The Issue: Harvard President Claudine Gay’s House testimony and Harvard’s subsequent defense of her.

Harvard keeping Claudine Gay as its president is not shocking (“Harvard’s Moment of Truth,” Editorial, Dec. 12).

That she is grossly unqualified for her position is also beyond question.

I fully expect, however, that she will be politely and discretely phased out in the near future, as she is an embarrassment to Harvard and will only continue to be held in contempt and low esteem by her peers.

However, the patricians at Harvard who selected her — for whatever reason — are not currently inclined to care about the pressure from wealthy Jewish alumni who have threatened to withhold their financial support.

Sadly, the vanity of a few elites will only continue to encourage the anti-Zionist hordes of students and faculty that are drawn to Harvard.

Mitchell Schwefel

Barnegat, NJ

Liberal Harvard president Claudine Gay’s invocation of free-speech rights to defend her inaction on antisemitism has hit a national nerve (“Zip-your-lip service from Ivy leader,” Dec. 12).

Many conservative parents and students believe that their views are not welcome, and that self-censorship is necessary to navigate the woke swamp that progressives have made of our schools.

Want to know if free speech exists on college campuses or even in high schools? Try asking your kid what he or she wrote about in their last essay. They will serve up whatever liberal garbage necessary in hopes of maximizing any scholarship money coming their way.

We should hope in the name of liberty and freedom that this is the beginning of a societal reset.

Michael D’Auria

Bronxville

Seemingly lost in the media furor over Gay’s testimony at Rep. Elise Stefanik’s lynch hearing was any mention of the more than 7,000 Palestinian children massacred in Israeli airstrikes in the last two months.
Mainstream conservatives allegedly care about fetal rights. However, this concern disappears right after the fetus is born. That is, at least, in Gaza, where the babies are brown.

Gay politely suggested that we must respect the right to free speech. Stefanik’s strong-arm tactics, on the other hand, echoed the Stalin show trials of the 1950s.

Thank goodness for Harvard’s board, as it came to Gay’s defense and stood up to Stefanik’s bullying.

Ron Spurga

Manhattan

Only at an Ivy League university can a college president lose $1 billion in donations and still keep her job.
Had Gay been the CEO of a private company, she would have been fired for losing that kind of money.

This is an example of what happens when colleges let people from DEI run things.

John Peters

San Antonio, Texas

The questions were simple to ask and the answers were simple to give. Yet Harvard’s first black (and second woman) president, Claudine Gay, was stumped.

Despite being selected from a pool of more than 600 nominees, Gay wasn’t smart enough to succinctly answer several questions during the hearing.

Last week Dr. Gay apologized in The Harvard Crimson for some of her answers. She stated, for example, that she regrets not telling Rep. Stefanik that “threats to our Jewish students have no place at Harvard and will never go unchallenged.”

I believe this was an improved statement — though it seems like just another example of shutting the door after the horse has bolted.

Alan Hirsch

Port Washington

Bill Ackman, former Harvard donor, said he learned that Harvard’s presidential-search committee considered only candidates who met the Harvard Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office’s criteria (“Billionaire Bill Ackman claims Harvard president was hired because of DEI initiative,” Dec. 7).

We are permitting DEI and its fundamentally transformative policies to destroy any possibility that universities can function as they once did — as marketplaces of ideas — instead of being agenda-driven by “institutional responsibility.”

Julia Lutch

Davis, Cal.