Harvard board set to meet Monday as calls for Claudine Gay to resign grow amid antisemitism, plagiarism claims

Calls for the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay have grown in recent days after she was questioned during a congressional hearing over mounting antisemitism on the Cambridge campus, and the board that could decide Gay's fate is set to meet on Monday. Reports also emerged on Sunday that Gay may be guilty of plagiarism in her PhD dissertation.

The Harvard Corporation is due to meet on Monday, and they could hear arguments both in favor and against Gay's continuance as the president of the storied school that has produced so many American presidents and thought leaders. While the meeting has long been on the calendar, they are expected to discuss Gay, the hearing, and her fate. Penny Pritzker, former commerce secretary under Obama and member of the prominent Pritzker family, chairs the Harvard Corporation.

The New York Times reports that "more than 500 members of the Harvard faculty had signed a petition urging 'in the strongest possible terms' to 'resist political pressures that are at odds with Harvard’s commitment to academic freedom.'"

The petition also tells the Harvard Corporation to "resist political pressures that are at odds with Harvard’s commitment to academic freedom, including calls for the removal of President Claudine Gay." The Board of Overseers met on Sunday.

Notable alum Alan Dershowitz penned a scathing rebuke of the university president on Monday, saying that she, along with the other two university heads who were grilled by Rep Elise Stefanik nearly a week ago, "articulated and enforced a double standard of free speech to the detriment of Jewish students."

UPenn president Liz Magill has already stepped down, after she failed to unequivocally condemn the calls for Jewish genocide on the Philadelphia campus. Dershowitz said after Gay is gone, the MIT president, Sally Kornbluth, is next.

All three women claimed that antisemitic speech and chants calling for violence against Jews were protected by free speech considerations, but that rang hollow to anyone who was paying attention. All three of these universities have claimed that "misgendering" and refusing to protect "preferred pronouns" is tantamount to hate speech over recent years.

"America watched in disbelief as these three sat before a Congressional committee this week and declined to call for the disciplining of demonstrators on their campuses, who chant for the mass murder of Jews," Dershowitz wrote in The Daily Mail.

It was during that hearing that Stefanik called for Gay to resign as well, after Gay said "calling for the genocide of Jews" is only in violation of the "Harvard Code of Conduct" if the context warrants it. "...[I]t depends on the context," Gay said. She later apologized via the school newspaper.

"These university leaders failed a basic test of moral clarity when they couldn't bring themselves to uphold the same standard for Jewish students that they would for any other group on campus," Dershowitz said.

The revelations that Gay had plagiarised portions of her PhD dissertation came from Christopher Rufo and Chris Brunet, and were upheld by faculty sources who spoke to Bob Ackman, a Jewish donor to Harvard who stopped funding the school after massive antisemitic protests erupted on campus and were seemingly endorsed by Gay and others.