Wow, just imagine!

Sigh, Claudine Gay condemned anti-Semitism forcibly some time ago at a Shabbat Dinner. Here are here remarks:

Remarks as delivered by President Claudine Gay at Harvard Hillel Shabbat Dinner

It’s an honor for my husband Chris and I to be here tonight to celebrate Shabbat with you. I’m told that this week’s Torah portion recounts the story of Abraham, the founder of the world’s great monotheistic faiths. In this week’s reading, God tells Abraham that Abraham will “be a blessing” – not that Abraham will receive a blessing, but that he will be a blessing. He is tasked with becoming a blessing in the lives of others, taking an active role in bringing light into a world that is so often full of darkness.

That responsibility to be a blessing – to bring light, to each other and to the world—resonates with me, and with my hopes for Harvard.

The past few weeks have been full of darkness. First came the horrific terrorist attacks on October 7th, in which 1400 Jewish people were murdered by Hamas, and more than 200 others were taken hostage. Then came the escalating humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Here in the U.S., we are witnessing a surge in anti-Jewish incidents and rhetoric across the nation — and on our own campus. The ancient specter of antisemitism, that persistent and corrosive hatred, has returned with renewed force. According to one report, incidents of antisemitism, nationally, have almost tripled over the past six years. Here at Harvard, I’ve heard story after story of Jewish students feeling increasingly uneasy or even threatened on campus. We should all be alarmed by this. I am.

I want to acknowledge the profound toll this has taken, especially on our Jewish students, faculty, and staff. Your grief, fear, and anger are heard and felt deeply.

As we grapple with this resurgence of bigotry, I want to make one thing absolutely clear: Antisemitism has no place at Harvard.

As President, I am committed to tackling this pernicious hatred with the urgency it demands. Antisemitism has a very long and shameful history at Harvard. For years, this University has done too little to confront its continuing presence. No longer.

Harvard’s mission, and legacy, is the pursuit and dissemination of truth. And the core of antisemitism is a lie – specifically, the denial of Jewish identity and experience. This lie has taken many forms, from Holocaust denial to the blood libel to conspiracy theories to the denial of the Jewish peoples’ historical ties to the land of Israel. Harvard is a place for inquiry and vigorous debate about our world’s greatest challenges. A place to reveal truth, not to deny facts.

To begin the vital work of eradicating antisemitism from our community, I have assembled a group of advisors whose wisdom, experience, and counsel will help guide us forward. These trusted voices include faculty, staff, alumni, and religious leaders from the Jewish community, and some of them are here tonight. I am enormously grateful for their conviction and generous spirit, and for the hope and high expectations for Harvard.

In the weeks ahead, these advisors will work with me, Provost Garber, and the School deans to frame an agenda and strategy for combating antisemitism at Harvard. They will help us to think expansively and concretely about all the ways that antisemitism shows up on our campus and in our campus culture. They will help us to identify all the places — from our orientations and trainings to how we teach — where we can intervene to disrupt and dismantle this ideology, and where we can educate our community so that they can recognize and confront antisemitism wherever they see it. They will help us find opportunities to foster the empathy, literacy, and understanding across identities and beliefs that we need to be the Harvard the world is calling for and that our community deserves.

Our Jewish students have shared searing accounts of feeling isolated and targeted. This shakes me to my core – as an educator, as a mother, as a human being. Harvard must be a place where everyone feels safe and seen. It is just the right thing to do.

The amount of work before us may seem daunting. And I know the goal that I have set for this institution will not be achieved tomorrow. Any problem that has been allowed to fester for this long will defy easy remedy.

Where we go from here will require courage, humility, and perseverance. It will demand fearless self-reflection about our own assumptions and biases. But we have done this before. We have the wisdom and resilience to meet this challenge. We have confronted legacies of injustice in the past and emerged stronger for it. Guided by our shared values, and our love for Harvard, I have faith we can turn pain into durable, hard-won progress. By lifting each other up and speaking truth even when difficult, the light of justice will scatter the shadows of hate and antisemitism.

