The president of Harvard University will keep her position despite angering students and alumni with her recent statements to Congress regarding antisemitism on campus.
The Harvard Corporation, the ultimate governing body of the Ivy League school, voted to keep Claudine Gay despite weeks of intensifying criticism.
“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 on Dec. 12, per The Wall Street Journal.
Gay appeared before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Dec. 5 alongside University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill and MIT President Sally A. Kornbluth. Gay and the other university presidents refused to directly answer New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a 2006 Harvard grad, who asked if calls for the genocide of Jewish people violated their schools’ codes of conduct.
“It can be, depending on the context,” said Gay.
Her evasive answer infuriated many who felt Gay had failed to adequately condemn antisemitism.
She previously faced criticism after 30 student groups co-signed a letter claiming Israel is responsible for Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. Alumni felt the school failed to properly respond to the letter and more than 1,600 Jewish donors, including billionaires Bill Ackman and Leslie Wexner, threatened to pull their donations from the university.
“We never thought that, at Harvard College, we would have to argue the point that terrorism against civilians demands immediate and unequivocal condemnation,” said members of the Harvard College Jewish Alumni Association in a letter to Gay and other university leaders. “We never thought we would have to argue for recognition of our own humanity.”
“Such inhumanity is abhorrent, whatever one’s individual views of the origins of long-standing conflicts in the region,” Gay said in a statement released four days after the student groups’ letter’s publication, per The Washington Times. “Let me also state, on this matter as on others, that while our students have the right to speak for themselves, no student group — not even 30 student groups — speaks for Harvard University or its leadership.”
Gay also launched an antisemitism advisory board during the fallout from the student groups’ letter.
Still, her Congressional testimony reignited calls for her resignation and Gay spent days attempting to explain herself and extinguish the furor.
According to The Atlantic:Harvard’s Claudine Gay evidently believed that she’d erred, because she reverted immediately to damage-control mode after leaving Washington. The next day, she told the [Havard Crimson] that her testimony did not represent “my truth” —that is, that she disapproves of genocidal anti-Semitism. (This is an extreme example of the political axiom “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”) Her original answer before Congress lacked any visceral disapproval of anti-Semitism, certainly none to match Harvard’s recent record of condemning speech deemed offensive to historically disadvantaged groups. Her affect was robotic, neutral. She showed no signs of concern at all.
Magill, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, and Scott Bankman, the chairman of the school’s Board of Trustees, both resigned on Dec. 9 after days of public scrutiny and mounting pressure from students and donors.
