Harvard’s lame attempt at damage control after its disastrous and morally ugly institutional response to the Hamas atrocities of 10/7 is already falling apart.
Prominent rabbi David Wolpe has resigned from the antisemitism advisory committee that Harvard convened in an effort to camouflage the fact that Jew hatred is deeply entrenched at America’s most prestigious university.
But Wolpe wasn’t fooled: “The system at Harvard” — like “the ideology that grips far too many of the students and faculty” and that “places Jews as oppressors” — is “itself evil,” he wrote on X.
Good for him for blowing up the whole immoral illusion.
The pathetic performance of President Claudine Gay before a congressional hearing on antisemitism this week makes it beyond clear that she has no interest in changing her school’s ways or recognizing the reality of what students and professors supporting Hamas mean.
She just wants to appease critics and make the public attacks and financial ostracism from big names like Bill Ackman stop.
Remember, Gay couldn’t summon up the courage to state to Congress that calls for armed genocidal violence against Israel, including civilians, violates the school’s conduct rules.
That’s after equally pathetic responses in the immediate aftermath of the atrocities.
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First Gay and Harvard produced a letter drawing moral equivalence between Hamas raping women and murdering children and the elderly and Israel’s justified response; then Gay produced a second, weak-tea statement on Hamas after widespread outrage over the first one.
This is the school parents fight tooth and nail to get their kids into.
Harvard’s far from the only Ivy that’s effectively sided with the terrorists and caught major blowback for it.
Consider embattled University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill: Reports are afoot that she may be asked to resign.
With good reason.
Like Gay, she fumbled and mumbled and hemmed and hawed in the days after 10/7, initially refusing to call Hamas terrorists.
Like Gay, she would not unequivocally state to Congress that calling for Jewish genocide violates her school’s code of conduct.
She needs to go, now — so kudos to the Penn-grad finance titans like Marc Rowan, Cliff Asness, Ross Stevens and others who are keeping the pressure up by stopping donations or clawing them back.
As for Harvard, it’s Gay who should be resigning.
Not Wolpe.
Rot begins at the head, after all. And so too can real, positive change.