East Greenbush, N.Y. — Congresswoman Elise Stefanik joined Fox News’ America Reports to discuss the long overdue resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay.
Watch her full interview here.
View highlights from her interview below:
On Claudine Gay’s Congressional Testimony:
“I say, John, that all three university presidents gave morally bankrupt testimony at the now infamous congressional hearing to a very specific moral question: Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university’s code of conduct? And one after the other, whether it was MIT, Penn, or Harvard, failed to answer that correctly, instead, bringing up, ‘It depends on the context.’ As you played earlier, it does not depend on the context. And as a Harvard graduate myself, we have seen a failure of leadership from Claudine Gay, a failure of moral leadership, but also, a failure of academic integrity which is a cornerstone of any higher education institution. So I called for her resignation, as I did for all three because of their abject failure in that congressional testimony and their failure to protect Jewish students. This is long overdue. It should not have taken the Harvard Corporation Board this long to demand her resignation. And I believe, as we continue our congressional investigation, that we will uncover, what will be the greatest scandal in higher education because the Harvard Corporation members themselves are complicit in this cover-up of her plagiarism and again, most importantly, their failure to protect Jewish students on campus.”
On Harvard’s Attempts to Cover-up Allegation of Claudine Gay’s Plagiarism:
“You know, this accountability would not have happened were it not for that congressional hearing, and I think what it forced was greater scrutiny of her position as the President of Harvard. And you have to remember, Gillian, she was selected as President of Harvard in a shorter search, you know executive search, than any other previous president, and they should have found out that there were fifty credible allegations of plagiarism. And the fact that the Harvard Corporation we now know knew about that before the congressional hearing and tried to cover it up and threaten media outlets to sue them, is a disgrace. When you are a board of any university, you need to make sure that your president, your faculty, and your students uphold the rigors of academic integrity, and instead, they wanted to hide this from their students, from their communities. So this accountability would not have happened were it not for the very clear, moral questions at the hearing, but there were many people who spoke out and really it was the over one billion views because of the pathetic testimony that led to this day.”
On Harvard Corporation’s Failure to Fire Claudine Gay:
“I don’t have information. I think it became clear, I said it has long been clear, everyone knows it. Harvard actually knew it deep down that her presidency was untenable. But I have been concerned that they tried to make this a political issue. It’s not political. It’s about academic integrity and moral leadership. And I’m a Harvard graduate myself. I know that the motto of Harvard is “veritas”, truth, and the Harvard Corporation absolutely failed in their responsibility to oversee this institution. They should have dealt with this immediately after the congressional hearing like Penn did.”
On the Ongoing Congressional Investigations Into Institutions of Higher Education:
This congressional investigation is not going to stop because of the resignation of these university presidents. There are deep institutional rots in these formally prestigious universities, whether it's their DEI offices, or whether it’s the antisemitism that we see raging on college campuses. So, I think the investigation is going to uncover much, much more. This is just, you know, about the university president on top of the institutions, but it’s an institutional rot that we are addressing because these colleges get billions of taxpayer dollars.”
On Claudine Gay Remaining A Harvard Faculty Member:
“No, and look at some of the student reporting in The Harvard Crimson. Students at Harvard are held to a standard that you can’t plagiarize, obviously. That does not stand for academic rigor and academic integrity. You can’t have members of the faculty, where a great percentage of their body of work is plagiarized. There are over fifty credible accusations, and she doesn’t have a very robust body of work as it is, compared to previous university presidents or faculty members. So, no she should not stay on the faculty.”
