House GOP plows on with Harvard antisemitism probe despite president’s exit
Unsatisfied with the recent resignation of Harvard’s president, the Republican-led House education committee ramped up its antisemitism investigation into Harvard on Tuesday.
Rep. Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican and the committee’s chairwoman, demanded in a new letter that the university produce years’ worth of documents and communications about school policies and any incidents related to antisemitic harassment and discrimination.
“While Dr. Gay has since resigned, Harvard’s institutional failures regarding antisemitism extend well beyond one leader,” Foxx said in the letter.
The letter was addressed to Penny Pritzker, a senior fellow for the Harvard Corporation, and Alan Garber, the school’s former provost who took over as interim president following Claudine Gay’s resignation Jan. 2.
Gay, the selective university’s first Black president, left just six months into the job amid a firestorm of allegations that she incorrectly cited other scholarship in her academic research, including in her decades-old dissertation.
Gay departed weeks after she testified alongside two other college presidents, one of whom is Jewish, before the House education committee and fumbled a line of questioning from GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik, who is not Jewish, about whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate university policies. Liz Magill, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, also resigned over the debacle.
Claudine Gay was just the start: US college presidents feel a chilling effect
In an opinion essay for The New York Times published Jan. 3, Gay called her decision to step down from the top post “wrenching but necessary.” She said she promptly corrected the citation errors amid “obsessive scrutiny” of her research and continues to stand by her work.
She painted the criticism of her, some of which she said was motivated by racism, as part of a broader right-wing assault on academic freedom and institutions of higher learning.
“Those who had relentlessly campaigned to oust me since the fall often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not reasoned argument,” she wrote. “They recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament. They pushed a false narrative of indifference and incompetence.”
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Harvard is one of dozens of universities under civil rights investigations by the Education Department over allegations of shared ancestry discrimination, a category which includes antisemitic and anti-Muslim harassment. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has said those types of discrimination complaints have skyrocketed in recent months as tensions over the Israel-Hamas war have inflamed tensions on college campuses.
In a statement to USA TODAY, Harvard spokesperson Nicole Rura said the university is reviewing Foxx's letter and will be in touch with the committee regarding its request.
Zachary Schermele is a breaking news and education reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at zschermele@usatoday.com. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Claudine Gay stepped down. Republicans still aren't satisfied.
