Harvard President Claudine Gayannounced her resignation on Tuesday, after she and other presidents of prestigious universities were heavily criticized for their testimony before Congress on the antisemitism on campuses.
The mandate of Gay It was the shortest in Harvard history, according to the Harvard Crimson student newspaper, and follows increased pressure for him to resign last month, following the resignation of University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill.
Gay, Magill and the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sally Kornbluthtestified on December 5 before a committee of the United States House of Representatives about the increase in the anti-Semitism on university campuses following the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas in October.
All three refused to give a definitive “yes” or “no” answer to Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik’s question about whether calling for the genocide of the Jews would violate their schools’ codes of conduct regarding bullying and harassment, saying they had to take into consideration the protection of freedom of expression.
More than 70 U.S. lawmakers signed a letter demanding that the boards of trustees of the three universities remove the presidents, citing their discomfort with the testimony.
However, Gay received support from some of his Harvard colleagues. Last month, several hundred professors signed a petition urging university administrators not to bow to political pressure to fire the school’s president over her testimony.
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Gay has also been the subject of plagiarism accusations. The academic was scheduled to submit three corrections to her 1997 thesis after a committee, which investigated the allegations, found that she had made citation errors, a university spokesman said.