The president of the prestigious American University of Harvard, Claudine Gay, found herself under fire on Wednesday and faced calls for her resignation after a parliamentary hearing devoted to anti-Semitism on university campuses.
This is not the first time that Ms. Gay and her institution have been at the center of controversy: the conflict between Israel and Hamas has unleashed passions at many of the most renowned universities in the United States, and Harvard in particular has been ordered by donors to clearly condemn pro-Palestinian student groups.
On Tuesday, Ms. Gay and two other university presidents were heard on this subject by a parliamentary commission whose stated objective was to “hold them to account” after “countless anti-Semitic demonstrations”.
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The elected Republican Elise Stefanik assimilated the calls from certain students for the “intifada” – an Arabic term meaning “uprising” and referring in particular to the first Palestinian revolt of 1987 against the Israeli occupier – to an exhortation to a “genocide against Jews in Israel and around the world”. She demanded that Ms. Gay say whether this type of slogan was against Harvard’s code of conduct.
“We subscribe to a commitment to freedom of expression, even of objectionable, insulting, hateful opinions,” replied Ms. Gay. “When speech turns into behavior that violates our policies, including against harassment or bullying, we take action.”
An argument that was not to the taste of Ms. Stefanik, who demanded that Ms. Gay resign “immediately”.
Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, said it was “dismayed that leaders of elite academic institutions are using misleading contextualization to minimize and excuse calls for Jewish genocide.”
“Any university, institution or society that can ‘contextualize’ and excuse calls for genocide is doomed to failure,” its president Dani Dayan said in a statement.
Republican senator Ted Cruz said on
Columnist and researcher Shadi Hamid also found Ms. Gay’s response “embarrassing”, but “because she accepted Stefanik’s postulate that saying + intifada + is equivalent to calling for genocide, which is ridiculous”.
Ms. Gay was forced on Wednesday to clarify her comments in a short press release.
“Some have confused the right to free expression with the idea that Harvard condones calls for violence against Jewish students. I want to be clear: calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any other ethnic or religious group, are despicable,” she said.
These calls “have no place at Harvard and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held accountable,” she said.
