A House committee is throwing subpoenas at three top leaders at Harvard for allegedly failing to produce documents relating to antisemitism as part of a robust congressional investigation into the university.

A target of the Education and the Workforce Committee is Harvard’s interim president, Alan Garber, who replaced Claudine Gay amid the firestorm that followed her evasive  testimony before that same committee. Separate subpoenas have also been issued to the head of Harvard’s board, Penny Pritzker, and the chief executive of Harvard’s endowment, N.P. Narvekar. 

Congresswoman Virginia Foxx, chairwoman of the committee, argues that the individuals repeatedly failed to comply with her request for evidence disclosing surging antisemitism on campus. The motion comes after she issued a “final warning” last week that Harvard could soon face legal troubles for being “unhelpful” in the probe she launched in December. 

“Of the 2,516 pages of documents Harvard has produced in response to the Committee’s antisemitism inquiry to date, at least 1,032 — over 40 percent — were already publicly available,” Ms. Foxx said in a statement on Friday. “Quality — not quantity — is the Committee’s concern.” 

The university now has until March 4 to fulfill Ms. Foxx’s wide-ranging request for 24 categories of documents, including years of communications between Harvard’s top administrative offices pertaining to antisemitism and the meeting minutes of its secretive governing body, the Harvard Corporation.

“It is my hope,” Ms. Foxx said, “that these subpoenas serve as a wakeup call to Harvard that Congress will not tolerate antisemitic hate in its classrooms or on campus.”

If the individuals refuse to comply with the congressional subpoenas, they could be charged with criminal contempt of Congress. If the committee chooses to pursue its subpoenas, it would hand off further action to the Department of Justice, which would ultimately have to decide to prosecute the individuals. That possibility seems unlikely under the Biden administration. 

Congress can, though, decide to act unilaterally to shut off Harvard’s grant money if the university fails to cooperate. That’s what Senator Scott threatened amid a surge in anti-Israel protests on Harvard’s campus in October, proposing a bill that would rescind federal money from colleges that “facilitate events that promote violent antisemitism.”

In 2021, Harvard reported that it received $625 million in federal funds, about 67 percent of the school’s total sponsored revenue that year. That might explain why Ms. Foxx is invoking her subpoena power to put pressure on Mr. Narvekar, who runs the Harvard Management Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of the university that manages its more than $50 billion endowment.

Ms. Foxx could soon turn to other Ivy League institutions. Earlier this week, she announced that the committee is expanding its antisemitism investigation to Columbia, whose campus has also been flooded with anti-Israel protests in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.