1 of 2 | Harvard University president Claudine Gay is among three academic leaders under pressure after their testimony this week in front of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. File Photo by Will Oliver/EPA-EFE
Dec. 9 (UPI) — A group of 72 mainly Republican U.S. House members are calling for the presidents of three prominent universities to be fired or resign over what they call their inaction in combating anti-Semitism on campus.
The presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Pennsylvania faced mounting pressure on Saturday after video of their joint appearance before a House committee earlier this week went viral online.
Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., joined Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., in sending a joint letter Friday to the members of the governing boards of all three institutions regarding University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, Harvard’s Claudine Gay and MIT President Sally Kornbluth.
The letter was signed by 72 House members. Moskowitz and Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey were the only Democrats to lend their names.
“Jewish students should have found comfort on their campuses. Instead, many Jewish and Israeli students have faced an increasingly hostile educational environment, in the form of targeted harassment, protesters calling for the elimination of the Jewish state, and even acts of violence,” the letter reads.
“This is a clear result of the failure of university leadership. To hold universities accountable, Congress held a hearing on confronting campus anti-Semitism. Testimony provided by presidents of your institutions showed a complete absence of moral clarity and illuminated the problematic double standards and dehumanization of the Jewish communities that your university presidents enabled.”
It calls for the immediate dismissal of the trio of collegiate leaders.
“The university presidents’ responses to questions aimed at addressing the growing trend of anti-Semitism on college and university campuses were abhorrent,” the lawmakers assert, adding that all three “were evasive and dismissive, failing to simply condemn such action.”
Magill, Kornbluth and Gay testified Tuesday in front of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce at a hearing entitled “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Anti-Semitism.”
Stefanik asked all three presidents during the contentious hearing if they considered rallies calling for genocide against Jewish people to be harassment worthy of action.
In her testimony, Gay said the answer wasn’t cut-and-dried and depended on context, such as if the speech is “targeted at an individual.”
Magill, meanwhile, said it could be a violation of school policy if it was followed up by certain conduct, while Kornbluth such calls for genocide would be “investigated as harassment if pervasive and severe.”
Following the hearing, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School board sent an open letter to Magill, insisting she clarify her position.
Harvard’s education department said at the end of November it was investigating a complaint of antisemitism on campus.
The university was also added to a list of 57 educational institutions, including elementary and secondary schools, that are under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education for “discrimination involving shared ancestry.”
Unrest and protests have blanketed school campuses across the United States since Israel first began its current war with Hamas in the Palestinian enclave of Gaza.