Harvard president to remain despite calls for her dismissal

The university rejects calls for Claudine Gay’s axing after her widely criticised appearance at a congressional hearing on campus anti-Semitism.

Harvard University president Claudine Gay. Picture: AFP

Claudine Gay will remain president of Harvard University, the school’s governing board announced, fending off calls for her dismissal in the wake of a much-criticised appearance before a congressional hearing on anti-Semitism on college campuses.

The decision by the Harvard Corporation — the university’s highest governing body — caps a week of calls from alumni and donors for Gay to resign. That anger was countered by support from faculty concerned about the independence of the university from political pressure.

The governing board also said it found “a few instances of inadequate citation” in some of Gay’s academic papers, but no research misconduct.

“Our extensive deliberations affirm our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing,” the board said in a message to the Harvard community Tuesday morning.

Critics had said Gay didn’t respond forcefully enough in her initial comments about the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and lambasted her equivocal response to a question by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) last week about whether calls for genocide of Jewish students would count as harassment.

The board said the university’s initial statement after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack “should have been immediate, direct, and unequivocal condemnation, ” and noted that Gay apologised for how she handled her congressional testimony.

“At Harvard, we champion open discourse and academic freedom, and we are united in our strong belief that calls for violence against our students and disruptions of the classroom experience will not be tolerated,” the board said Tuesday.

The Harvard Corporation also said it became aware in late October of allegations regarding three of Gay’s academic articles, and the school initiated an independent review of her published work. They said the review found “a few instances of inadequate citation” but their analysis found “no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.” Gay has requested four corrections in two articles, to insert citations and quotation marks that were originally omitted, the board said.

The formal statement supporting Gay comes as she faced mounting backlash to her testimony before Congress and similarly strong calls for her to remain in office. A letter Monday signed by hundreds of alumni, as well as some students and a few dozen faculty, and staff called for Gay to step down. The letter says Gay “selectively applies the principles of free speech to protect certain groups over others.” The developments at Harvard show a divergence from how another Ivy League school, the University of Pennsylvania, handled fallout from the same congressional hearing. Penn’s president, Liz Magill, resigned Saturday.

Sally Kornbluth, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also testified; all three leaders faced backlash for their comments, and Magill and Gay later posted videos clarifying their statements.

At the hearing, Stefanik asked whether “calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?” Gay demurred, saying the answer depended on the context. On Friday, 74 members of Congress signed a letter urging all three schools to remove their presidents.

Harvard alumni and donors, including Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund chief executive, have expressed their frustration with Gay’s conduct. On Sunday, Ackman sent a letter to the school’s governing body.

“As a result of President Gay’s failure to enforce Harvard’s own rules, Jewish students, faculty and others are fearful for their own safety as even the physical abuse of students remains unpunished,” Ackman wrote.

The letter of support signed by hundreds of faculty, meanwhile, called for the Harvard Corporation board to rebuff those efforts. “We, the undersigned faculty, urge you in the strongest possible terms to defend the independence of the university and to resist political pressures that are at odds with Harvard’s commitment to academic freedom, including calls for the removal of President Claudine Gay,” read the letter.

Gay, who took office six months ago and is the university’s first Black president, apologised to the Harvard Crimson student newspaper last week for her remarks. “I am sorry,” Gay said in an interview with the Crimson. “Words matter.” Benjamin Eidelson, a professor at Harvard Law School who signed the faculty letter, said that he believes Gay’s comments have been misinterpreted and misused since she repeatedly condemned anti-Semitism at the congressional hearing.

“It is a politically motivated effort to make the university operate by the standards that certain donors and opportunistic politicians think that we should, rather than the intellectual values that define the institution,” he said.

The Wall Street Journal