I ask for your partnership in this effort. There is so much important work for us to do, but I have never been more hopeful that Harvard can lead the way. I am confident that we can rise to the challenge once given to Abraham, to become the blessing needed for our shared future.

www.harvard.edu/president/

The plagiarism accusations are ones you could probably gin up about many people who have written PhDs.as inevitably in a document 191 pages long (I looked up her thesis using my own university login credentials) with numerous appendices there will be something you won't cite perfectly. My co-supervisor for my PhD told me a story the other week where when examining someone's works with another supervisor they passed it. The person concerned had done their viva. It was just after this student was told she had passed that she noted she had never visited an archive. It is more or less a condition that at some point you do that and also try and get at least one or two articles published and speak at conferences. She hadn't made the supervisors aware of that and they inherited her from other supervisors who had retired. Having stamped her doctorate they were now in an awkward spot because the previous supervisors should have made the new supervisors aware of these concerns and did not. There are people further on than I am now who have been passed on to other supervisors several times. One person has survived on just doing notes and rough plans for four years in one case. They eventually got thrown off their course on the 14th of December. I was waiting to see my supervisor in the break area and making some notes and a massive argument developed over this and you had a student storming out out shouting about how she had never been 'Given direction.' Sorry, at the doctorate level, there is a lot of onus on the students to supervise themselves.

Claudine will probably eventually step down. I did find the answers she gave to Congress rather smart-alecky if you look at what we saw in the media. However, when you see all of what she said an entirely different picture emerges.

British academia and US academia differ in how far you can go with regard to critiquing Israel I notice. I certainly reject any idea of gross generalizations about the Jews and there are some people in academia who I would say are covering up anti-Semitism but the American academic system seems wildly over-sensitive to any criticism of Israel at times. I personally am not talking about the subject if I can avoid it when avoiding seminars or lectures etc. It's too sensitive right now. Too many posters stuck up on noticeboards by people from either side. I certainly detest Hamas but I feel the reaction to their barbarism has now become collective punishment. Bibi created part of this problem as well. It's not an one-way street. I view the whole thing as a messy nasty business and I'm also not Israeli or Palestinian ultimately. 

She's out. Just surprised it took this long.

www.yahoo.com/news/claudine-gay-harvard-universitys-embattled-president-has-resigned-how-we-got-here-and-whats-next-224504828.html

Nobody cares about her gender or skin color. She appeared before Congress regarding the problems of campus violence/ antisemitism stemming from the war in Israel. She appeared to be weak on antisemitism. As a result her university lost a ton of major Jewish donations, but she didn't step down - allegedly the Harvard board didn't want her to, perhaps because she was their first ever black president.

I note that the white female president of another Ivy, UPenn, similarly appeared weak on antisemitism before Congress, and that lady already stepped down weeks ago, so it was a bit baffling why Claudine Gay did not do the same. It looked like Harvard was turning a blind eye to calls for Jewish genocide.

Then all these plagiarism accusations against Claudine Gay, like 40 or 50, got reported. The guvnor might be correct that such things happen in academia, might be fixable with citations, and might not be that bad normally, but having it come up on the heels of the poor showing before Congress and after the white lady head of UPenn already resigned was just too much. Also most people reading the news do not work in academia and all they see is some black female head of top ranked university allegedly supporting genocide while committing academic dishonesty and they conclude she was a diversity hire, in other words not qualified for the job and hired only because she was a black woman.

Harvard didn't help by reportedly clearing her from the plagiarism allegations before even doing the investigation into them. Congress was looking into that too.

With what Harvard charges to go there and the qualifications students need to get accepted, many if not most of them also get accepted to other top schools and are not going to want to attend some hotbed of controversy and potential violence when they can probably just as easily choose another top school that's not dealing with all that.

Whole thing was just a giant fail by Harvard. Next time they hire a minority President they better go through the academic record with a fine tooth comb and fix anything that needs fixed before the person is placed in the job.

Yeah you're smart not to get involved, not even online.