Harvard Boards Reportedly Weighing Claudine Gay’s ‘Mishandling’ Against Letting Elise Stefanik Win

The Harvard Corporation, one of the two boards governing the Ivy League school, will meet Monday to discuss the future of President Claudine Gay in light of the fallout from her anti-Semitism testimony before Congress last week. The other governing body, Harvard’s Board of Overseers, met Sunday. Tensions are reportedly high at both boards over whether taking action would be worth it appearing that Republican. Rep. Elise Stefanik was able to “force” an ouster.

At the hearing about anti-Semitism on campus since the brutal terror attack by Hamas against Israeli civilians, Stefanik, a Harvard graduate, asked the university presidents whether calling for genocide against Jews would violate their respective codes of conduct. The waffling answers caused an immediate backlash that crossed party and ideological lines and angered people across the country, including prominently on Sunday Al Gore.

Penn’s president resigned Saturday amid the fallout, and, as the New York Times explains, Harvard’s Gay is facing “escalating pressure on Sunday to resign as prominent alumni, donors and politicians called for her ouster.”

But the prospect of allowing the impression that Stefanik was able to successfully pressure for Gay’s removal has caused some to balk, the paper reports.

“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,” they add.

Despite the fact that “prominent alumni, donors and politicians” have called for her removal or resignation, some members of the faculty circulated a petition Sunday that garnered around 500 signatures from among the university’s 2300 faculty members which urged the school to “resist political pressures that are at odds with Harvard’s commitment to academic freedom” and to “defend the independence of the university.”

Among the signers was Harvard professor Laurence Tribe, who last week slammed Gay’s “hesitant, formulaic, and bizarrely evasive answers” to Stefanik at the hearing.

The short letter is composed of only two sentences due to the differing views among the signers about the war in Gaza and the issues at the hearing, the report says.

Melani Cammett, a leader in the effort and professor of international relations, said the short statement reflected the fact that signers held a broad range of views on the war in Gaza, campus protest and Dr. Gay’s statement to Congress — but were united in resisting political pressure on Harvard.

The Times points out that Gay told the Harvard Crimson last week that she has the support of Penny Pritzker, “leader of the 12-person Harvard Corporation, who is a former Obama administration official. Dr. Gay is also a member of the Harvard Corporation.”

But as the blowback continues, being on the same side of the issue as Republicans does appear to be taking a toll on some. An instinct which may also have been at play in the responses at the hearing in the first place, among others.