Harvard President Claudine Gay will remain head of the Ivy League school despite backlash over her answers to questions posed last week at a congressional hearing on antisemitism, the university’s governing board said Tuesday.
“As members of the Harvard Corporation, we today reaffirm our support for President Gay’s continued leadership of Harvard University,” a statement signed by board members read. “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 statement came after the board met Monday and decided not to remove Gay from her post, The New York Times reported.
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“In this tumultuous and difficult time, we unanimously stand in support of President Gay,” the statement read. “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.”
Some politicians, donors and alumni have called for Gay’s resignation after she and two other university presidents — the University of Pennsylvania’s Elizabeth Magill and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth — appeared for a hearing on antisemitism last week in Washington. In an exchange that later went viral, Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., pressed the presidents to equivocally say that calls for genocide of Jewish people amounted to bullying and harassment on campus.
The incident prompted Magill and Penn board chair Scott Bok to resign from their posts Saturday, CNN reported.
“At Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no,” Stefanik asked at the Dec. 5 hearing.
“It can be, depending on the context,” Gay said. She later added, “Antisemitic rhetoric, when it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation, that is actionable conduct, and we do take action.”
She sought to clarify her response in a statement shared on Harvard’s social media pages Wednesday, saying, “Calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group are vile, they have no place at Harvard, and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account.”
She apologized in an interview with The Harvard Crimson, the university’s student paper.
“I got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures,” Gay said. “What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged.”
Gay became Harvard’s first Black president in July, according to The Associated Press.