Obama secretly pushed Harvard to keep president Claudine Gay despite campus antisemitism, plagiarism controversies: report
Former President Barack Obama has secretly lobbied Harvard University officials to stick by embattled President Claudine Gay as she faces pressure to resign for giving cover to antisemitism on campus and for committing plagiarism.
Obama, 62, a 1991 graduate of Harvard’s law school, privately urged the university to let Gay remain in office after she testified Dec. 5 before the House Education and Workforce Committee that calls for the genocide of Jews may be permissible under the school’s code of conduct, depending on “context,” according to a report out Friday.
“It sounded like people were being asked to close ranks to keep the broader administration stable — including its composition,” a source told Jewish Insider of the former president’s clandestine effort.
The report did not say whether that effort had continued after Gay’s scholarship was called into question following her testimony for dozens of instances of alleged plagiarism.
A spokeswoman for Obama did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Harvard declined to comment on the matter to Jewish Insider.
Gay’s fate partially lies in the hands of former Obama Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, a member of a prominent Chicago family — her brother is Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker — who serves as senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, the university’s highest governing body which recently probed the president’s academic publications for evidence of plagiarism.
Gay previously told the Boston Globe in a statement, “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 Wednesday, Harvard announced that “examples of duplicative language without appropriate attribution” were found in Gay’s 1997 doctoral dissertation following a review by a four-person Corporation subcommittee.
A separate review by a three-person independent panel also commissioned by the Harvard Corporation determined no other improper citations were discovered in “all of President Gay’s other published works.”
The same day, the House Education Committee sent a letter to Pritzker demanding the university hand over internal records about its handling of the scandal after having launched an earlier probe over antisemitism at Harvard.
“If a university is willing to look the other way and not hold faculty accountable for engaging in academically dishonest behavior, it cheapens its mission and the value of its education,” wrote the panel’s chairwoman, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC).
“Students must be evaluated fairly, under known standards — and have a right to see that faculty are, too.”
During the hearing, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) grilled Gay, Massachusetts Institute of Technology president Sally Kornbluth and then-University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill for refusing to denounce antisemitic protests on their campuses.
Each emphasized that antisemitic speech — including calls for the genocide of Jews — did not necessarily violate university policies and were context-dependent.
Magill resigned one week after the hearing, while Gay and Kornbluth have remained at their posts.
Pritzker, a 1981 Harvard grad, was appointed senior fellow of the Corporation in 2022 after having donated $100 million to the university — and she helmed the search committee that appointed Gay as the school’s new president last year.
When announcing the pick in December 2022, she praised Gay as “a remarkable leader who is profoundly devoted to sustaining and enhancing Harvard’s academic excellence.”
Following fresh plagiarism allegations against the president this week, many scholars have demanded Gay’s resignation on top of those who sought it after her congressional hearing — including one professor whose work the Harvard president allegedly copied.
“Fire Claudine Gay posthaste,” Vanderbilt University political science professor Carol Swain said Thursday on X. “She can be relieved of duties until the terms are negotiated. Hire the best man or woman who can steer the university back towards sanity.”
Swain said Gay had lifted sections from a book she published in 1993 and an article she wrote in 1997 without proper attribution.
New York Times columnist and Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter has also called for Gay to step down, saying the more than 40 instances of improper attribution in her scholarly work “make it untenable for her to remain in office.”
Pritzker has yet to publicly weigh in on the controversy, but the Harvard Corporation’s board members said in a Dec. 12 statement that they “reaffirm” their support for Gay’s leadership.
“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 board said.
However, billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin told the New York Times that Pritzker, who is Jewish, had privately agreed that Harvard’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attack had been tepid and a statement needed to be released in solidarity with Israel.
Meanwhile, loyal supporters of the school have paused hundreds of millions of dollars in donations over Gay’s decision to stand by student groups that blamed the Jewish state for Hamas’ atrocities.
