The president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, will remain at the head of the prestigious Ivy League university, announced Tuesday, December 12, the highest body of the institution, which met Monday evening. “President Claudine Gay is the person best placed to enable our community to address the very serious social issues we face,” said the Harvard Corporation in a statement released following their meeting.
After the Hamas attack on October 7, “the university’s initial statement should have been an immediate, direct and unequivocal condemnation,” the statement continued. “The president apologized for her comments made in Congress and committed to intensifying the fight against anti-Semitism within the university,” argued the corporation, which expressed its full confidence in the president.
Criticized after congressional hearing
After a Congressional hearing on anti-Semitism on Tuesday, December 5, the president of the university was widely criticized for her responses to questions from Republican elected official Elise Stefanik, who likened the calls of certain students to the “Intifada » to an exhortation to “genocide against Jews in Israel and around the world.”
The U.S. Congress opened an investigation Thursday into what it called “rampant anti-Semitism” on campus, and a member of a Harvard advisory board on anti-Semitism, Rabbi David Wolpe, announced his resignation.
Since the bloody attacks by Hamas in Israel on October 7, followed by deadly reprisals by the Israeli army, the conflict has caused turmoil in renowned universities in the United States, such as Harvard (near Boston), UPenn (Philadelphia) or Columbia (New York).
Rich donors and voices in the Republican camp, but also Democrats, have denounced an outbreak of anti-Semitic incidents on campuses and criticized a too weak response from university presidents, against a backdrop of recurring criticism from conservatives against American campuses that ‘they judge too left
Some lawmakers and university donors have called for Claudine Gay’s resignation, following the resignation of Liz Magill, also under fire, as president of the University of Pennsylvania on Saturday. A petition signed by more than 600 faculty members called on the school’s board of trustees to keep Harvard’s president in her position.