TEMPO.CO, Jakarta – Hundreds of professors and university lecturers Harvard signed a petition asking campus administrators not to bow to political pressure to fire the chancellor because of his testimony to Congress about anti-Semitism on campus.
A brief petition was signed by at least 570 professors and delivered on Sunday evening, December 10, 2023, to the 13 members of the Harvard Corporation, which has the authority to fire university chancellor Claudine Gay. More professors indicated they also wanted to sign, according to one of the petition authors.
Pressure on Gay increased over the weekend, after University of Pennsylvania Chancellor Liz Magill resigned on Saturday.
Gay, Magill and Massachusetts Institute of Technology chancellor Sally Kornbluth testified before a U.S. House of Representatives committee last week about the rise in antisemitism on campuses following the outbreak of Israel’s Hamas war in October.
The three declined to give a definitive “yes” or “no” answer to Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik’s question about whether calling for genocide against Jews would violate their campus code of conduct on bullying and harassment, and said they had to balance that with free speech. .
More than 70 US lawmakers signed a letter demanding that the three universities’ governing boards fire the chancellors, citing dissatisfaction with their testimony.
But Alison Frank Johnson, a Harvard history professor and one of the authors of the petition sent to the school corporation, rejected politicized calls for Gay’s ouster.
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“I get the impression that many people don’t know how much support he received, as a scholar, colleague, and administrator, within the university – including from people who sometimes disagreed with him,” Frank Johnson wrote in an email. “We don’t want to lose him because of a political stunt.”
Frank Johnson would not explain the contents of the petition, but emphasized that it called on the Harvard Corporation “not to yield to political pressure, including pressure to remove the chancellor.”
Jewish students, families and alumni have accused the campuses of tolerating antisemitism, especially in statements by pro-Palestinian demonstrators since the Islamist group Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 and killed around 1,200 people. The attack triggered a massive counterattack by Israel that has left more than 118,000 Palestinians dead.
REUTERS
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