Harvard Corporation senior fellow Penny Pritzker will stay on for now as calls for her ouster grow following Tuesday’s immediate resignation of Claudine Gay as Harvard president.
Pritzker, who has led the Ivy League school corporation since February 2022, will remain in his post, a Harvard spokesman told the student-run Crimson Wednesday, despite backlash over the controversy that has surrounded the elite school and its leaders since Oct. 7. attack Israel.
The corporation, which is similar to boards of trustees at other colleges, supported Gay during weeks of controversy that included intense criticism of his statement to Congress addressing antisemitism last month and questions about the integrity of his academic record.
Following Gay’s resignation, anger immediately turned to the Harvard Corporation and Pritzker, who also served as secretary of commerce under President Obama.
Pritzker, whose brother is Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, was the chairman of the search committee that selected Gay to take over for Lawrence Bacow when he left the job last June.
He is expected to be part of the search for a new permanent president, the Crimson reported.
Harvard did not immediately return an email Wednesday afternoon.
Billionaire and Harvard alumnus Bill Ackman, who is leading the charge to oust Gay, called on Pritzker and other board members to step down early Wednesday morning in a 4,000-word essay posted on X that also joins the university’s DEI mission.
Calls for Penny Pritzker to step down have intensified. AFP via Getty Images
“The Board Chair, Penny Pritzker, should resign along with the other board members who led the campaign to keep Claudine Gay, orchestrated a strategy to threaten the media, bypass the process to evaluate plagiarism, and instead contribute to the damage that has been done,” Ackman said.
“This is the minimum change needed to start repairing the damage that has been done,” he also said.
Peter Malkin, Harvard donor and namesake of the Malkin Athletic Center, wants members of the corporation involved with Gay’s recruitment to step down.
Pritzker was part of the team that hired Claudine Gay as president last year. Terry Schmitt/UPI/Shutterstock
“I think the relatively hasty actions by the Corporation in the search process indicate to me that there was not a full review of the qualified candidates that were out there,” Malkin told the Crimson.
Another major donor, Kenneth Lipper, urged the university to reflect on what happened during Gay’s presidency.
“When we suffer major losses,” Lipper said, “we must analyze why, repair what we can, and accelerate into a new phase of performance that reflects our nation’s 300-year history of scholarly achievement and leadership.”
The campus has been filled with controversy in recent months. CJ GUNTHER/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Frank Laukien, a visiting chemistry scholar at Harvard, singled out Pritzker as the problem, and told the New York Times he should “share accountability and resign immediately.”
Laukien added in an email to the paper: “We need some new independent members of the Harvard Corporation who are not tainted by recent events and failures, and who are not part of the longstanding cronyism at the top of Harvard.”
Pritzker, a 1981 Harvard graduate, has been a board member since 2018 before he became its senior fellow. He donated $100 million to the university toward a new economics building months before the inauguration, the Boston Globe reported.
Pritzker’s net worth is estimated at more than $3 billion with most of the family’s wealth coming from the Hyatt hotel chain, according to Forbes.
The business center named her one of the most powerful women in the world in 2009.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
