Melissa Korn
WSJ, Jan. 3, 2024
“The most important thing that they can do right now is say everything. As many updates as they can provide, as much as they can tell the community, as much as they can openly and in real time share, the better off Harvard will be in the long run.”
Claudine Gay resigned Tuesday as president of Harvard University, after being dogged for weeks by allegations of plagiarism and charges that she didn’t respond with enough urgency to concerns about antisemitism on campus.
But her departure from the top spot is unlikely to move the school beyond the scandals of the past few months or solve concerns about hostility toward Jews on campus.
The governing board and interim leaders will first need to address concern from some faculty and alums that the school has drifted too far to the left, with a growing emphasis on ethnic studies and diversity, while also fielding complaints from others that it hasn’t gone far enough in addressing racial inequities on campus and in society at large.
Harvard’s leaders also will have to navigate a fraught and changing admissions landscape, six months removed from a Supreme Court ruling that bars Harvard and other colleges from considering race when deciding who gets a coveted spot on campus.
And they will need to do it all under scrutiny, as Harvard is considered by many the leading embodiment of everything wrong with American higher education.
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