As Harvard University leadership reels from a steady drip of disclosures that President Claudine Gay plagiarized key parts of her scholarship, a major financial backer and alumnus, Leonard Blavatnik, has paused donations to the school. It comes as the accusations of plagiarism against Ms. Gay — first levied by conservative journalists — have now been verified, to varying degrees, by national media outlets. 

Mr. Blavatnik is a Ukrainian-American who earned his masters of business administration at Harvard and made his nearly $30 billion fortune in natural resources following the fall of the Soviet Union. Bloomberg first reported that Mr. Blavatnik will pause donations after giving as much as $270 million in recent decades. 

The energy tycoon follows other financial backers of these elite universities in pulling his money. The Victoria’s Secret founder, Les Wexner, announced in October that he is cutting all ties with Harvard. At the University of Pennsylvania, whose president later had to resign following her testimony before Congress, donors are especially angry. The billionaire private equity manager Marc Rowan called on alumni to stop donating to Penn. Another billionaire, Ronald Lauder, threatened to do the same. 

While Harvard may be losing major financial support, it still sits on an endowment worth more than $50 billion. Some Republicans, though, want to target those large endowments in an attempt to force policy changes. On December 14, Senator Vance proposed a 35 percent capital gains tax on non-religious schools’ endowments worth more than $10 billion — a tax that would have raised more than $500 million from Harvard alone last year. 

Some major backers and alumni who have pulled their scheduled donations include the billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who has made a name for himself as a leading critic of elite universities that have failed to confront antisemitism on their campuses.

Before Ms. Gay’s disastrous testimony for the House Education Committee, during which she failed to say that calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s policies, Mr. Ackman invited her to attend a screening of footage taken by Hamas during the brutal attack on October 7. 

“I encourage the Harvard President, the Harvard administration, the faculty, and students to attend,” Mr. Ackman wrote on X. “In life, there are moments where we are called upon to bear witness and deeply contemplate our history, our humanity, and the implications for our future. This is one of them.” Ms. Gay, though, declined. 

The criticisms of Harvard as an institution not only arise from Ms. Gay’s painful testimony and the school’s inability to confront antisemitism on campus but Ms. Gay’s apparent plagiarism that has occurred on several instances throughout her academic career. 

The first allegations that she had plagiarized other scholars came less than two weeks ago from two conservative writers, Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet. The two men accused Ms. Gay of plagiarizing multiple political scientists when writing about local politics, representation, and race. 

Since that exposé, legacy media outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and CNN have all uncovered other instances of plagiarism throughout Ms. Gay’s career. CNN even spoke with plagiarism experts who say that while a lack of certain citations and sourcing may not necessarily constitute plagiarism, they found that Ms. Gay’s violations likely met the definition and violated Harvard’s academic standards.

The university itself has admitted that it has found plagiarism by another name in Ms. Gay’s work, calling it “duplicative language without appropriate attribution.” When the New York Post asked Harvard and possible instances of plagiarism back in October, the university threatened to sue the writers for defamation, only to later admit that they did find issues with the president’s past scholarship. 

The most significant of the recent developments could be the call for Ms. Gay’s resignation by one of the Times most respected columnists, John McWhorter, a professor at Columbia. He said the dam has broken for Ms. Gay, and she should resign following the plagiarism disclosures. “Quibbling over degree and awareness of plagiarism has its place, but at THIS point, how can she hold her head high on a campus where students are allowed no such quibbles?” he asked on X. “It makes Harvard look even worse than it already does.”