Claudine Gay (left) and Elise Stefanik (right).
Kevin Dietsch, Drew Angerer/Getty Images
GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik is already celebrating Harvard president Claudine Gay’s resignation.Stefanik has been leading the charge against antisemitism at elite colleges.And Gay has been her top target.
Harvard president Claudine Gay resigned on Monday, and the GOP’s Elise Stefanik isn’t wasting any time rejoicing in her downfall.
The Republican representative from New York posted a scathing message shortly after Gay announced her resignation from the prestigious position she had held since July.
“The resignation of Harvard’s antisemitic plagiarist president is long overdue,” Stefanik wrote on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.
“Claudine Gay’s morally bankrupt answers to my questions made history as the most viewed Congressional testimony in the history of the U.S. Congress. Her answers were absolutely pathetic and devoid of the moral leadership and academic integrity required of the President of Harvard,” Stefanik added. “This is just the beginning of what will be the greatest scandal of any college or university in history.”
Gay faced backlash over her December 5 testimony to Congress, where she wavered when Stefanik asked if calling for a genocide of Jewish people would violate the university’s code of conduct. Gay was also accused of plagiarizing academic articles last month.
Stefanik has been leading the push to look into the policies of the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and if they fueled campus antisemitism.
Out of the three elite university presidents who testified to Congress, Gay is the second to resign. University of Pennsylvania’s Elizabeth Magill stepped down a few days after the hearing, but MIT’s Sally Kornbluth has clung to her position despite high-profile calls for her resignation.
Stefanik has previously railed against Gay for turning Harvard into a “bastion of antisemitism” and advocated for defunding “the rot of antisemitism at America’s ‘elite’ institutions of higher education.”
In her post on Tuesday, Stefanik vowed to keep digging to “expose the rot” of antisemitism at elite institutions.
Stefanik was kicked off a Harvard advisory panel in 2021 after making comments that promoted former President Donald Trump’s widely debunked narrative that the 2020 election was stolen, according to the AP.