Harvard Governing Boards Prepare for Second Day of Meetings with President Gay’s Future Uncertain

Updated at 7:40 A.M. E.D.T.As pressure mounts on Harvard University’s president, Claudine Gay, following her disastrous testimony before Congress, the two boards that govern Harvard University will meet again Monday after convening for several hours over the weekend. Calls for Ms. Gay’s resignation have only intensified since the resignation of the University of Pennsylvania’s president, Elizabeth Magill, on Saturday. Penn’s had board quickly called an emergency meeting on Thursday after several prominent leaders, including the Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, said Ms. Magill should either resign or be fired by the board after she said calling for Jewish genocide was not necessarily a punishable offense. Following Ms. Magill’s voluntary resignation, many observers and activists are turning their attention to the Harvard and M.I.T. presidents, who faced a similar backlash for failing to unequivocally condemn calls for genocide outright during testimony before Congress. Ms. Gay, Ms. Magill, and president Sally Kornbluth of M.I.T. appeared on Tuesday before the House Education committee, where all three said punishing someone for advocating for genocide depended on the “context” of the remarks. The Crimson also reported that the school’s two governing boards — the Harvard Board of Overseers and the Harvard Corporation — were holding a regularly scheduled meeting on campus Sunday afternoon. It is not known if they discussed Ms. Gay’s future at America’s oldest college. When asked Sunday by a Crimson reporter if Ms. Gay deserved to remain as president, the head of the Harvard Corporation, Penny Pritzker, declined to comment. The billionaire hedge fund chief executive Bill Ackman, a double Harvard alumnus and fierce critic of Ms. Gay, wrote a letter to the two boards on Sunday demanding that Ms. Gay be fired. “In her short tenure as President, Claudine Gay has done more damage to the reputation of Harvard University than any individual in our nearly 500-year history,” he wrote. “In the last 24 hours, a petition has been circulating among the Harvard community which asks the board to fire President Gay. I expect it may already have thousands of signatures.”Like Ms. Magill , who attempted to walk back her claim that calls for genocide did not violate the school’s code of conduct, Ms. Gay said that she was “sorry” and that “words matter” in an interview with the Harvard Crimson. She also said, “When words amplify distress and pain, I don’t know how you could feel anything but regret.”Ms. Gay says she has the support of the university board leadership, though those leaders have declined to go on the record to affirm their support. “I do so with confidence that we and I will help get us through this moment and to a place where our students feel safe and able to focus on the very thing they came to Harvard to do.”The lawmaker who helped kick off this firestorm simply by asking questions, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, wrote on Saturday night that she was glad to see Ms. Magill step down from her position, but also said that Ms. Gay and Ms. Kornbluth were incapable of leading their institutions. “One down. Two to go,” Ms. Stefanik, a Harvard alumna, wrote. This, Ms. Stefanik said, is only the “beginning of addressing the pervasive rot of antisemitism that has destroyed the most ‘prestigious’ higher education institutions in America.”In an interview with the Sun, Ms. Stefanik said that she and her House education committee colleagues will investigate and attempt to root out antisemitism on university campuses.“This is a watershed moment,” she told the Sun’s M.J. Koch on Friday. “My fear is that when we conduct this investigation, what we are going to uncover is antisemitism very deep in these institutions of higher learning, some of which were founded, in Harvard’s case, before the founding of our country.”Ms. Gay’s testimony on Tuesday has won her little support from within Harvard’s faculty and alumni network. The famed law school professor Laurence Tribe said he was “with” Ms. Stefanik on the issue of antisemitism, and said Ms. Gay’s “hesitant, formulaic, and bizarrely evasive answers were deeply troubling to me and many of my colleagues, students, and friends.”On Saturday, author C. Bradley Thompson disclosed the existence of a memo sent by Ms. Gay to the Harvard community in August 2020, as the search for a new university president was underway. In it, Ms. Gay calls for more equitable policies and establishment of a diversity, equity, and inclusion office for undergraduate arts and sciences students. Mr. Thompson describes it as a “blueprint for the intellectual corruption & politicization of a once great institution, and it laid the groundwork for the antisemitism & the anti-Americanism rampant at Harvard today.”The billionaire hedge fund chief executive Bill Ackman, a double Harvard alumnus and fierce critic of Ms. Gay, called the memo her “business plan” for allowing antisemitism to spread. The scrutiny on the presidents of Harvard and M.I.T. follow the swift action by Penn’s board in the aftermath of Ms. Magill’s Congressional appearance. had quickly called an emergency meeting on Thursday after several prominent leaders, including the Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, said Ms. Magill should either resign or be fired by the board. The board of Penn’s graduate business school, Wharton, had also called on the trustees to fire the university president. Governor Shapiro, an ex-officio member of Penn’s board, spoke out after Ms. McGill said that calling for Jewish genocide was not necessarily a punishable offense. The board of Penn’s graduate business school, Wharton, also called on the trustees to fire the university president.________This has been updated from the bulldog edition.

Harvard Governing Boards Prepare for Second Day of Meetings with President Gay’s Future Uncertain

Harvard Governing Boards Prepare for Second Day of Meetings with President Gay’s Future Uncertain

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