Penny Pritzker, senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, will remain in her position despite increasing pressure from influential donors and alumni for her to step down following Claudine Gay’s resignation as Harvard’s president earlier this week.
Pritzker, who has led Harvard’s highest governing body since February 2022, will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, a university spokesperson told the student-run newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, on Wednesday. The Harvard Corporation’s head and ten other members have been criticized for standing by Gay after her antisemitism and plagiarism scandals hit their peaks in December, when she failed to denounce antisemitism at a congressional hearing amid the ongoing Israel–Hamas war and questions arose regarding the integrity of her academic work.
Gay formally resigned on Tuesday due to the public backlash in both controversies. Now, Pritzker and the corporation find themselves under scrutiny for hiring Gay in the first place.
Pritzker led the search committee that ultimately chose Gay, who became Harvard’s first black president last July.
In a letter announcing Gay’s appointment at the time, Pritzker said she possesses a “rare blend of incisiveness and inclusiveness, intellectual range and strategic savvy, institutional ambition and personal humility, a respect for enduring ideals and a talent for catalyzing change.”
Hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman, the donor and alumnus who led the campaign to oust Gay from her post, said Wednesday that all of Harvard’s board members, including Pritzker, should be removed for their role in protecting the former Ivy League president for several weeks.
“Board Chair, Penny Pritzker, should resign along with the other members of the board who led the campaign to keep Claudine Gay, orchestrated the strategy to threaten the media, bypassed the process for evaluating plagiarism, and otherwise greatly contributed to the damage that has been done,” Ackman wrote in a lengthy post on X. “New Corporation board members should be identified who bring true diversity, viewpoint and otherwise, to the board.”
He also criticized Harvard’s Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging, which Gay created, saying it should be shut down and its staff fired for stoking antisemitism on campus ever since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.
“Harvard must once again become a meritocratic institution which does not discriminate for or against faculty or students based on their skin color, and where diversity is understood in its broadest form so that students can learn in an environment which welcomes diverse viewpoints from faculty and students from truly diverse backgrounds and experiences,” Ackman added.
The announcement that Pritzker will keep her job was made in response to his comments.
A sister to Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker and the U.S. commerce secretary under President Barack Obama, Penny Pritzker maintains strong ties to the Democratic Party. She currently serves as special representative for Ukraine’s economic recovery in the Biden administration and has been a major Democratic donor for the last three decades.
With a net worth exceeding $15 billion, the Pritzker family owns the Hyatt hotel chain and has used its wealth to promote liberal ideologies such as transgenderism. Penny Pritzker contributes about $3.5 billion to her family’s total net worth, according to Forbes.
Pritzker first joined the Harvard Corporation in July 2018.
In addition to Ackman, others such as former Trump administration official Richard Grenell and conservative activist Christopher Rufo called for Pritzker’s resignation in the wake of Gay’s ouster.
Jeff Sonnenfeld, associate dean for leadership studies at Yale School of Management, noted Pritzker’s silence on the matter.
“Penny should step up and say what went wrong,” he told the New York Post. “A lot of people on that board should step down if they can’t explain what they did. If this had been Enron or some other disaster, people would be very critical if a board didn’t speak up.”
The Yale dean added that Gay’s controversies worsened because the corporation was engaged in “a lot of bad groupthink.”
“Penny is an old friend and half the board are old friends. And while they are not incompetent and have sterling characters, the process totally failed,” Sonnenfeld said. “They’ve been tone deaf, arrogant, disdainful and inelegant if not downright deceptive.”