Harvard’s president came under serious scrutiny by the Republican-led House Education Committee for antisemitic harassment and discrimination on campus. As a result of this, she recently resigned. However, the education committee has dedicated more efforts to its antisemitism investigation into Harvard.
Rep. Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican, and the committee’s chairwoman wrote a new letter to the university officials. She demanded that they provide the committee with documents and communications about school policies that go several years back. She also demanded information on any incidents related to antisemitism and discrimination.
“While Dr. Gay has since resigned, Harvard’s institutional failures regarding antisemitism extend well beyond one leader,” Foxx said in the letter. “There is evidence antisemitism has been pervasive at Harvard since well before the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack. A November 2022 report by the AMCHA Initiative, a nonprofit that documents antisemitism on college campuses, found Harvard had the highest rate of threats based on Jewish identity of the 109 campuses they surveyed,” she wrote.
The chairwoman addressed her letter to Penny Pritzker, a senior fellow for the Harvard Corporation, and Alan Garber, the school’s former provost and current interim president. Dr. Gay was the prestigious university’s first Black president.
However, she turned in her resignation just six months after becoming president. Dr. Gay resigned after facing a pile of allegations about incorrectly citing other academics in her research, including her dissertation.
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Dr. Gay left her position a few weeks after she appeared before the House Committee on Education alongside other college presidents. During her testimony, she fumbled a line of questioning. Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik asked her if calling for the genocide of Jews would violate university policies, and she didn’t respond with a yes or no.
Furthermore, Gay wrote an opinion essay for The New York Times, sharing her thoughts on the situation. “My hope is that by stepping down, I will deny demagogues the opportunity to further weaponize my presidency in their campaign to undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth,” she wrote.
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“As I depart, I must offer a few words of warning. The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader. This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda.”
“But such campaigns don’t end there. Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organizations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility. For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal,” She cautioned.
ALSO READ: Students File Lawsuits in Fight Against Antisemitism at US Colleges
Harvard isn’t the only university being scrutinized. There are dozens of other universities that the Education Department is investigating over allegations of shared ancestry discrimination, which includes antisemitic and anti-Muslim harassment.
The Education Secretary, Miguel Cardona, has said that the rate of such discrimination on college campuses has spiked since the Israel-Hamas war began.
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