The president of Harvard has publicly apologised in an interview for remarks she made during a congressional hearing about anti-Semitism on US campuses amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, AFP reports.

Claudine Gay, a professor who has led the prestigious US university since July 2023, was asked on Tuesday whether calls for “genocide” against Jews would violate Harvard’s code of conduct, to which she did not respond with a direct affirmative.

“I am sorry,” Gay said in an interview published by her university’s student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson.

“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.”

Gay and the two other participants at the five-hour-long hearing — her counterparts at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) — have faced a backlash for their responses to Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s questioning.

Stefanik, who studied at Harvard, has called for the presidents to resign and on Wednesday announced that the House Education and Workforce Committee would be “launching an official congressional investigation with the full force of subpoena power” into the three universities, and others.

Read more here