'Terrible Moment': Harvard President Claudine Gay Resigns Amid Mounting Backlash

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - Harvard President Claudine Gay on Tuesday announced that she has resigned from her position.

"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. This is not a decision I came to easily," Gay said in a statement.

Gay explained in the statement that she decided to resign after consulting with members of the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing body. Such a move is in the "best interest of Harvard," she said.

"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," Gay's resignation letter reads.

"I trust we will all find ways, in this time of intense challenge and controversy, to recommit ourselves to the excellence, the openness, and the independence that are crucial to what our university stands for — and to our capacity to serve the world."

Harvard faculty members have reacted to the Tuesday resignation with disappointment, with one professor marking it as a "terrible moment."

“Instead of listening to voices of scholars in her field who could speak to the importance and originality of her research, we heard voices of derision and spite on social media. Instead of following established university procedure, we had a Corporation granting access to self-appointed advisers and carrying out reviews using mysterious and undisclosed methods," history professor Alison Frank Johnson told US media.

Gay's presidency was the shortest in Harvard University's history, spanning six months and two days, according to the Harvard Crimson.

The resignation comes after repeated revelations that Gay was a serial plagiarizer in her work. Gay previously came under the spotlight in early December for her often-critiqued testimony before US Congress in which she told lawmakers that calls for genocide against the Jewish community "depends on the context," although it would be labeled "bullying, harassment, intimidation" per school policy.

At the time, Gay sat alongside MIT President Sally Kornbluth and then-University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill. The testimony was in response to a rise in student actions amid the Gaza conflict.