Despite legacy media reports yesterday that Harvard University President Claudine Gay was resigning, the plain text of Gay’s resignation letter shows the she has not resigned.
In the letter, Gay says “I will be stepping down as president” (future tense). Use of the present tense “I am resigning” would mean immediate resignation, and actually constitute a resignation.
Since Gay said she “will be stepping down,” meaning at some point in the future, and since she gave no date or time for the end of her tenure, Gay has in fact not resigned. At least not in writing.
Harvard Media Relations staff did not respond to our questions about this matter, or provide any letter in which Gay actually resigns. They also have posted no press releases in two months, a common practice for an organization in trouble. The situation at Harvard is worse than that, it has become one big dumpster fire in recent years.
To make certain our deconstruction of Gay’s supposed resignation letter was correct, we turned to Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the form of ChatGPT. It said (transcript of the session):
The statement “I will be stepping down as president” [which are Gay’s exact words] in the future tense generally implies a planned resignation or departure from the position, but it may not necessarily mean an immediate resignation. It suggests that the person has made a decision to resign in the near future, allowing for a transition period or for certain arrangements to be made.
In it’s response, ChatGPT’s use of hedging language like “generally implies” and “not necessarily” may suggest some wiggle room, but recent research at Ohio State University shows that ChatGPT often won’t defend its answers – even when it is right. It has even backed off correct answers it gave and endorsed incorrect answers
Until Harvard tells us how we are wrong in our analysis, we are sticking with our analysis showing that Gay hasn’t resigned as President of Harvard.
Gay isn’t alone at Harvard in botching communications. A full 24 hours after the news broke, Harvard Media Relations (HMR) still had not published a press release about Gay’s resignation. Yet when Gay was announced as Harvard president on December 15, 2022, Harvard Media Relations published a press release the same day.
Sadly, Gay’s case is not the only evidence of slothfulness at Harvard Media Relations. More than three weeks after the president of Harvard’s prestigious Kennedy School of Government announced his resignation on September 7th, HMR’s press release page still contained no information about it.
It is unclear why HMR is performing so poorly in this and other areas. Harvard Media Relations has also published no press releases responding to allegations involving Gay’s plagiarism, which has caused her to submit multiple “corrections” to academic papers she has published in the past.
Harvard Media Relations’ failure to address the plagiarism allegations is an additional black eye for Harvard since all major news outlets are reporting that the reason for Gay’s resignation was prompted by that very same plagiarism issue. To have stonewalled on that issue is a bad look, especially since it did not stonewall on another controversial issue involving Gay: her botched remarks before Congress in early December that many perceived as anti-Jewish. In that matter, Harvard Media Relations did issue this continuing press release.
If Gay has in fact resigned, then her 6 month and 2 days as Harvard’s 30th president is by far the shortest tenure of any non-interim Harvard president in its almost 400-year history.
In her supposed resignation letter, Gay claimed, without citing examples or evidence, that she had been “subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.” Christopher Rufo, a vocal critic of Gay, said in this Twitter post that “it’s not 2020 anymore, calling everything racist doesn’t work.”
Harvard’s famous logo contains one word “Veritas” (“Truth” in Latin). If only Harvard would live up to their logo, and Harvard’s own honor code. It was this code’s prohibition against plagiarism, its requirement for “accurate attribution of sources” and not “misrepresenting the ideas or language of someone else as one’s own” that Gay violated.
Yet despite her violation of Harvard’s own policies and honor code, the managing members of the Harvard Corporation allowed Gay to resign rather than fire her for cause. Their statement commenting on Gay’s resignation did not mention plagiarism or related topics, but did mention “repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol directed at her” as if that is why she resigned.
Gay is also being allowed to return to her faculty position, despite the considerable evidence of plagiarism on her part.
Does Harvard’s rank hypocrisy, mediocre intellectual climate, posture governing board and failure to hold its president to it own honor code qualify it for membership in the Poison Ivy League of academic institutions?
As always – Lacrimonia.Com reports and our readers decide. Follow us on Facebook to receive notifications when we publish articles.
