The leaders of multiple prominent colleges and universities came under fire following their testimony at a House hearing on antisemitism last week. Critics have condemned the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT for their testimony, in which none of the three explicitly stated that calling for the genocide of Jewish students would violate their institutions’ codes of conduct. In one exchange with Republican representative Elise Stefanik from New York, University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill said that whether such calls constituted harassment or bullying would be a “context-dependent decision.” The backlash was swift, with politicians, alumni, and donors alike calling on the presidents to be removed from their posts. Magill resigned on Saturday, but Harvard president Claudine Gay got a vote of confidence from the school’s board on Tuesday. Below are live updates on what’s happening as the controversy continues to unfold.
Though Harvard’s governing board announced its support for Claudine Gay, allegations that the university president plagiarized portions of her Ph.D. dissertation are still receiving attention.
The Harvard Crimson reports that some of the passages in question appear to violate the university’s stated policies on plagiarism, which state that students “must give credit to the author of the source material” through either citations or quotes when citing someone else’s work word for word, something Gay is alleged not to have done.
However, the school paper spoke to some of the scholars Gay alleged to have copied and most of them felt that her actions didn’t rise to the level of plagiarism. Gary King, a Harvard professor who advised Gay on her dissertation, called the claim “false and absurd” in an email to the Crimson.
“Her dissertation and every one of the numerous drafts I read leading up to the final version met the highest levels of academic integrity,” he said. “If you were going to commit plagiarism, would you plagiarize your professor’s work and expect to get away with it?”
Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a Harvard alum who has been in the spotlight for her grilling of the university presidents at last week’s congressional hearing, seemed to react to the news of Gay’s fate on X.
The Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing board, announced Tuesday morning that Harvard president Claudine Gay will be staying on in her role despite mounting criticism over her recent House testimony.
The committee met Monday and discussed the matter well into the evening, per the New York Times. They publicized their support of the school’s leader in a letter signed by all its members excluding Gay herself.
“As members of the Harvard Corporation, we today reaffirm our support for President Gay’s continued leadership of Harvard University,” the letter 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 board did criticize Gay’s initial response following Hamas’s attack, saying that the university’s first statement should’ve been “an immediate, direct, and unequivocal condemnation.” But the group acknowledged that Gay apologized for her testimony and said she is “committed to redoubling the University’s fight against antisemitism.”
Their statement also addressed the plagiarism claims levied at Gay, saying the board did an independent review at Gay’s request that found “a few instances of inadequate citation,” but no violations of Harvard’s research policies. They said Gay requested four corrections to insert quotation marks and citations that were omitted.
Gay, who first took on the role in July, received increasing support from the Harvard community in recent days with more than 650 faculty members signing an open letter of support for the university’s first Black president.
In addition to the backlash she’s received for her congressional testimony, Harvard president Claudine Gay defended herself from allegations of plagiarism Monday.
Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet, a conservative activist and writer, respectively, alleged in a Substack post that Gay plagiarized sections of her Ph.D. dissertation entitled “Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Policies.” They claim that she lifted entire portions from a paper written by Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam as well as a book by scholar Carol Swain without sufficiently paraphrasing the passages.
Gay defended her past work in a statement to the Boston Globe. “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship,” she said. “Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure my scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards.”
The Harvard Crimson reports that all 13 of the members of the Harvard Alumni Association executive committee have signed onto a letter asking the university’s governing boards to support Claudine Gay.
“President Gay is the right leader to guide the University during this challenging time,” the letter read. “We are confident President Gay will address antisemitism, and other forms of hate, effectively and courageously.”
Per the Crimson, the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers are expected to issue a decision on Gay’s future on Monday.
The Harvard Corporation, the university’s most powerful governing board, is set to meet Monday and is likely to discuss the controversy surrounding the institution’s president Claudine Gay. The New York Times reports:
The Harvard president’s future at the school is expected to be discussed during the Harvard Corporation’s meeting on Monday, people briefed on the meeting said. The meeting was long scheduled, but the topic of Dr. Gay’s fate became front and center after her congressional testimony on Tuesday.
People familiar with the closed-door debate over Dr. Gay’s future also said there was a tension between what some people on the Corporation board view as her mishandling of the questions and a desire not to allow Ms. Stefanik and other critics to force an ouster on the board.
As of Monday, Gay is still in her post, even after a prescheduled meeting of Harvard’s Board of Overseers Sunday.
[I]n the letter, which began circulating around 11 a.m. Sunday, the faculty members asked the [Harvard] Corporation to defend the principle of university independence in the face of what they described as politically motivated attacks on Harvard. The letter was sent to the Corporation at 8 p.m. Sunday with 511 signatures, according to History professor Maya R. Jasanoff ’96, a faculty member who helped organize the letter.
Addressing the Corporation, they wrote they “urge you in the strongest possible terms to defend the independence of the university and to resist political pressures that are at odds with Harvard’s commitment to academic freedom, including calls for the removal of President Claudine Gay.”
