Harvard is being asked to produce a host of documents by a House committee as it launches its first salvo against universities accused of harboring antisemitism on their campuses. 

A 9-page letter sent to the Harvard Corporation senior fellow, Penny Pritzker, and interim president, Alan Garber, seeks to uncover “the depth and breadth of the antisemitism that exists at Harvard,” the chairwoman of the Education and the Workforce Committee, Virginia Foxx, who signed the letter, tells the Sun. 

The university has two weeks to produce the requested documents, ranging from years of student reports of antisemitism on campus to the meeting minutes of Harvard’s governing bodies to evidence of declining numbers of admitted Jewish students. After her committee scrutinized Harvard’s president Claudine Gay before Congress last month, Ms. Foxx said she would use the “full force of subpoena power” to root out antisemitism in higher education.

“We want to make sure that we’re getting to the bottom of the problems,” Ms. Foxx says. “Now, I am not naive enough to think that that one letter is going to get us all the information that we need. I think that’s going to give us a start, and I suspect there’ll be a lot of follow-up.”

It is unclear how much documentation Harvard will be willing to give the committee, but the school is under a national spotlight at the moment, and Ms. Foxx says it is in their best interest to comply. “If they have people there who care about the institution, who care about its image, then my guess is they’ll cooperate,” she says. “Harvard should want this.”

The university had the highest rate of threats based on Jewish identity out of more than 100 campuses surveyed in a November 2022 report cited in the letter. More than two-thirds of students interviewed by student Sabrina Goldfischer in her March 2023 senior thesis said they had censored themselves in academic or social settings because of their Judaism or ties to Israel.

A striking example of discrimination in the letter concerns a Harvard Kennedy School lecturer, Marshall Ganz. According to an HKS-commissioned probe, he advised his three Israeli students in a spring 2023 course to remove from their proposed class project any reference to Israel as a “liberal-Jewish-democracy,” as well as the word “Jewish,” which he said “creates an unsafe space” in the classroom. 

Mr. Ganz, the investigation determined, showed preference for Arab students and denigrated Israelis, in effect creating “a hostile learning environment for the students based on their Israeli nationality and Jewish ethnicity and ancestry.” The Kennedy School’s dean, Douglas Elmendorf, accepted the review’s findings. Mr. Ganz is still on the faculty. 

The committee is also requesting evidence of any disciplinary actions Harvard has taken against students perpetrating antisemitism, as well as other instances of discrimination and harassment on campus. It also seeks to underscore the irony of Harvard’s “supposed commitment to free speech,” which Ms. Gay said in her December testimony extends to “views that are objectionable, outrageous and offensive.” 

Ms. Foxx recalls that when she met with Ms. Gay the day before the hearing, she advised her, “I want you to get a spine, and I want you to speak with moral authority.” To Ms. Gay’s many critics, that admonition did not guide her performance before Congress. 

To remove the cloak of secrecy surrounding Harvard’s governance, the committee urges Ms. Pritzker and Mr. Garber to produce all documents and communications in the last three years involving the school’s president, provost, executive vice president, as well as the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers.

Asked to envision a path forward, Ms. Foxx says, “Harvard should look back on the days when it was considered the number one institution in the world and say, ‘What were we doing then? And how have we strayed from the model institution that we used to be?’” 

What Ms. Foxx jokingly calls “our sleepy little education committee” is, in fact, wide awake and prepared to hit more universities with requests for evidence of antisemitic incidents that have surged on their campuses before and after October 7. The questionnaires will vary between schools depending on their areas that, she says, are in need of “due diligence.” 

“We are living in the most exciting time in the world in terms of education,” Ms. Foxx says, referencing the critical research and innovation taking place on college campuses today. “But now that seems to be so torn down.”