Harvard University President Claudine Gay’s resignation following dozens of plagiarism allegations will be “just the beginning of the reckoning,” House GOP Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik told The Post Tuesday — vowing that Republicans will carry out a “long overdue” cleansing of higher education’s “institutional rot.”
“The Harvard Corporation should have forced this resignation immediately after the congressional hearing just a month ago, but they failed and it became clear … that her presidency was untenable,” said Stefanik, a 2006 graduate of Harvard College.
Stefanik (R-NY) added that the Harvard president, who announced in a statement that she was resigning from her leadership post, but would remain on the Ivy League school’s faculty, had been a “disgrace” during her short tenure, “whether it was her failure to protect Jewish students or the just shredding of academic integrity in the university’s attempt to cover up her nearly 50 instances of plagiarism.”
“I’m a graduate of Harvard; it was previously the most prestigious higher education institution in the world. That is long gone,” Stefanik went on.
Last month, Republicans on the House Education and Workforce Committee launched an investigation of Harvard and other elite universities over their handling of recent antisemitic incidents on campus following disastrous testimony by Gay, then-Penn President Liz Magill and MIT President Sally Kornbluth.
Stefanik said that effort would “continue apace.”
“Billions of taxpayer dollars go to these institutions,” she said. “And not only do you have Jewish students who are being physically assaulted and harassed on campus, but you have a lot in these offices of DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] that are antisemitic by definition.
“And I believe the investigation is going to uncover what will be the greatest scandal in colleges and university history.”
The antisemitism probe, and another investigation into what Education and Workforce Committee Chairman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) has called “credible allegations of plagiarism” against Gay, have already begun with requests for internal documents and threats of subpoena if universities do not comply.
Stefanik pointed out that “hundreds of Jewish students” had reached out to Harvard’s DEI office about “the rise of antisemitic slurs” and “antisemitic acts on campus” but had received no response.
“I am working with Chairwoman Virginia Foxx. We are absolutely focused on document requests, and we will not hesitate to use subpoenas,” she said.
“They don’t get to live by a different set of rules because they happen to be on the board of Harvard. They have to respond to the United States Congress by law — and especially because billions of US taxpayer dollars go to fund these institutions.”
“This is just the beginning of the reckoning. This is long overdue,” she added.
Stefanik made headlines Dec. 5 when she grilled Gay, Magill and Kornbluth during a House Education and Workforce Committee hearing about incidents of antisemitic harassment on their campuses,
In an exchange that has since been viewed millions of times, Stefanik asked each whether anti-Israel students calling for the genocide of Jews in the wake of Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7 violated their universities’ codes of conduct related to bullying and harassment.
Gay and the others declined to give a yes-or-no answer to the question, emphasizing that the speech would depend on “context” and would only warrant action if rising to the level of bullying, harassment and intimidation.
Magill resigned Dec. 9, four days after the disastrous testimony, but Gay survived the initial blowback. However, her tenure as Harvard’s president could not survive a second scandal — this time concerning her lifting citations from other scholars without attribution on her academic work dating back to her doctoral dissertation.
“As I said, after the Penn president resigned, ‘One down, two to go.’ Now we’re at, ‘Two down, one to go,’” Stefanik said. “They’ve lost their moral clarity with now infamously delivering the most morally bankrupt testimony in the history of Congress.”
That “moral bankruptcy,” she charged, went right to the top at Harvard, where the university’s governing body chose to retain Gay — reportedly under pressure to do so from high-profile figures like former President Barack Obama, a 1991 Harvard Law graduate.
“Not only did they allow it to fester, they covered it up. And it’s a fiduciary responsibility when you serve on these governance boards of these institutions,” Stefanik said.
“And in the case of Harvard, we now know that the Harvard Corporation was aware of the credible accusations of plagiarism and instead of addressing that, they threatened to sue a media outlet,” she said, referencing threats The Post received from attorneys hired by the university after comment was requested about allegations that Gay had stolen other academics’ work.
“What’s also of concern is the executive search for the Harvard president was the shortest ever when they selected Claudine Gay. And the individual who led that was Penny Pritzker, a former Obama Cabinet official,” Stefanik continued. “We also know that Obama himself called in to pressure the Harvard Corporation to keep Claudine Gay.
“The radical leftists on these boards made this political, and what they did was, they completely destroyed their academic integrity and they completely destroyed their moral leadership and their brand name worldwide.”