plagiarism? what we are learning today from harvard insiders. plus, the deadly airport runway inferno. two lanes collide, five on one jet nearly killed, 400 escaped alive. how did the planes and up on the runway in the first place? and the senior member of hamas assassinated at an explosion in beirut. is the situation in the middle east about to get even worse? happy new year, and welcome to the lead. i m jake tapper, and we start out with raking news. harvard university s claudine gay is stepping down as president, resigning after just about six months on the job. the student journalist who broke the story of her stepping down for the harvard crimson newspaper noted that this is the shortest presidential tenure in harvard s august history. it has been quite a tumultuous month for the now former present. when asked for calling for the genocide of would violate harvard campuses code of conduct. yes or no. it can be, depending on the context. from that, to multiple allega
professor allison frank jones. thank you for speaking to us. and obviously, thinking about the harvard campus today. must be a difficult place to be right now. let s bring in the former president of brandeis university, who talked a lot about this i don t know scandal is the right word, but controversy. do you think the resignation was inevitable, and was it because of the testimony or the plagiarism allegations? was a plagiarism. the testimony is honestly something we talked about the or that got a lot of attention, but my own view is, if it were only that, she would ve been able to ride this out. the answer she gave was not a good answer, and we talked about that as well, but i wouldn t have cost her her job. the plagiarism allegation is what really stuck, because it didn t go away and there was this sense of continuing investigations of back. i think i made it inevitable. it certainly kept harvard in the headlines for the wrong reasons, which is not anything any university wan