When Rep. Elise Stefanik declared “One down. Two to go” after University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill’s resignation, she apparently wasn’t kidding.
No sooner had Ms. Magill stepped down Saturday than the campaign to oust Harvard President Claudine Gay kicked into full gear, an onslaught that includes plagiarism allegations as well as a donor revolt spurred by what critics call her weak response to campus antisemitism.
Ms. Gay’s future may soon be decided by the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, the university’s top governing boards, which had a regularly scheduled meeting Monday. Discussions of her status are expected.
Leading the charge for her removal is billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, a Harvard graduate and a major donor, who said he is aware of more than $1 billion in paused and withdrawn donations from “a small group of Harvard’s most generous Jewish and non-Jewish alumni.”
“In her short tenure as President, Claudine Gay has done more damage to the reputation of Harvard University than any individual in our nearly 500-year history,” Mr. Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square, said in an open letter Sunday to Harvard’s governing boards.
In Ms. Gay’s corner were more than 600 Harvard faculty members who signed a letter to the Harvard Corporation urging it to “defend the independence of the university and to resist political pressures that are at odds with Harvard’s commitment to academic freedom, including calls for the removal of President Claudine Gay.”
SEE ALSO: Heads roll at Penn as Magill, Bok resign after disastrous House hearing on antisemitism
“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,” said the letter, as reported by the Harvard Crimson.
The Harvard Alumni Association executive committee voted Monday to give its unanimous support to Ms. Gay, while a letter from more than 700 “Concerned Black Alumni and Allies” praised her “commitment to free speech” and her “leadership at Harvard as a Black woman.”
Please see my letter today to @Harvard governing boards of directors:
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) December 10, 2023
December 10, 2023
Dear Members of the Harvard Governing Boards:
In her short tenure as President, Claudine Gay has done more damage to the reputation of Harvard University than any individual in our nearly…
Ms. Gay, who assumed the presidency in July after five years as Harvard faculty dean, was pilloried for her Dec. 5 testimony before a House committee on rising campus antisemitism, when she testified alongside Ms. Magill and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth.
Asked by Ms. Stefanik whether calling for “genocide of Jews” would violate campus rules, they said it would depend on the context. Ms. Gay sought to walk back her comments two days later, telling the Harvard Crimson that “I am sorry. Words matter.”
Their testimony prompted more than 70 Republican and Democratic members of Congress, led by the Republican Stefanik and Rep. Jared Moskowitz, Florida Democrat, to call for the presidents to step down.
Ms. Stefanik, a Harvard alum, blasted faculty members defending Ms. Gay, saying Monday that instead of prioritizing the “safety and security of Jewish students under historic antisemitic attacks with a crystal clear condemnation of calls for genocide of Jews, they are instead obsessively focused on their dislike and entitled disdain for those with opposing political beliefs.”
Not helping Ms. Gay’s cause were questions raised Monday about her academic integrity.
Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo and American Conservative contributor Christopher Brunet accused her Monday of violating Harvard’s academic integrity policy in her 1997 Harvard Ph.D. thesis by paraphrasing work from other sources without adequate attribution.
They said she lifted passages from various authors “nearly verbatim” without quotation marks. She did provide references to her sources, but Harvard’s plagiarism rule says that when paraphrasing, “you must completely restate the ideas in the passage in your own words.”
“If your own language is too close to the original, then you are plagiarizing, even if you do provide a citation,” the Harvard policy states.
Mr. Rufo and Mr. Burnet acknowledged that some critics “might object to any punishment, arguing that her dissertation is decades old, or that these instances of plagiarism appear to be highly technical, or even trivial.”
“But the dissertation is the cornerstone of an academic career, and universities impose demanding standards of academic integrity, with severe consequences for violators,” they said. “Harvard, in particular, has a strict policy on these matters.”
Ms. Gay told The Boston Globe in a Monday statement that “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship. Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure my scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards.”
Also making the rounds was a 2020 memo allegedly written by Ms. Gay when she was Harvard faculty dean that said the Black Lives Matter global protests against “police brutality and systemic racism” offer a “profound opportunity for institutional change that should not and cannot be squandered.”
Her goals include “Amplify teaching and research on racial and ethnic inequality” and commit to “anti-racist action and the infusion of inclusive practices into all aspects of our teaching and research.”
The memo was posted on X by C. Bradley Thompson, a Clemson University professor and executive director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism.
This philosophy is pure poison https://t.co/XIr0lRBeBK
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 10, 2023
“This memo is a blueprint for the intellectual corruption & politicization of a once great institution, and it laid the groundwork for the anti-semitism & the anti-Americanism rampant at Harvard today,” said Mr. Thompson. “This is Gay’s agenda for Harvard, which means for the rest of American higher education.”
He said that “Gay obviously should be fired, but that’s not enough. Her ideological agenda must be opposed and tossed in the dustbin of history.”
Elon Musk, the CEO of X, responded: “This philosophy is pure poison.”
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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