by Brandon Poulter
Over 70 members of Congress called for the removal of the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Friday following their testimony at a Tuesday hearing, which caused widespread outrage.
Harvard President Claudine Gay, Penn President Elizabeth Magill and MIT President Sally Kornbluth refused to say during the hearing if calls for genocide were violations of their campuses’ codes of conduct, and Gay and Magill later backtracked on their statements following widespread backlash. The letter, spearheaded by Republican New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, calls on the boards of the universities to “immediately remove each of these presidents” from their positions.
“This is a clear result of the failure of university leadership. To hold universities accountable, Congress held a hearing confronting campus antisemitism,” the letter reads.
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,” the letter continues.
Multiple prominent figures including billionaire Bill Ackman and billionaire Jon Huntsman Jr. have called on Magill to resign. The Penn Wharton school’s board of advisors also called on Magill to resign.
“We demand that your boards immediately remove each of these presidents from their positions and that you provide an actionable plan to ensure that Jewish and Israeli students, teachers, and faculty are safe on your campuses. Anything less than these steps will be seen as your endorsement of what Presidents Gay, Magill, and Kornbluth said to congress and an act of complicity in their antisemitic posture. The world is watching – you can stand with your Jewish students and faculty, or you can choose the side of dangerous antisemitism,” the letter continues.
Over 30 student organizations at Harvard signed a pro-Palestinian letter blaming Israel for the Hamas terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, causing uproar. Gay released a statement Oct. 10 saying that the students did not speak for the university but that the organizations had a “right to speak.”
Magill initially did not refer to Hamas as a terrorist organization until after Huntsman threatened to stop donating to the university. A “small number” of antisemitic threats on campus to university faculty and staff resulted in Penn contacting the FBI to investigate the matter.
Harvard, UPenn and MIT did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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Brandon Poulter is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