“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,” they added.
While the Harvard Corporation has not declared its support for Gay since last week’s congressional hearing, the governing board at MIT has unequivocally done that for MIT president Sally Kornbluth. As the Boston Globe reported on Thursday:
“The MIT Corporation chose Sally to be our president for her outstanding academic leadership, her judgment, her integrity, her moral compass, and her ability to unite our community around MIT’s core values,” the statement from the committee said. “She has done excellent work in leading our community, including in addressing antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hate, which we reject utterly at MIT. She has our full and unreserved support.”
The Harvard Crimson notes a conspicuous silence regarding the calls for resignation targeting president Claudine Gay:
Gay said in an interview with the Crimson on Thursday that she has the support of Penny S. Pritzker ’81, senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation — the University’s highest governing body.
But Pritzker has remained silent. A Harvard spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Saturday about whether Pritzker and the Harvard Corporation still have confidence in Gay.
The silence from the Corporation stands in stark contrast to the responses from MIT and the University of Pennsylvania following the hearing. Members of the University of Pennsylvania’s Board of Trustees pressured Magill to resign, as the board held an emergency meeting Thursday to discuss Magill’s tenure. Meanwhile, the executive committee of the MIT Corporation — the school’s governing board — released a statement Thursday evening declaring their “full and unreserved support” for Kornbluth.
At Harvard — nothing.
The lack of any public statement from the Harvard Corporation has left the fate of Gay’s presidency uncertain even as external pressure mounts on her to resign.
The Crimson also points out that if the Harvard Corporation turns on Gay, it “would be a remarkable about-face for a board whose entire membership served on the presidential search committee that handpicked Gay to lead Harvard just one year prior.”
The Corporation has a regularly scheduled meeting on Sunday.
It’s also worth emphasizing, as CNN explains, that Gay is not exactly in the same boat as Magill:
Unlike Gay, Penn’s Magill was under fire for months prior to her resignation. Donors had been calling for Magill’s resignation since September, when the university allowed speakers that Penn’s administration acknowledged had a history of making antisemitic remarks to participate in the “Palestine Writes Literature Festival” on campus. Those existing tensions were further inflamed once the current Israel-Hamas war began.
Gay has also been vocal in her acknowledgement of Jewish students’ concerns.
On October 7, a coalition of student groups released a statement placing the blame for Hamas’ attacks on Israel’s government. The letter drew sweeping condemnation from business leaders and alumni, who called for the students whose groups signed the statement to be blacklisted. A spokesperson for the coalition later wrote in a statement that the group “staunchly opposes violence against civilians — Palestinian, Israeli, or other.” Three days after the coalition posted its letter, Gay released a statement condemning the “terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas” and affirming that “no student group — not even 30 student groups — speaks for Harvard University or its leadership.” In a speech at Harvard’s Jewish student organization in late October, Gay announced that she had assembled an advisory group of “faculty, staff, alumni, and religious leaders from the Jewish community” who “will help us to think expansively and concretely about all the ways that antisemitism shows up on our campus and in our campus culture.”
That has not made Gay less susceptible to criticism, but her willingness to take accountability in the face of criticism may be the determining factor in whether she ultimately steps down.
Magill voluntarily resigned on Saturday, University of Pennsylvania board of trustees chairman Scott Bok announced in an email to the Penn community. Magill, who had held the role for only a year and a half, will stay on until an interim president can be appointed and will remain a tenured faculty member at Penn’s Carey Law School, he said.
The school’s board of trustees met by phone on Saturday evening to discuss the leadership transition, at which point Chairman Bok announced that he was stepping down, as well.
“It has been my privilege to serve as President of this remarkable institution,” Magill said in a statement. “It has been an honor to work with our faculty, students, staff, alumni, and community members to advance Penn’s vital missions.”
Said Bok in a statement regarding his own resignation: “While I was asked to remain in that role for the remainder of my term in order to help with the presidential transition, I concluded that, for me, now was the right time to depart.” The now-former board of trustees chairman, who had also faced pressure to step down amid the controversy, defended Magill in his statement:
The world should know that Liz Magill is a very good person and a talented leader who was beloved by her team. She is not the slightest bit antisemitic. Working with her was one of the great pleasures of my life. Worn down by months of relentless external attacks, she was not herself last Tuesday. Over prepared and over lawyered given the hostile forum and high stakes, she provided a legalistic answer to a moral question, and that was wrong. It made for a dreadful 30-second sound bite in what was more than five hours of testimony.
That’s how one progressive Jewish organizer at Penn described Magill’s resignation in a statement to the Daily Pennsylvanian:
College senior Jack Starobin, an organizer for the progressive Jewish group Penn Chavurah, described Magill’s resignation as “an alarming precedent” for the future of free speech and academic freedom at Penn and other higher education institutions.
