The Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers, the two entities that govern the Ivy League university, are facing increasing pressure from all sides as they decide whether to retain university President Claudine Gay.
Gay has been under fire since last Tuesday, when she testified before the House Education and the Workforce Committee during a hearing focused on rising antisemitism on college campuses. During that hearing, Gay, under questioning from Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), refused to say if calling for the genocide of Jews is a violation of the university's harassment policy. The hearing came two months after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel that claimed the lives of more than 1,200 people.
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The fallout from the hearing has already cost University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill her job. Meanwhile, Gay has faced growing calls for her resignation from numerous high-profile people outside the university's community. But unlike Magill, who has served as Penn's president for more than a year, Gay has only held the top job at Harvard since July, meaning her removal would represent a swift fall from grace for the first black woman to lead Harvard.
Last week, Stefanik and a bipartisan group of lawmakers called for Gay, Penn's Magill, and MIT President Sally Kornbluth to lose their jobs in a letter to the governing boards of the three schools. All three academic leaders testified at the antisemitism hearing, and all three failed to state during their testimony that advocating genocide against Jewish people would result in punishment at their schools.
"Given this moment of crisis, we demand that your boards immediately remove each of these presidents from their positions and that you provide an actionable plan to ensure that Jewish and Israeli students, teachers, and faculty are safe on your campuses," the lawmakers wrote. "Anything less than these steps will be seen as your endorsement of what Presidents Gay, Magill, and Kornbluth said to Congress and an act of complicity in their antisemitic posture. The world is watching — you can stand with your Jewish students and faculty, or you can choose the side of dangerous antisemitism."
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Amid the growing calls for Gay's ouster, the Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers held a meeting on Sunday, but details of what they discussed were not released. The same day, in response to the substantial pressure calling for Gay's removal, a group of 511 members of the Harvard faculty wrote a letter urging the board to retain Gay.
"The critical work of defending a culture of free inquiry in our diverse community cannot proceed if we let its shape be dictated by outside forces," the letter said, according to the Harvard Crimson. The names of all the letter's signatories were not released, but history professor Maya Jasanoff was named by the Harvard Crimson as one of the organizers of the letter.