CV NEWS FEED // Harvard’s most influential governing board announced Tuesday morning that it is “unanimously” standing behind controversial President Claudine Gay.
Two days ago, Gay’s critics accused her of plagiarizing parts of her doctoral thesis, citing photographic evidence. Last Tuesday, she was heavily criticized for her remarks at a House Committee Hearing regarding anti-Semitism on campus.
“We today reaffirm our support for President Gay’s continued leadership of Harvard University,” said the Fellows of Harvard College in a statement.
“Our extensive deliberations affirm our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing,” the board continued:
So many people have suffered tremendous damage and pain because of Hamas’s brutal terrorist attack, and the University’s initial statement should have been an immediate, direct, and unequivocal condemnation. Calls for genocide are despicable and contrary to fundamental human values. President Gay has apologized for how she handled her congressional testimony and has committed to redoubling the University’s fight against antisemitism.
The Fellows downplayed Gay’s plagiarism scandal, stating that they “reviewed the results, which revealed a few instances of inadequate citation.”
“While the analysis found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications,” the statement claimed.
Anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) advocate Christopher Rufo disagreed with that assertion. “Gay lift[ed] an entire paragraph nearly verbatim from a paper by Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam’s, while passing it off as her own paraphrase and language,” he wrote on X (formerly Twitter) Saturday.
“This is a direct violation of Harvard’s policy,” Rufo noted, citing the relevant guidelines.
The Fellows concluded:
In this tumultuous and difficult time, we unanimously stand in support of President Gay. At Harvard, we champion open discourse and academic freedom, and we are united in our strong belief that calls for violence against our students and disruptions of the classroom experience will not be tolerated.
The statement’s lead signatory was Harvard Senior Fellow Penny Pritzker.
Pritzker currently serves as the U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine’s Economic Recovery in the Biden administration and was previously the Secretary of Commerce in the Obama administration. She is the sister of Democratic Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker.
In an X post Tuesday, Journalist David Marcus stated that the Fellows’ decision to back Gay is “exactly why Americans have no faith in our institutions.”
“There is no accountability,” he wrote. “The elite are free from consequences for their actions. Unless that changes, nothing else will.”
At the much-scrutinized December 5 House committee hearing, Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-NY, asked Gay: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment?”
The embattled president replied: “The rules around bullying and harassment are quite specific and if the context in which that language is used amounts to bullying and harassment, then we take, we take action against it.”
