All posts tagged: shaky December

An Old-Fashioned Scandal Fells a New Harvard President

[ad_1] For all the focus on recent changes in the political mood on college campuses, the downfall of Harvard President Claudine Gay turns out to be a story about some of the oldest values of academia. Gay, a political scientist, resigned today, making her the second president of an Ivy League institution to bow out in the past month. University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill stepped down on December 9, but the cases are not as similar as they might initially seem. Magill’s departure stemmed directly from the shaky December 5 congressional testimony by a panel of college presidents about anti-Semitism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and was viewed as a victory for Elise Stefanik, the Republican representative who led the questioning. Eliot A. Cohen: Harvard has a veritas problem What appear to have doomed Gay were the allegations of plagiarism lodged against her. This is an important distinction. Penn’s board of trustees was spooked by pressure from donors and politicians. The Harvard Corporation, an equivalent body, was not. In a December 12 statement, it acknowledged …