In the midst of the college application season, presidents of the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have faced harsh criticism for their response to campus antisemitism, igniting a fire that caused two of these universities’ presidents to resign.
Conflict began after Pro-Palestinian protests occurred on university campuses, which led to Ivy League presidents testifying at a congressional hearing if these protests violated their school’s bullying and harrasment policies.
These three Ivy School presidents, along with five others, testified at the hearing on Dec. 5, 2023. The backlash against these three specific schools rose from their seemingly “dismissive” and “dodging” responses in front of Congress. New York Representative Elise Stefanik repeatedly questioned them, asking if calling for the genocide of Jews violated their university’s bullying and harrasment policies.
Claudien Gay (Harvard) stated that it was dependent on the situation, Elizabeth Magill (UPenn) stated that speech becomes a violation if it turns into harassment and Sally Kornbluth (MIT) stated that she had yet to hear these claims on campus, responses that stirred critique from individuals in public domains.
“I’m no fan of [Representative Elise Stefanik], but I’m with her here. Claudine Gay’s hesitant, formulaic, and bizarrely evasive answers were deeply troubling to me and many of my colleagues, students, and friends,” said Laurence Tribe, retired Harvard University professor, on X, formerly known as Twitter.
While conflict continued, it wasn’t solely the antisemitism protests that led Gay to resign. Gay, while in office after the hearing, received more than 40 accusations of plagiarism. Harvard’s Board had stood behind Gay throughout the hearing, even releasing a public statement in support of their president. Gay wrote in a guest opinion piece released by the New York Times that, along with criticism surrounding the congressional hearing, she received racist phone calls, messages, death threats and had police monitoring her home. The board continued to look for information to keep Gay as president despite the plagiarism accusations, but on Dec. 27, Gay resigned – just six months into her Harvard presidency.
“My deep sense of connection to Harvard and its people has made it all the more painful to witness the tensions and divisions that have risen our community in recent months, weakening the bonds of trust and reciprocity that should be our sources of strength and support in times of crisis,” said Gay in her resignation letter. “Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.”
Magill made the decision to resign as president of UPenn a week after the hearing. On Dec. 12, in UPenn’s official announcement about Magill’s resignation, she released a two-sentence statement, saying it was an honor to hold the position of president, but did not mention anything about the Dec. 5 hearing and protests that had occurred.
Kornbluth released a statement to the MIT community, and she shared her hopes of moving forward with positive action. Kornbluth said she aspires to share in their sentiment, and that MIT staff and students will join in battling any forms of hate.
“The thing with leadership is [that] you’re handed situations, and you have to use your experiences, whether you’ve had an experience with that exact thing before, and you’ve got to put it into practice,” said Tim Pate, RHS teacher and father of a Harvard alumnus. “I think that they [Ivy presidents] mishandled the whole situation. When they were meeting with Congress, they had an opportunity to say, ‘I made a mistake.’ They should have done that. They didn’t.”
Though the congressional hearing created conflict for these universities, other Ivy league presidents attempted to bypass further opposition through actions that followed. As far as steps taken to prevent bullying and harassment, schools such as Columbia University and Barnard College created a task force on antisemitism to ensure that their campuses remain an inclusive environment, especially for Jewish students and staff.
“I hope it will be seen as a moment of reawakening to the importance of striving to find our common humanity – and of not allowing rancor and vituperation to undermine the vital process of education,” Gay said in her resignation letter. “I trust we will all find ways, in this time of intense challenge and controversy, to recommit ourselves to the excellence, the openness, and the independence that are crucial to what our university stands for-and to our capacity to serve the world.”
