Penny Pritzker, a senior fellow at the Harvard Corporation, will remain in her role for now as calls grow for her ouster following Claudine Gay’s immediate resignation as Harvard president on Tuesday.
Pritzker, who has led the Ivy League school’s corporation since February 2022, will remain in his position, a Harvard spokesperson told the student-run Crimson Wednesday newspaper, despite the backlash to the controversy that has besieged the school. elite school and its leaders since October 7. attack on Israel.
The corporation, which is similar to a board of directors at other universities, supported Gay during weeks of dispute that included immense criticism of his testimony before Congress about anti-Semitism last month and questions about the integrity of his academic record.
Following Gay’s resignation, anger quickly turned toward the Harvard Corporation and Pritzker, who also served as Commerce Secretary under President Obama.
Pritzker, whose brother is Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, was chairman of the search committee that chose Gay to replace Lawrence Bacow when he left office last June.
She is expected to be part of the search for a new permanent president, the Crimson reported.
Harvard did not immediately respond to an email Wednesday night.
Billionaire and Harvard alum Bill Ackman, who led the effort to get rid of Gay, called on Pritzker and the rest of the board to resign early Wednesday morning in a 4,000-word essay published in X that also addressed the mission. DEI of universities.
Calls have intensified for Penny Pritzker to resign. AFP via Getty Images
“Board President Penny Pritzker should resign along with the other board members who led the campaign to keep Claudine Gay, orchestrated the strategy to threaten the media, circumvented the plagiarism review process, and otherwise way, it contributed greatly to the damage that has already been done,” Ackman said.
“These are the minimum changes necessary to begin to repair the damage that has been done,” he also stated.
Peter Malkin, a Harvard donor and namesake of the Malkin Athletic Center, wants members of the corporation involved in Gay’s hiring to resign.
Pritzker was part of the team that hired Claudine Gay as president last year. Terry Schmitt/UPI/Shutterstock
“I think the Corporation’s relatively hasty action in the search process indicated to me that there was not a full review of the qualified candidates out there,” Malkin told the Crimson.
Another major donor, Kenneth Lipper, urged the university to reflect on what went wrong during Gay’s tenure as president.
“When we suffer a great loss,” Lipper said, “we must look at the whys, repair what we can, and accelerate toward a new phase of performance that reflects our 300-year history of academic achievement and national leadership.”
The campus has been filled with controversy in recent months. CJ GUNTHER/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Frank Laukien, a visiting professor of chemistry at Harvard, singled out Pritzker as the problem, telling the New York Times that she should “share responsibility and resign immediately.”
Laukien added in an email to the newspaper: “We need several new independent members of the Harvard Corporation who are untainted by recent events and failures, and who are not part of the long-standing cronyism at the top of Harvard.”
Pritzker, a 1981 Harvard graduate, has been a board member since 2018 before rising to senior member. She donated $100 million to the university for a new economics building months before the appointment, the Boston Globe reported.
According to Forbes, Pritzker’s net worth is estimated at more than $3 billion and much of the family fortune comes from the Hyatt hotel chain.
The business community named her one of the most powerful women in the world in 2009.
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Source: vtt.edu.vn