“We’ve seen a successful campaign by far right congressional Republicans allied with partisan donors and political lobbyists to push out a president who tolerates if not adamantly defends the Free Speech of pro-Palestinian students, Starobin said. “We’ve seen Magill’s administration caving to some of that political pressure by showing selective outrage on behalf of the safety and free speech of students who support Israel, but not showing that same outrage on behalf of the safety and free speech of students who speak up for Palestinian rights.”
The Republican New York congresswoman celebrated Magill’s resignation in a tweet shortly after Penn’s announcement — and pressed the presidents of Harvard and MIT to follow suit:
Pennsylvania senator Bob Casey, a Democrat, also released a statement via X/Twitter supporting the change in leadership:
The Wall Street Journal reports:
[Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression legal director Will] Creeley and others pointed to examples in recent years in which private college and university presidents seem to have embraced free-speech arguments in some contexts, but shrink from them when asked to defend politically unpopular ideas or scholarship. Several instances involved professors whose scholarship or commentary was viewed as critical of groups considered protected minorities.
A noteworthy recent example involved the Penn law professor Amy Wax, who has spoken frequently and publicly about her preference for Western culture and against race-based affirmative action. The school has acknowledged her right to free speech but still moved to have her dismissed. She remains at the school. …
Meanwhile, many students are engaging in self-censorship to avoid being punished for views considered problematic on campus, according to numerous surveys. A 2023 survey by the Buckley Institute at Yale found that 61% of students said they often felt intimidated in sharing beliefs different from their professors in class. In the same survey, 46% of undergraduate students said they thought it was appropriate to shout down or disrupt a speaker on their campus.
The university’s board of trustees will meet by phone on Sunday evening, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer:
The board has remained mum on its next steps in the face of a congressional committee investigation, scrutiny by Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and the White House, and a threat of further loss of donations. But an email from chairman Scott L. Bok obtained by the Inquirer said the Sunday phone call was set up at the request of many members and that he understood they would want to have input on statements going out from Magill or the board.
Magill is also facing pressure to resign from the board of advisers at Wharton. More than 70 U.S. representatives have signed a letter calling for her removal, as well, and some Pennsylvania lawmakers have threatened to withhold more than $31 million in state funding for the university’s veterinary school unless she is removed.
The New York Times’ Lauren Hirsch reports that Harvard president Claudine Gay and Penn president Liz Magill both worked with teams from the law firm WilmerHale to help them prepare for their testimony. But as one legal expert told Hirsch, in the end, the two leaders may have focused a little too much on the legal ramifications of what they said:
Preparing for congressional testimony involves blending legal caution with political savvy and common sense, legal experts say. Lawyers typically advise those testifying to be mindful of the law but to also consider headlines that could come out of the hearing. That can be a difficult task after hours of pointed questioning. …
Steven Davidoff Solomon, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, said that the college presidents appeared to be “prepared to give answers in the court — and not a public forum.” But the responsibility of university presidents, Mr. Solomon said, is “not to give legal answers, it’s to give the vision of the university.”
University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill has faced an increasing level of scrutiny in the days following the controversial House Education committee hearing, with several big-dollar alums threatening to rescind their donations. That includes asset manager Ross Stevens, an alumni of Penn’s prestigious Wharton School of business, who wrote a letter stating he would withdraw a $100 million partnership “absent a change in leadership and values at Penn in the very near future.”
On Thursday, CNN reported that Magill stayed on as president following an impromptu board meeting on Thursday. But with the money on the line, board chairman Scott Bok will reportedly speak with Magill on Friday, encouraging her to step down for her comment stating that speech calling for the genocide of Jews only violates Penn’s harassment policy if “the speech turns into conduct.”
Per the Associated Press:
At issue was a line of questioning that asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate the universities’ code of conduct. At the Tuesday hearing, [Harvard president Claudine Gay] said it depended on the context, adding that when “speech crosses into conduct, that violates our policies.”
Gay told The Crimson she was sorry, saying she “got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures.”
“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 said.
On Thursday, Intelligencer’s Jonathan Chait emphasized the difference between the two:
There are several underlying causes for the discomfort of the college presidents, not all of which have clear solutions. College campuses have been inundated with pro-Palestinian activism, which sometimes contains a threatening tone to Jewish students. Campuses have also been struggling for a decade or so with left-wing demands to make campuses “safe,” which has entailed cracking down on criticism of the political left.
So what does it mean to make Jewish students feel safe on campus? One way would be to crack down on anti-Israel rhetoric that might make many Jews feel threatened. That would be consistent with the methods universities have sometimes employed to protect other minority groups. But it would also be deeply illiberal.
A more limited and defensible response would be to police conduct. When mobs of students disrupt classes and make it hard for students to walk around campus without being screamed at (or shoved), that creates an intimidating atmosphere.
Read the rest of his take here.
This post has been updated.
