Harvard president's exit amid pro-Israel pressure unsettles US academia

As the news of the Harvard's president resigning under pressure made the rounds on Tuesday, following accusations of plagiarism and not addressing student antisemitism, responses from those who oppose her ouster showed a concern for what this decision means for the future.

"This is so bad and dangerous. I don't particularly care about who the president of Harvard is, or this particular (now former) president. But you have to be a fool not to understand that this is going to reverberate throughout our society," wrote economist and author Nathan Tankus on X, formerly Twitter.

Claudine Gay had been under significant pressure to leave her post ever since her heavily criticised performance at a congressional hearing in December related to university responses to students' pro-Palestinian demonstrations over Israel's war in Gaza.

Harvard Corporation on Tuesday said that it had accepted Gay's resignation "with sorrow" following nearly a month of criticism of her responses during the hearing. Harvard did not immediately respond to request for comment.

At issue was universities' alleged acceptance of students calling for the genocide of Jews, largely based on chants during demonstrations such as "from the river to the sea" and "intifada", an Arabic term meaning 'uprising' or 'shaking off'.

At the time, Washington-based political analyst Shadi Hamid posted on X, "Harvard President Claudine Gay's response to Elise Stefanik was embarrassing but not for the reasons people claim. It was embarrassing because she accepted Stefanik's premise that saying "intifada" is equivalent to a call for genocide, which is ridiculous."

He continued, "The problem with these college presidents is that they're spineless technocrats who don't have the courage of their convictions. GOP officials are popularizing the idea that pro-Palestine sentiment = pro-Hamas sentiment. This should be rejected out of hand."

Though there were no instances of students explicitly calling for genocide, the inferences of these chants and other similar slogans became the key issue of last month's hearing, as lawmakers, led by Republican Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, grilled the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology over allegations of antisemitism at their universities.

Following Gay's resignation Tuesday, Stefanik said, "Two down", in reference to the resignation of UPenn's president Liz Magill following the hearing, likely with the president of MIT, Sally Kornbluth, who is Jewish, looking at a similar pressure campaign. Similarly, on Tuesday, billionaire financier and university mega donor Bill Ackman wrote on X, "Et tu Sally?"

Amid Ackman's continued threats, Gregg Gonsalves, a Yale professor, wrote to Ackman on X, "@BillAckman is a pernicious influence on American education. He thinks his money equals wisdom and even if it doesn't, he thinks it gives him the right to bully at will. Time to stand up to people like him. He's odious."

As multiple critics of Ackman have noted, the billionaire donor has a long history of advocating against what he sees as leftist causes at Harvard.

"They're using a key moment to attack the whole edifice of DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] and double standards on the left," Robert Vitalis, a professor of political science at UPenn, told The New Arab. "Here's Claudine Gay, Harvard's first African American president. What a great thing to topple. It feeds precisely the narrative of double standards."

He has opted to take early retirement due to the political climate on campus.

"I was curious how I would run a class in the spring. People are going from contesting what you teach in class to suing and using the legal system," he said. "I resigned because I don't want to have to deal with this."