CLAUDINE GAY IS STILL IN-CHARGE AS HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT.

EL-ZION GLOBAL NETWORK NEWS.

Harvard President Claudine Gay remains at the helm after the school’s board of directors met Sunday amid calls for her removal for failing to effectively denounce threats of violence against Jewish students on campus. Though the agenda of the meeting was not publicized, it is likely that Gay’s future was discussed given the contentious congressional testimony last week of three university presidents that led to the resignation of University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill on Saturday.

The Sunday meeting was not an emergency meeting and had been scheduled long in advance, the source said. It remains unclear whether Gay has enough support to keep her job, though hundreds of faculty members have rushed to her defense in a letter to the administration.

Gay apologized last week for testimony before a House committee on December 5, in which she, Magill and MIT President Sally Kornbluth failed to explicitly say calls for genocide of Jews would violate their schools’ codes of conduct.

Harvard has encountered difficulty combating a rise in antisemitic incidents on campus, although recent claims of antisemitism at Penn were considered far worse. Still, a growing number of members of Congress, donors and other prominent leaders are still calling for Gay to step down.

‘One down. Two to go’

“One down. Two to go,” Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, with the “two” being a reference to Gay and Kornbluth. “In the case of @Harvard, President Gay was asked by me 17x whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard’s code of conduct. She spoke her truth 17x. And the world heard.”

Stefanik, along with a group of 71 bipartisan lawmakers, sent a letter to the governing boards of Harvard, Penn, and MIT urging them to remove their university leaders. Meanwhile, hundreds of faculty members have signed a petition in support of Gay.

Gay has since apologized for her remarks, “I am sorry,” she said in an interview with The Harvard Crimson on Thursday. “Words matter.”

“I got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures,” Gay told the student newspaper. “What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged.”

But some major donors remain unmoved, particularly Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund CEO, who has been among Gay’s most vocal critics.

“As a result of President Gay’s failure to enforce Harvard’s own rules, Jewish students, faculty and others are fearful for their own safety as even the physical abuse of students remains unpunished,” Ackman wrote in an open letter to Harvard’s governing board of Sunday. “Knowing what we know now, would Harvard consider Claudine Gay for the position? The answer is definitively “No.” With this simple thought experiment, the board’s decision on President Gay could not be more straightforward.”

Harvard is one of several academic institutions to come under fire in recent months over alleged antisemitism on campuses following the terror attacks by Hamas on October 7 and Israel’s subsequent strikes on Gaza. Harvard is also among 14 colleges under investigation by the Department of Education since the attacks “for discrimination involving shared ancestry” an umbrella term that covers both Islamophobia and antisemitism