Instagram users are no longer able to air their views on Harvard University’s social media platform as the school’s Instagram account is now closed to comments. This comes amid the Ivy League school’s antisemitism scandal that got many enraged after the school’s president Claudine Gay botched a Congressional hearing on antisemitism
Harvard also turned off comments on a post to X sharing the board’s support for Gay through the scandal.
Harvard’s commitment to free speech is so strong that they turned off comments on their post defending their radical and unjust DEI house of cards.
At least they’re saying the quiet parts out loud. 🤡 https://t.co/MkThh6XqM2 pic.twitter.com/afKIjozIcJ— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) December 13, 2023
Per Breitbart News, the school also prevented users from being able to tag its Instagram account. The outlet had observed the lockdown when it attempted to tag the school in a report on the scandal.
During the congressional hearing held last Tuesday alongside University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth, Gay had failed to condemn calls for the genocide of Jews on campus. When asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) to address the matter which had become a serious issue in Harvard, she denied that such genocidal calls constitute bullying and harassment.
Amid the backlash that ensued, she apologized in a statement saying she was caught up in “an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures.”
She admitted that her response was wrong, suggesting that the opinion she aired during the hearing was not her “truth.”
In her words, “What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard and will never go unchallenged. Substantively, I failed to convey what is my truth.”
In addition to the blowback on her antisemitism stance, Gay is also being challenged for her 1997 Ph. D. dissertation, which many, led by conservative activist and CRT expert Christopher Rufo and journalist Christopher Brunet, say was plagiarized.
In all of these, the school president has the support of Harvard Corporation, which has voiced support for her and promised not to remove her in a statement dismissing the calls for her removal.
“As members of the Harvard Corporation, we today reaffirm our support for President Gay’s continued leadership of Harvard University…President Gay has apologized for how she handled her congressional testimony and has committed to redoubling the University’s fight against antisemitism,” the statement read.
In a statement addressing the plagiarism scandal, the board said, “At President Gay’s request, the Fellows promptly initiated an independent review by distinguished political scientists and conducted a review of her published work. While the analysis found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.”
