At least 570 professors signed a petition delivered Sunday evening asking Harvard’s board not to fire university president Claudine Gay, who came under fire after testifying in front of the House Education & Workforce Committee in a hearing last week.

Like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sally Kornbluth and the University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill who sat alongside her, Gay refused to directly address whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates university policy, issued a statement through Harvard’s X account a day after the hearing:

The petition comes after Magill and the chairman of Penn’s board of trustees, Scott Bok, both stepped down from their positions after facing both internal and external demands to resign. Alison Frank Johnson, a professor of history at Harvard and a co-author of the letter, told Reuters that it asks the Harvard Corporation “not to bend to political pressure, including pressure to remove the president.”

“I get the impression that many people don’t know how much support she has, as a scholar, colleague, and administrator, within the university — including from people who disagree with her,” Frank Johnson said. “We don’t want to lose her because of a political stunt.”

In an interview with the Harvard Crimson, the university’s student-run newspaper, Gay said she was “sorry” and that “words matter.”

“I got caught up in what had become, at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures,” she told the Crimson. “What I should have had the presence of mind to do in the 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 has faced calls to resign similar to those which ultimately felled Magill. Alongside Representatives Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) and Kevin Kiley (R., Calif.), both Harvard graduates, large donor and Harvard alumnus Bill Ackman has urged the university’s board to remove her. Ackman, who is the founder and chief executive officer of hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management, has been at the forefront of the campus turmoil over antisemitism; he called on Harvard to publish the names of students involved with organizations that signed a statement blaming Israel for Hamas’s October 7 attack and said he will not hire anyone involved.

Ackman has shared a “petition circulating on Harvard President Gay” on X, this one a “vote of no confidence” in Gay’s leadership.