Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University, will remain in her post despite the swirling controversy over her remarks at a congressional hearing on antisemitism last week.
The university’s governing board, the Harvard Corporation, on Tuesday issued a statement declaring “unanimous” support for Gay and affirming the institution’s commitment to “open discourse and academic freedom.” Gay, a political scientist and former dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, became president six months ago.
“President Gay has apologized for how she handled her congressional testimony and has committed to redoubling the university’s fight against antisemitism,” the board’s statement said..
Several hundred current and former professors and administrators had signed a petition on Sunday and Monday asking the board “to defend the independence of the university” and not fire Gay. The executive committee of the university’s alumni association had also voted to support her, according to news accounts.
The board’s decision to keep Gay in office contrasts with what transpired over the weekend at the University of Pennsylvania, where M. Elizabeth Magill stepped aside as president after her comments at the same congressional hearing stoked outrage. Scott L. Bok, Penn’s board chair, also resigned.
Last week’s five-hour hearing on antisemitism, convened by the House education committee, also featured Sally Kornbluth, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Pamela Nadell, director of the Jewish-studies program at American University. MIT’s board said last week that it supports Kornbluth, who became president in January.
The hearing’s aftermath has cast a harsh light on the challenge college presidents face in making statements of any kind, let alone on an issue with the intensity, scale, and complexity of the conflict between Israel and Hamas. As higher-education leaders navigate difficult topics, faculty members are increasingly concerned that presidents are under pressure to toe the political line or lose their jobs.
“When you make statements from an institutional position, there’s almost no way to satisfy everybody,” said Ryan D. Enos, a professor of government at Harvard and one of the faculty members who started a petition calling on the board to support Gay.
Conservative activists have also accused Gay of plagiarism. Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute and a board member at New College of Florida, on Sunday published a Substack article claiming that Gay plagiarized sections of her 1997 doctoral dissertation.
The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news organization, has also published an article claiming that Gay had improperly used portions of other scholars’ work in four papers published between 1993 and 2017.
In its Tuesday statement, the Harvard board said that it didn’t believe the allegations constituted misconduct but that Gay had agreed to amend two articles. Gay defended “the integrity of my scholarship” in a statement on Monday.
Testimony Trouble
During last week’s hearing, Gay, Kornbluth, and Magill were pressed repeatedly by members of Congress to denounce pro-Palestinian protesters.
The exchanges between the presidents and Rep. Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, have been seized on by critics as evidence that selective private universities have become tolerant of antisemitism. Some conservative critics blame progressive ideologies that they feel are influencing campus decision-making, as well as policies meant to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Stefanik asked Gay and her peers if student protests calling for genocide of Jews would violate university policies. In response, Gay denounced such language as “hateful” and “at odds with the values of Harvard.” But “we embrace a commitment to free expression and give a wide berth to free expression, even of views that are objectionable, outrageous, and offensive,” Gay continued.
Gay has since apologized for her responses, telling The Harvard Crimson, the campus newspaper, that she had gotten “caught up in what had become at that point an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures.” But her testimony has fueled anger and disappointment on Harvard’s campus and beyond. Days after her appearance on Capitol Hill, a prominent rabbi resigned from an advisory group formed in October to combat antisemitism at Harvard.
Searching Scrutiny
Following Tuesday’s contentious hearing, the congressional panel said it would examine the three universities’ “learning environments” and “policies and disciplinary procedures.”
“The short explanation is that both events on campus and the painfully inadequate testimony reinforced the idea that I cannot make the sort of difference I had hoped,” Rabbi David J. Wolpe wrote on the social-media platform X.
Bill Ackman, a hedge-fund manager who has a bachelor’s degree and M.B.A. from Harvard, has issued numerous calls for Gay’s dismissal, claiming she was hired only to satisfy the demand for a racial minority as president. Ackman has also donated more than $25 million to the university.
Gay is Haitian American and the first person of color to serve as Harvard’s president. She is only the second woman to be appointed to the post.
Resisting Politics
For many faculty members who signed the petition backing Gay, their endorsement was less a statement of support than an affirmation of the university’s autonomy from partisan political forces.
It’s hard to get 700 Harvard faculty to agree on anything.
“The critical work of defending a culture of free inquiry in our diverse community cannot proceed if we let its shape be dictated by outside forces,” reads the petition.
In the first 24 hours, the petition was signed by about 700 current or emeritus faculty members and administrators, Enos said.
“It’s hard to get 700 Harvard faculty to agree on anything,” he said.
“There’s no doubt that students feel uncomfortable on campus because they’re Jewish,” Enos said, but social-media posts from people like Ackman that call for firing the president are not a serious way to address the problem. Leveraging a large online following is a “sad way to go about something like this,” he said.
Derek J. Penslar, a professor of Jewish history at Harvard, said antisemitism is one problem among many at the university, along with anti-Arab sentiment and Islamophobia, that make it difficult to have a nuanced discussion of the Israel-Hamas war.
The president’s testimony was not up to the moment and the setting, Penslar said, but he still doesn’t want her removed. Gay and the other presidents all used legally defensible arguments to describe the universities’ responsibility to balance free speech and student safety, he said, when they should have used sympathetic and sensitive language.
“She let herself be bullied by the congresswoman,” Penslar said of Gay.
“I was disappointed in the president’s statement,” he added, “but understand that she was at a distinct disadvantage.”
Though the war continues to divide the campus, Penslar said, faculty members are mostly committed to working with Gay, not against her.
