McConnell knocks Harvard for antisemitism record after embattled president keeps role

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Thursday excoriated Harvard University’s decision to allow President Claudine Gay to remain in office, decrying what he called glaring examples of what is “rotten in the state of America’s most elite universities.”

The top Senate Republican made the comments in a floor speech just two days after the university’s board announced that Gay would be permitted to keep her job. The board defended Gay despite her handling of the school’s response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks against Israel and her refusal to say at a House hearing last week that calling for the genocide of Jewish people constituted harassment.

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“Despite her abysmal record on combating antisemitism and mounting allegations of plagiarism in her own scholarship, the cadre of left-wing financiers and university administrators who make up the governing Harvard Corporation has affirmed their ‘confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal,’” McConnell said Thursday.

“When you look at Harvard’s history, this embarrassing lack of moral clarity is hardly a surprise,” he continued, pointing to former Harvard President Abbott Lowell proposing a numerical quota on Jewish students more than a century ago.

McConnell quoted Lowell as saying at the time: “The antisemitic feeling among the students is increasing, and it grows in proportion to the increase in the number of Jews.”

“So one Harvard President says that the presence of Jews causes antisemitism,” the Senate GOP leader added. “A hundred years later, another says that calls for Jewish genocide really depend on the context in which they’re made. Frankly, you’d be forgiven for wondering whether antisemitism isn’t just business as usual at Harvard.”

Thursday was not the first time McConnell had taken aim at how higher education institutions responded to Hamas’s attack on Israel, the largest assault against Jewish people since the Holocaust, and the subsequent war.

After more than 30 Harvard student groups signed on to a statement condemning Israel and absolving Hamas of responsibility, something Gay refused to condemn the organizations for, McConnell called out the presidents of Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Stanford University, and the American Bar Association for declining to stand firmly against the carnage.

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“I can only hope that the leaders of America’s universities recognize what time it is in America,” McConnell said in October. “This is a time for moral clarity, not a time for antisemitic hate dressed in faculty-lounge jargon.”

Gay has faced bipartisan calls for her removal as president in the past two months, though those calls have intensified since her controversial House testimony last week. The Harvard president went on to apologize for her refusal to say that calls for a genocide of Jewish people violate the school’s code of conduct, which appears to have been satisfactory to the university board.