Hundreds of Harvard faculty have signed a letter backing the university's president, Claudine Gay, after her testimony at a congressional hearing on the rise of campus anti-Semitism ignited pressure for her to resign. The letter and the hearing both come as a rise in hate attacks and offensive rhetoric targeting Jews and Muslims since the eruption of the current conflict in Gaza fuels a debate on the boundaries of free speech in the United States. It is "not the job of opportunistic politicians to try to tell a university who should run their university, or to tell them what people at University have to think and say", says Ryan D. Enos, Professor of Government at Harvard University. "One of the bedrocks of a free society, frankly, is that is that thinkers and educators can do what they want and say what they want and research what they want... The separation between politics and universities, they should be very strict," Enos adds. IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES