Harvard president to remain in position

Harvard University’s highest governing board is expected to release a statement Tuesday standing by President Claudine Gay amid calls for her removal after her responses at a House education hearing on antisemitism, according to The Crimson. She is expected to remain in her role.

The board's decision came after a Monday night meeting. More than 650 faculty members have also shown support for the the embattled president, The Crimson reported.

The board's support for Gay follows University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill’s decision to step down over the weekend. Republicans scorched the elite college presidents, along with Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth, at a more than five-hour campus antisemitism hearing on Dec. 5.

But Gay arguably got the worst of the scrutiny during the hearing.

House Education and Workforce Chair Virginia Foxx(R-N.C.) slammed Harvard as “ground zero for antisemitism” following the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), a Harvard alum, called for Gay’s resignation after an adversarial line of questioning.

Gay denounced antisemitism and acknowledged that her institution has had some missteps.

"This is difficult work, and I admit that we have not always gotten it right,” she said. “As Harvard’s president, I am personally responsible for confronting antisemitism with the urgency it demands."

But the scrutiny around Gay is mostly around her refusal to condemn calls for “Jewish genocide” as a violation of Havard’s code of conduct.

“You are president of Harvard, so I assume you're familiar with the term ‘Intifada,’ correct?” Stefanik asked Gay at the hearing, to which she agreed. “Then you understand that the use of the term ‘intifada,’ in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict, is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the State of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews?”

Gay responded: “That type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me.” She later added that the institution embraces “a commitment to free expression, even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful.”

More than 70 lawmakers have called on the board of trustees at Harvard to remove Gay, and about a dozen Democratic lawmakers urged the board to review its policies on bullying and harassment.

Gay has since apologized for her comments at the hearing.

“I am sorry,” Gay said in an interview with The Crimson last week. “Words matter.”