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{shortcode-a0fafb3727a5405eac46bd1741f1eafab86bbf7e}arvard Corporation Senior Fellow Penny S. Pritzker ’81 and the presidential search committee chose Claudine Gay as Harvard’s 30th president without conducting a scholarly review of her work, according to a person familiar with the process.
The committee favored Gay’s administrative expertise during the process, passing over two internal candidates who boasted both administrative experience and far more extensive scholarship credentials: Tomiko Brown-Nagin and John F. Manning ’82.
Brown-Nagin, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, published two books and won the highest award in American History writing, while Manning, dean of Harvard Law School, argued nine cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and wrote more than 40 legal articles.
Manning declined to comment on being a finalist in the last presidential search. Brown-Nagin did not respond to a request for comment.
Gay was heralded as a brilliant political scientist and successful university administrator upon her selection as Harvard’s president, but her scholarly record was comparatively thin.
The revelation about the search process gives insight on how the search committee managed to pick a president whose scholarship would later come under microscopic scrutiny for allegations of plagiarism in December, after she had already faced months of controversy over the University’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
An investigation by the Corporation later found that her work contained multiple instances of “duplicative language,” leading Gay to make a total of seven corrections across two articles and her Ph.D. dissertation.
The plagiarism allegations, which were first reported by right-wing media outlets, raised questions about the extent to which the search committee vetted Gay and how the allegations were not discovered during the search process.
A person familiar with the process said Gay’s lengthy experience as a senior administrator led the Harvard Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — to not conduct a more comprehensive review of her scholarship.
A Harvard spokesperson declined to comment for this article.
The plagiarism allegations marked a major turning point in Gay’s brief tenure as president, weakening her support among Harvard faculty and students.
The unraveling of Gay’s presidency and the intense scrutiny on her scholarship record will likely prompt a look inward for the Corporation as its members try again to select someone to lead Harvard for the next decade.
The search for Harvard’s 30th president lasted just five months, making it the shortest Harvard presidential search in almost 70 years.
The 15-person presidential search committee narrowed a pool of 600 initial nominations down to just one person: Claudine Gay.
Gay, who served three years as Social Sciences divisional dean and five years as FAS dean, was widely considered to be a prominent contender to succeed former University President Lawrence S. Bacow from the moment he announced his retirement in June 2022.
The list of nominations was narrowed to 50, before the search committee chose to interview a shortlist of 12 finalists.
In picking a president, universities almost always weigh scholarship and administrative experience in their deliberations. Richard P. Chait, an education governance expert and longtime adviser to the Corporation, told The Crimson in September 2022 that being eligible for tenure at Harvard is a major hurdle for candidates.
A source close to the Harvard search in 2022 said that the search committee felt that any candidate for Harvard’s presidency must be known to be an outstanding scholar.
In an interview with The Crimson after Gay’s selection in December 2022, Corporation member and former Princeton University president Shirley M. Tilghman said that administrative experience was essential in addition to substantial scholarship when weighing candidates.
“It is just too complicated a job for someone who has never had to deal with something as complicated as the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, so that eliminated some of the candidates who may have been extraordinary scholars, but really did not have the kind of depth of experience,” Tilghman said at the time.
But in their focus on Gay’s administrative bona fides, the committee placed less weight on her academic track record.
Though Gay wrote multiple articles on race and politics that have been widely cited, her scholarship was decisively more limited compared to those of Manning and Brown-Nagin.
When the search process began, Manning had nine years of HLS administrative experience, first as deputy dean and then as dean of HLS since 2017. Brown-Nagin had four years of top administrative experience, having been promoted to her deanship around the same time as Gay in 2018.
Helming the FAS — the University’s largest school — seemed to serve as a litmus test for administrative skill, leading Pritzker and the search committee to believe that Gay would make a relatively easy transition into the Harvard presidency.
But Gay’s administrative roles at the University also led the search committee to make a disastrous decision to not review her scholarship more closely.
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A person who has served on leadership search committees at various colleges and universities said that Harvard, like other universities, does not conduct extensive reviews and plagiarism checks on the scholarship of its serious contenders. Instead, the University relied on the conclusions of previous search committees and tenure reviews.
The Corporation seemingly believed a review would be unnecessary, even though university presidents — especially leaders of prominent institutions like Harvard — are usually subject to a higher level of scrutiny.
But when the Corporation learned of the plagiarism allegations in October 2023, they then launched an independent review process that found several instances of “duplicative language” — where quotation marks were missing or attribution was omitted entirely.
While the Corporation initially stuck by Gay after the first allegations became public, persistent questions about Gay’s academic integrity eventually led Pritzker and the board to lose confidence in their own candidate.
Three members of the Board of Overseers — the University’s second-highest governing body — are expected to join members of the Corporation on the 31st presidential search committee, which has not been formally announced.
Barring any changes, at least eight of the new search committee’s 15 members will have also served on the group that selected Gay.
Their job, in many ways, will be retracing their steps from a year ago in a radically altered higher education climate.
In light of her tumultuous tenure, some criticized the rapidness of the selection process that promoted Gay. While Harvard has 11 other shortlist candidates from the last search that they already determined were good contenders, the events of the last several months may point to the need for the next search to include broader outreach before selecting the next president.
The Harvard Corporation faces some new challenges that it did not in the fall of 2022, even as Manning and Brown-Nagin could both be strong presidential contenders again.
The governing boards, in particular Pritzker and the Corporation, remain under serious scrutiny for their role in Harvard’s leadership crisis.
Beyond Harvard, how universities address questions of free speech and hate on their campuses will remain salient, regardless who occupies the top job.
But this time around the Corporation must confront a situation in which its preferred candidates are asking an awkward question: Who wants to be president of Harvard?
—Staff writer Emma H. Haidar can be reached at emma.haidar@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @HaidarEmma.
—Staff writer Cam E. Kettles can be reached at cam.kettles@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @cam_kettles or on Threads @camkettles.
