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Harvard’s board has given Claudine Gay its full backing to remain as the university’s president after her Congressional testimony on campus antisemitism stirred furious backlash and a movement to oust her.
The board announced its decision on Tuesday morning following a series of meetings.
“In this tumultuous and difficult time, we unanimously stand in support of President Gay,” its members said in a statement.
Gay is Harvard’s first black and second woman president. She began her term only in July.
Her job was thrown into doubt after a disastrous performance — along with the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — at a Congressional hearing last week in which all three struggled to say whether calls for genocide of Jews violated their codes of conduct or harassment policies. To varying degrees, all said it depended on “the context” — provoking a firestorm of criticism that reached the White House.
Elizabeth Magill, the Penn president, resigned under pressure on Saturday evening. That focused scrutiny on Gay and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth.
Following the hearing, 74 members of Congress signed a letter to the universities’ boards urging that all three be sacked.
The hearing was held to examine a surge in antisemitism on American campuses since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s ensuing offensive in Gaza.
Critics have accused the universities of failing to tackle antisemitism and abiding by a double standard in which some minority groups are intensely protected while others are not.
The controversy has opened a wider debate about academic freedom and free speech on campuses in an era in which many universities have embraced diversity, equity and inclusion policies and related philosophies that critics say create a hierarchy of victims.
But the controversy has also raised questions about how much influence billionaire donors should have on university campuses. The campaigns against Gay and Magill have been led by two Wall Street titans: Bill Ackman, a Harvard alumnus and founder of the Pershing Square Capital Management, and Marc Rowan, a Penn graduate and co-founder of Apollo Global.
Ackman, in a Monday post on social media platform X, speculated that Gay would survive because the board did not want to appear to have publicly bowed to pressure from a wealthy donor.
Even though Gay will remain in her post, Harvard may be in for continuing tumult. Furious alumni have already vowed to end their support of the university.
Meanwhile, Elise Stefanik, the New York Republican who led the questioning at last week’s hearing, has vowed a full investigation of the schools, which receive huge amounts of public funding.
Ari Berman, president of Yeshiva University, told an education forum in New York on Tuesday that “we have experienced a failure of leadership, [that is] missing moral clarity”.
He argued too many were focused on administering and fundraising rather than stewardship and moral leadership.
She initially came under criticism by many Jews for issuing a tepid statement after the October 7 attack. She sought to make amends by dining with Jewish students at Harvard Hillel and hearing first-hand about the harassment they were facing.
But the goodwill was undone by her Congressional testimony.
Harvard’s board also said on Tuesday that the university had launched an “independent review” of Gay’s published work in late October, “which revealed a few instances of inadequate citation”.
The board said the analysis found “no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct”, but Gay had “proactively” requested four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.
Additional reporting by Andrew Jack