Dive Brief:
- A congressional committee said Friday that it's subpoenaing top Harvard University officials to obtain documents related to its ongoing investigation into how the Ivy League institution addresses antisemitism on campus.
- Rep. Virginia Foxx, the North Carolina Republican who chairs the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, told Harvard officials in letters accompanying the subpoenas that the university had “repeatedly failed” to satisfy lawmakers’ requests for documentation “within a reasonable timeframe.”
- The action marks the first time the House education committee has subpoenaed a university, it said in a social media post Friday. The move comes a little over three weeks after Foxx described Harvard’s initial batch of documents as “woefully inadequate,” saying that many of them were already publicly available.
Dive Insight:
The subpoenas ramp up the House panel's efforts to investigate how top-ranked colleges handle and discipline antisemitism. Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.
House lawmakers announced a formal investigation into Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania on Dec. 7 — only a couple days after the three institutions’ leaders testified before Congress about campus antisemitism.
At the time, lawmakers panned the three leaders for not definitively saying that calls for the genocide of Jewish people would violate their campuses' policies. Elizabeth Magill stepped down as Penn’s president just a few days after the hearing, while Claudine Gay left Harvard’s top post about a month later amid mounting plagiarism allegations as well as outcry over her testimony.
Earlier this week, the committee expanded the antisemitism investigation to include Columbia University. However, as of Friday, the committee has only announced plans to subpoena Harvard.
The committee said it was serving subpoenas to three officials:
- Penny Pritzker, senior fellow of the Harvard Corp., the university’s highest governing body.
- Alan Garber, Harvard’s interim president.
- N.P. Narvekar, chief executive of Harvard Management Company, which oversees the university’s endowment.
Harvard has produced over 2,500 pages of documents in response to the investigation.
However, Foxx has taken issue with 1,000-plus of those pages already being publicly available. Some of the documents also included redactions, even though the concealed information was available in the public versions, according to the committee.
“The limited and obfuscatory nature of the productions that Harvard has provided in the last month has made clear that it is not treating this congressional inquiry with appropriate seriousness,” Foxx wrote to the officials. “Given Harvard’s vast resources and the urgency with which it should be addressing the scourge of antisemitism, the evidence suggests that the school is obstructing this investigation and is willing to tolerate the proliferation of antisemitism on its campus.”
The subpoenas make several documentation requests, including for all reports of antisemitic acts made to campus officials since January 2021. They also demand all documents referring to disciplinary processes related to conduct targeting Jewish and Israeli people, as well as Zionists.
