The president of another elite Ivy League institution, the University of Pennsylvania, had already been forced to resign.
As House Republicans challenged Gay during his testimony with questions about whether free speech extended to calling for the genocide of Jews, he celebrated the latest academic collapse.
Representative Elise Stefanik said, “Harvard knows that this long-overdue forced resignation of an anti-Semitic plagiarist president is the beginning of the largest scandal of any college or university in history.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, a close US ally, has claimed that a “tremendous wave of anti-Semitism” has swept across university campuses.
Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, has described it as a “cancer”.
Alumnus and multimillion-dollar donor Bill Ackman claimed in a letter to Harvard’s governing board that “Billions of dollars in donations to the university have been canceled, withheld, and withdrawn because of President Gay’s failures. “
Gay, 53, was born in New York to Haitian immigrants and is a political science professor who in July became the first black president of 368-year-old Harvard.
Failure of leadership and denial of anti-Semitism have a cost. Hopefully the glorious Harvard University will learn from this disappointing conduct,” wrote new Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz in response to Gay’s departure.