Amid damning allegations of plagiarism and evasive comments on anti-semitism that cast a pall on Claudine Gay’s presidency at Harvard, Ms Gay tendered her resignation on Tuesday but insists the decision to quit was motivated by threats of personal attack and racial hostility.

“It has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus,” Ms Gay wrote in her resignation letter submitted on Tuesday.

Ms Gay came under public scrutiny after she gave a non-committal response when asked by U.S. Congresswoman Elise Stefanik whether or not the school regarded calls for genocide of Jews as bullying and harassment, given the ongoing war between Israel and the Palestinian militant organisation, Hamas.

“It depends on the context,” was Ms Gay’s response on December 12 to the straightforward question which the Congresswoman specifically demanded a “Yes or No.”

The remark drew public ire with many intellectual and political pundits accusing the institution of encouraging calls for violence against Jews with its rather lukewarm and lenient stance.

Presidents of other Ivy League institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology sat on the fence on their schools’ respective stance on anti-semitism.

It, however, didn’t take long for Elizabeth Magill of UPenn to cave into pressure and resign from the school’s presidency four days after facing the Congress.

As pressure intensified, Harvard’s Ms Gay’s scholarly works were scrutinised and it came to light that she lifted off sentences in four of her scholarly works which she passed off as her own idea since they lacked proper attribution and quotation marks. The contentious works, including her doctoral dissertation, were published between 1993 and 2017.

Still Harvard University Corporation Board stood unflinchingly behind Ms Gay and downplayed the plagiarism accusation as only a “research misconduct” after an independent review was carried out.

“President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications,” Harvard wrote in a statement clearing its president of any wrongdoing last December.

Their decision to support Ms Gay through the plagiarism scandal angered many students who accused the prestigious institution of having double standards since undergraduates faced stiffer sanctions for far lesser infractions.

An opinion piece written by an anonymous student demanded that Ms Gay be compelled to turn in her resignation because the school had been explicit that “omitting quotation marks, citing sources incompletely, or not citing sources at all constitutes plagiarism according to Harvard’s definitions.”

Before the scandal of the initial plagiarism claims could simmer, another anonymous whistleblower submitted an official complaint of six fresh plagiarism charges in never-before-seen samples of Ms Gay’s works to Stacey Springs, Harvard ‘s research integrity officer on New Year’s Day. 

The nearly 30-page complaint detailed how Ms Gay lifted half a page on David Canon’s book, “Race, Redistricting, and Representation: The Unintended Consequences of Black Majority Districts,” in her 2001 journal article “The Effect of Minority Districts and Minority Representation on Political Participation in California.” 

She was similarly found to have lifted sentences from Franklin Gilliam and her thesis adviser, Gary King, without giving due credit, strengthening the allegation of plagiarism levelled against her.

But in spite of these overwhelming evidence-backed claims and raging scandal, Ms Gay maintains her decision to step down was based on “racial animus” implying her skin colour made her an easy prey for threats rather than her controversial scholarly works.