Obama secretly pushed Harvard to keep president Claudine Gay despite campus antisemitism, plagiarism controversies: report
NY Post
Former President Barack Obama has secretly lobbied Harvard University officials to stick by embattled President Claudine Gay as she faces pressure to resign for giving cover to antisemitism on campus and for committing plagiarism.
Obama, 62, a 1991 graduate of Harvard’s law school, privately urged the university to let Gay remain in office after she testified Dec. 5 before the House Education and Workforce Committee that calls for the genocide of Jews may be permissible under the school’s code of conduct, depending on “context,” according to a report out Friday.
“It sounded like people were being asked to close ranks to keep the broader administration stable — including its composition,” a source told Jewish Insider of the former president’s clandestine effort.
The report did not say whether that effort had continued after Gay’s scholarship was called into question following her testimony for dozens of instances of alleged plagiarism.
A spokeswoman for Obama did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Harvard declined to comment on the matter to Jewish Insider.
Gay’s fate partially lies in the hands of former Obama Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, a member of a prominent Chicago family — her brother is Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker — who serves as senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, the university’s highest governing body which recently probed the president’s academic publications for evidence of plagiarism.
