Tipsheet

It Looks Like Barack Obama Was Involved in Letting Harvard President Claudine Gay Keep Her Job

Rebecca Downs
Rebecca Downs  |  December 22, 2023 2:45 PM

Harvard President Claudine Gay continues to be embroiled in controversy not only for her particularly lacking response during a House Committee on Education & the Workforce congressional hearing earlier this month when it comes to if calls for genocide against Jews constitutes bullying and harassment, but also for allegations of plagiarism that just keep coming in. Even the mainstream media has started to turn on her. And yet the Harvard Corporation still voted unanimously last week to let Gay keep her job. It looks like Gay not only has Penny Pritzker, senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, but also former President Barack Obama, whose administration Pritzker served in.

A Friday report from Jewish Insider mostly focuses on Pritzker, but Obama himself is in fact mentioned:

To some observers, Pritzker’s silence amid the fallout has been particularly glaring because she has long been regarded as a staunch supporter of Israel. The 64-year-old Jewish entrepreneur and philanthropist from Chicago, whose brother, J.B., is the governor of Illinois, was one of Barack Obama’s earliest and most important financial backers, and has been credited with persuading Jewish and pro-Israel donors to support his first presidential campaign, despite skepticism over his approach to Middle East policy.

According to a source familiar with the matter, Obama, a Harvard graduate, had privately lobbied on Gay’s behalf as she faced pressure to resign in the wake of her disastrous appearance before the congressional hearing on antisemitism. “It sounded like people were being asked to close ranks to keep the broader administration stable — including its composition,” the source, who was informed of Obama’s outreach and asked to speak anonymously to discuss a confidential matter, told JI on Tuesday.

Obama’s office did not respond to a request for comment from JI.

It is unclear if Pritzker, who served as Obama’s commerce secretary in his second term, spoke with the former president as the Harvard Corporation was deliberating over its decision to support Gay.

This is very telling, and it speaks to such rot in our higher institutions, including and especially on college campuses, where antisemitism has gotten a free pass. From the very start, Harvard has been lacking in its response to protect Jewish students from antisemitic and pro-Hamas agitators.

As Townhall has covered, immediately after Hamas perpetrated the attack against Israel on October 7, many students were quick to put out pro-Hamas statements blaming Israel for the attack. When such students were doxed, Harvard set up a task force to help those students.

When it comes to any such claims that Harvard is committed to free speech as it lets antisemitic hate speech get out of control, it's worth reminding that Harvard came in dead last for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) ranking of college campuses.

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Obama is mentioned as a Harvard graduate in this piece, but there's been other Harvard graduates who have been vocal in their outrage against the university's response to dealing with Gay. This includes House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who questioned Gay at that hearing, as well as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who has shared his outrage as well as how he's continuously tried to reach out to Harvard.

Ackman's pinned post, from Thursday, speaks to an "incredibly disappointing" meeting with Prtizker, and also how his letters have gone unanswered with also no acknowledgment of having been received. Although Ackman writes in his post that the board members "must now realize that they made a bad choice and that their continued support for President Gay is not just enormously damaging to Harvard, but it is also incredibly destructive to their own reputations," he also suggests that they're afraid to be perceived as racists. 

"The principal reason I believe is that they are afraid of being called racists. They have concluded that if they fired President Gay, Harvard’s first black president, they would be cancelled and deemed racists. They have failed to act out of fear," Ackman offers. "They have failed to act out of fear," he adds. "They would also have to admit that they made a bad choice in selecting Gay, and acknowledge that they ignored concerns raised about Gay’s scholarship and leadership prior to appointing her."

Regardless of what the board does, the fallout continues for the supposedly elite institution, as law firms have been announcing they will no longer recruit there, and donors keep pulling their money.

When it comes to Obama's own response to the terrorist attack that Hamas perpetrated against Israel, the former president was quite delayed in his lacking response, waiting until October 9 to post about the matter. As Matt's covered, the problems with Obama's stance don't end there, as the former president has put out reading lists and made comments along the lines of seeking a "moral equivalency" between Israelis and Palestinians. He's even dared to claim "you have to admit that all of us are complicit to some degree."

"Harvard" has been trending over X on Friday, as the institution and Gay have been trending quite a bit since Gay's testimony.