittedly complex area but the schools were defending free speech after coming down hard on those faculty members who resisted such requirements as using a student's preferred pronouns.
