Harvard University’s highest governing body, the Harvard Corporation, is defending Claudine Gay’s leadership capabilities in the face of national pressure for her to resign following her congressional testimony on campus antisemitism last week.  

After a meeting on Monday, the board has voted to keep Ms. Gay as the university’s 30th president. In a unanimous decision announced over email to members of the Harvard community on Tuesday morning, the board asserted that “our extensive deliberations affirm our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing.”

The statement of support for Ms. Gay comes after influential donors, alumni, and members of Congress have criticized her refusal to call genocidal language “harassment and bullying” during her testimony before Congress last week. Former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz argues in the Sun that her “double standard on free speech renders her unfit to lead Harvard.” 

Yet hundreds of faculty members as well as current students and alumni have rushed to support Ms. Gay. “In this tumultuous and difficult time, we unanimously stand in support of President Gay,” the board says in its letter. “At Harvard, we champion open discourse and academic freedom, and we are united in our strong belief that calls for violence against our students and disruptions of the classroom experience will not be tolerated.”

Addressing recent accusations of plagiarism leveled against Ms. Gay, the board says that the university became aware of three articles questioning the validity of her academic writings in late October, a month after she was formally inaugurated as president. An independent report by journalists Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet claimed she plagiarized sections of her 1997 Harvard dissertation in violation of Harvard’s policies on academic integrity.

“At President Gay’s request,” the board says it launched an independent review “by distinguished political scientists” of her published work. Upon reviewing the findings on December 9, they found “a few instances of inadequate citation” but “no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.” The board added that “President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.”

Some students are pointing to a double standard in the board’s review of her published work. On the Harvard-exclusive group of an anonymous discussion forum, SideChat, one student wrote, “if we made the same ‘citation errors,’ we would fail, if not be kicked out…” Another said, “if I plagiarized four different parts of my paper I would probably get in trouble and I’m not an undergrad… interesting the university president is not held to the same standards.”

Students, though, appear to be overwhelmingly embracing the board’s decision to keep Ms. Gay in her post. In the same discussion forum, they cheer, “GAY WILL STAY” and “OUR president”. In a statement to the Boston Globe on Monday, Ms. Gay said, “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship. Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure my scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards.”

On Monday, more than 700 faculty members from Harvard’s various professional schools issued a carefully-worded statement urging the board “to defend the independence of the university and to resist political pressures” for Ms. Gay’s resignation. The school’s commitment to academic freedom, they say, should not be shaped “by outside forces.”

One of those forces is famed hedge fund manager and Harvard alumnus, Bill Ackman, who has emerged as a vehement critic of his alma mater after antisemitism surged on campus. He wrote on X Monday, “by continuing to employ Gay and Kornbluth, both Harvard and MIT are continuing to endorse managements’ conduct and previous actions, deepening the universities’ liability.”

Mr. Ackman also questioned the letter of unanimous endorsement for Ms. Gay sent by the Harvard Alumni Association Executive Committee on Monday. It called upon the Harvard Corporation and the university’s other governing body, the board of overseers, to publicly back her. “How,” asked Mr. Ackman on X Tuesday morning, “did the ⁦Harvard Alumni Association support President Gay without polling its members first?” 

Even if Ms. Gay was pushed out of her prestigious post, though, such a move would be unlikely to root out campus antisemitism, a visiting scholar at the Harvard Divinity School, Rabbi David Wolpe, tells the Sun after he resigned from the school’s antisemitism advisory board. “This is a much deeper and more systemic issue,” he says, “than certain individuals.” 

The House Education and the Workforce Committee is investigating Harvard, Penn and MIT over the issue after their presidents’ damning testimonies last week. Congresswoman Elise Stefanik tells the Sun she fears “that when we conduct this investigation, what we are going to uncover is antisemitism very deep in these institutions of higher learning, some of which were founded, in Harvard’s case, before the founding of our country.”