Posted on 12/12/23
| News Source: WSJ
Claudine Gay will remain president of Harvard University, the school’s governing board announced, fending off calls for her dismissal in the wake of a much-criticized appearance before a congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses.
The decision by the Harvard Corporation—the university’s highest governing body—caps a week of calls from alumni and donors for Gay to resign. That anger was countered by support from faculty concerned about the independence of the university from political pressure.
The governing board also said it found “a few instances of inadequate citation” in some of Gay’s academic papers, but no research misconduct.
“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 to the Harvard community Tuesday morning.
Critics had said Gay didn’t respond forcefully enough in her initial comments about the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, and lambasted her equivocal response to a question by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) last week about whether calls for genocide of Jewish students would count as harassment.