After Gay's resignation, spotlight shifts to MIT president

The resignation of Claudine Gay as president of Harvard University leaves Sally Kornbluth, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as the only one of three college presidents not to have stepped down following testimony before a congressional hearing last month that didn't unequivocally condemn antisemitism on their colleges' campuses.

After Gay's resignation on Tuesday, the spotlight for some of those who led the push for the ouster of Gay shifted to Kornbluth.

Bill Ackman — a billionaire investor, Harvard graduate and donor — an early critic of how Gay handled the university's response to the Oct 7 Hamas attack, applauded her resignation.

"President Gay resigned because she lost the confidence of the University at large due to her actions and inactions and other failures of leadership," Ackman posted on X on Tuesday, responding to criticism over his role in Gay's resignation.

"Gay resigned because it was untenable for her to remain President of Harvard due to her failings of leadership." And he wrote: "Et tu Sally?'', which translates from Latin to "and you Sally?", suggesting Kornbluth should be the next to resign.

On Dec 13, Ackman, who is Jewish and married to an Israeli, wrote to the MIT board: "Let's make a deal. If you promptly terminate President [Sally] Kornbluth, I promise I won't write you a letter, a reference to his open letter to Harvard criticizing Gay's failure to condemn the deadly Oct 7 attacks by Hamas on Israel.

Ackman also claimed in social media posts that Harvard hired Gay only to fulfill diversity requirements, an accusation that Gay and Harvard denied.

"President Gay's resignation is about more than a person or a single incident," said the civil rights leader the Reverend Al Sharpton in a statement.

He said her resignation is "an assault on the health, strength and future of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)".

"This is an attack on every black woman in this country who's put a crack in the glass ceiling. Most of all, this was the result of Bill Ackman's relentless campaign against President Gay, not because of her leadership or credentials but because he felt she was a DEI hire."

Sharpton's organization, the National Action Network, is planning to protest outside Ackman's New York office on Thursday.

US Representative Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican who is also a Harvard alum and who grilled the three college presidents at the hearing, hailed Gay's departure.

Stefanik posted "TWO DOWN" on social media — seemingly referring to Gay and University of Pennsylvania President Liz McGill, who resigned on Dec 9 after an outcry against her legalistic and equivocal responses at the hearing.

The board at MIT had swiftly supported Kornbluth when criticism of Gay and McGill mounted after their testimony.

"She has done excellent work in leading our community, including in addressing antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hate, all of which we reject utterly at MIT. She has our full and unreserved support," a board statement said.

Faculty leaders, department heads and deans at MIT soon followed with their own endorsements of Kornbluth. Unlike Gay and McGill, Kornbluth, who is Jewish, didn't issue a formal apology after the controversial hearing.

On Tuesday, when asked for comment on Gay's resignation, a spokesperson for MIT made no reference to Kornbluth and said the school's "leadership remains focused on ensuring the work of MIT".

Unlike at Harvard and Penn, donors didn't flock to social media to demand Kornbluth's removal. Students at the MIT campus in Cambridge were busy with final exams last month and paid little public attention to the hearings, Kornbluth's comments and demands that all three resign. S

Students don't return to the campus until later this month. Also unlike the Harvard student newspaper The Crimson, the campus newspaper of MIT, The Tech, had no coverage of the uproar over the hearings.

But a letter signed by hundreds of Jewish alumni and their allies, sent on Dec 13 to the university's administration and its governing board, the MIT Corporation, expressed alarm at Kornbluth's "disastrous" testimony and that she hadn't apologized for it. But they didn't call for her resignation.

The letter also criticized the board's endorsement of her leadership

Without commenting on the merits of the plagiarism allegations against Gay, President Irene Mulvey of the American Association of University Professors said Tuesday that she fears plagiarism investigations could be "weaponized" to pursue a political agenda.

"There is a right-wing political attack on higher education right now, which feels like an existential threat to the academic freedom that has made American higher education the envy of the world," Mulvey said.

She said she worries that Gay's departure will put a new strain on college presidents. In addition to their work courting donors, policymakers and alumni, presidents are supposed to protect faculty from interference so they can research unimpeded.

"For presidents to be taken down like this, it does not bode well for academic freedom," she said. "I think it'll chill the climate for academic freedom. And it may make university presidents less likely to speak out against this inappropriate interference for fear of losing their jobs or being targeted."