Republican lawmakers stepped up their campaign to pressure colleges including Harvard, Northwestern and Columbia to take a stronger stance against antisemitism with a report that scrutinizes their responses to protests that erupted after the Hamas attack on Israel last year.
The 325-page document released by the House Education and the Workforce Committee sought to expose what it presented as failures by elite schools to adhere to their own rules amid turmoil fueled by the terrorist attack and Israel's retaliatory response in Gaza. The committee gathered more than 400,000 pages of text messages, emails and documents, some collected by subpoena.
In one prominent section, the investigation showed how Harvard officials such as then-President Claudine Gay, current President Alan Garber and others crafted their responses in ways that committee members viewed as unsupportive of Jewish community members and Israel. The report also included discussions among administrators at other schools roiled by protests, from the University of California at Los Angeles to the University of Pennsylvania.
“For over a year, the American people have watched antisemitic mobs rule over so-called elite universities, but what was happening behind the scenes is arguably worse,” US Representative Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican who chairs the committee, said in a statement thursday.
Harvard and Gay, who resigned in January amid accusations of plagiarism and after her disastrous testimony in front of the committee in December, came in for particularly close scrutiny. Gay was criticized for being too slow to respond when 30 student groups blamed the events of Oct. 7 solely on Israel just hours after the attack.
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The report painted a picture of Harvard's difficulty crafting a statement after Hamas fighters killed more than 1,200 people in Israel and took hundreds of hostages.
“Even the seemingly uncontroversial proposition of labeling Hamas' terrorist attack as 'violent' proved to be unpalatable to Harvard Medical School Dean George Q. Daley,” the report said.
According to emails provided in the report, Daley said he'd feel more comfortable eliminating the “violent” qualifier.
“This remains factual while avoiding singling out Hamas' violence,” he wrote. While saying he didn't feel adamantly, he argued that the wording change would avoid focusing on “assigning blame when it's best we express horror at the carnage that is unfolding.”
Pritzker, Friedman
Gay, Garber and Penny Pritzker, who leads Harvard's board as a senior fellow, also discussed a response to Josh Friedman, a hedge fund manager and board member of Harvard Management Co., which runs the school's $53 billion endowment. He wrote to Pritzker about the phrase “from the river to the sea,” which is perceived by many to be a call for the expulsion of Jews from Israel.
Pritzker expressed similar concerns.
“I must confess that it feels very antisemitic to me, especially since it is used by the anti-Israel terrorist groups Hamas and PFLP,” Pritzker wrote, according to the report, referring to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. “So I am struggling with why it isn't hate speech and why that is acceptable on our campus and why we don't condemn it.”
She went on to say, “Perhaps the question goes to free speech which cannot be eliminated but can be condemned.”
Harvard spokesperson Jason Newton said in an emailed statement that the university “is steadfast in our efforts to create a safe, inclusive environment where students can pursue their academic and personal interests free from harassment and discrimination.”
“Antisemitism has no place on our campus, and across the university we have intensified our efforts to listen to, learn from, support, and uplift our Jewish community, affirming their vital place at Harvard,” according to the statement.
Campus protests intensified earlier this year with the Israel-Hamas war. Israel's bombardment and invasion of Gaza has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in the territory, which doesn't distinguish between combatants and civilians.
At US colleges, protest rallies and tent encampments were followed in some cases by crackdowns and student suspensions.
After demonstrators occupied a university building at Columbia, the school called in the New York Police Department. In Los Angeles, police shut down the UCLA encampment after pro-Palestinian protesters were attacked by counter demonstrators, starting a melee that left more than a dozen injured.
At Northwestern, school administrators reached an agreement with protesters to remove an encampment – a move derided by the House education committee, which called the school's president to testify in May.
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The committee's report included correspondence between Northwestern officials regarding a proposed boycott of Sabra brand hummus because of its Israeli co-ownership. The committee slammed Provost Kathleen Hagerty, saying she acquiesced to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.
In the correspondence, the committee said Hagerty supported a proposal by faculty negotiator Nour Kteily for Northwestern to “quietly” boycott Sabra hummus to satisfy student demands, according to text messages cited in the report.
Hagerty responded, “That's probably pretty easy,” according to the report. Kteily replied “I think symbolically it'd be quite valuable for them” and “could be something you trade off for meaningfully less on divestment.”
Northwestern objects to the “unfair characterizations of our provost and valued members of our faculty based on isolated and out-of-context communications,” spokesperson Jon Yates wrote in an email. “The university unequivocally stands behind them and their work on behalf of our students, and their hard work to successfully bring our encampment to a swift and peaceful end.”
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