Inside a Harvard library late Monday evening, Miles Herszenhorn and Claire Yuan were trying to focus on their studies. That is, until the students, both juniors and reporters for The Harvard Crimson, the school’s newspaper, got a tip: University president Claudine Gay, despite calls to resign following her controversial congressional testimony about antisemitism on college campuses, would remain in office. “We made several trips between The Crimson’s office and the library that night,” said Herszenhorn. “We kept trying to just call it a night and spend the rest of the night at the library”—they are, after all, in the middle of finals—but “we wanted to keep chasing it.” That they did: Around 4:30 a.m. Tuesday, the Crimson reporters, beating every national newspaper, scooped that Gay would stay on as president with the support of the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing board, which had remained silent since the hearing. A New York Times push alert with the news came a few hours later, by which time the Corporation had issued a statement making their decision official.
Gay wasn’t the only university president under fire for her congressional testimony last week on the topic. University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill and MIT president Sally Kornbluth were also grilled—most aggressively by Representative Elise Stefanik—on their respective responses to antisemitism on campus and free expression. While all condemned antisemitism, they also all seemed to dodge the question of whether students should be disciplined if they call for the genocide of Jews, saying, in one way or another, that it depended on the “context.” The hearing—titled “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism”—followed “countless examples of antisemitic demonstrators on college campuses,” House Education Committee Chair Virginia Foxx said in a statement announcing the gathering. University administrators, Foxx said, “have largely stood by, allowing horrific rhetoric to fester and grow.”
The backlash—from donors, prominent alumni, members of Congress, and even the White House—was swift. While MIT’s board announced its “full and unreserved support” for Kornbluth the same day the House Committee on Education and the Workforce—the same committee that held the hearing—announced that it would open a formal investigation into the three universities, Magill and Gay’s future seemed increasingly imperiled. Both Magill and Gay issued statements apologizing for their remarks, Magill in a video message and Gay in an interview with The Crimson. SNL offered its own version of events. Over the weekend, four days after her appearance before Congress and under pressure that began long before her trip to the Capitol, Magill resigned. Minutes later, Scott Bok, the chair of the University Board of Trustees, also resigned. Stefanik, a staunch Donald Trump supporter and Harvard alum whose attempt to overturn the 2020 election put her at odds with her alma mater in the past, has been taking something of a victory lap, posting on X: “One down. Two to go.”
Chronicling the saga was The Daily Pennsylvanian, aka The DP, Penn’s student newspaper. Jared Mitovich and Molly Cohen, juniors at Penn who serve as co–news editors of The DP, broke the news of Magill and Bok’s resignations before any national outlet. “Ever since the testimony we’ve kind of gone into a true live-updates scenario,” said Mitovich, who next semester will be The DP’s editor in chief. “We don’t typically do live updates just because our staff is typically in and out of class, [have] other commitments,” he said. “But we were really committed to providing our readers with a blow-by-blow of what was happening.” Even, like their counterparts at The Crimson, when in the midst of finals. “We’ve learned a lot about journalism and the inner workings of our university throughout this,” said Cohen, The DP’s incoming president.
The intrepid student reporters at Harvard and Penn had an encounter last week on The Hill, where both The Crimson and DP sent reporters to cover the testimony live. They sat nearby each other—along with other national media outlets like The Boston Globe and The New York Times—as the hearing unfolded. “It wasn’t a surprise to see the Penn reporters there,” said Herszenhorn, calling The DP “a great publication.” According to Cohen, they “discussed how it was very interesting that both our universities had been led to this moment.” Watching the testimony, she said, “We definitely knew that this was a turning point, in terms of the entire storyline that’s been developing this whole semester.” They are committed, she said, both to the investigative work of this story as well as “trying to explore what this moment means and what the implications are for the students and faculty who call this campus home.”
The Israel-Hamas war has prompted heated debate on college and university campuses nationwide about Israel’s security and Palestinians’ rights, along with calls for a ceasefire in Gaza amid mass death and destruction. Amid these tensions, 73% of Jewish college students said in a survey conducted last month that they “have experienced or witnessed antisemitic incidents on their campuses” since the start of the fall semester. The Biden administration recently opened investigations into several universities and colleges “to address the alarming nationwide rise in reports of antisemitism, anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and other forms of discrimination.”
Charlotte Klein
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