Harvard professors criticize ‘partisan’ congressional report

Brown and other professors accused Republican panel members of aiming to make higher education institutions look bad with a biased and unfair report that ignores other forms of hatred predominantly on university campuses.

“It’s a political hit job disguised as a congressional report,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard government professor.

A spokesman for the congressional committee said: “The ridiculous notion that this investigation is government overreach is inaccurate and not based in reality.

“This investigation has always been about keeping Jewish students safe,” the spokesman said. “Period.”

The report includes internal emails from Harvard administrators, which the committee obtained under the subpoena, that show their deliberations on drafting a joint statement on the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas and Israel’s military response. The Harvard statement, which followed a controversial statement from student groups, written by Palestinian Americans two days earlier, it provoked backlash from alumni and politicians. They said Harvard should have condemned Oct. 7 as terrorism rather than trying to equate the attack with Israel’s response.

Harvard’s then-president Claudine Gay released another statement a day later on October 10 condemning the “terrorist atrocities committed by Hamas. Such inhumanity is abhorrent, regardless of one’s views on the origins of the long-running conflicts in the region.” Current Harvard President Alan Garber, who was a priest at the time, told the Harvard Crimson student newspaper on Nov. 10 that he “regrets the first statement.” Garber disagreed with other Harvard leaders about removing the word “violent” from a description of the attack in the joint statement, according to messages in the report.

For many teachers, the congressional report makes no sense new information or insights about events at Harvard last year. It did not justify the “expenditure of taxpayer dollars” that funded the congressional investigation, said Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor and founding director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law. Internal emails in the report show Harvard administrators, many of whom are Jewish, “think hard about hard problems and do their best under difficult circumstances,” Feldman said.

“Wouldn’t you like to have a number of positions considered in the course of making a difficult decision?” Feldman said.

As donor backlash began last fall, Gay and the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania were called to testify about the pro-Palestinian protests and reports of rising anti-Semitism before the Education and Workforce Committee, chaired by North Carolina Republican Virginia Foxx, on December 5. Committee leaders appealed to all three female presidents to resign after offering legalistic answers to questions about whether calling for the genocide of the Jews violated university rules. Former UPenn president Liz Magill resigned days later amid sharp criticism from major donors and Pennsylvania’s governor. Gay resigned on January 2 amid allegations of plagiarism in her academic work and backlash from donors.

A Harvard spokesperson said the university is “persevering in our efforts to create a safe, inclusive environment” and that work related to civil dialogue, campus divisions, discipline and protest rules is “ongoing.”

“Anti-Semitism has no place on our campus, and across the university we have stepped up our efforts to listen to, learn from, support and uplift our Jewish community, affirming their vital place at Harvard,” said the spokesperson.

The October 7 Hamas attack killed an estimated 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped another 250. Palestinian health authorities say about 42,000 have been killed during Israel’s military response, their figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The war sparked widespread protests at Harvard and other universities last academic year, and in May Harvard adopted a policy of neutrality in which its leaders will no longer officially comment on world events unless they directly impact university business.

Harry Lewis, former dean of the undergraduate college and professor of computer science at the school, said he found nothing “revealing” in the internal communications exposed in the Republican report. However, he believes discipline across the university should be more consistent, explaining that different schools within the university oversee discipline for their students.

“Students occupying a building could receive drastically different penalties (or rewards!) depending on whether they are from the Law School or the Divinity School,” Lewis wrote in an email.

In an interview with the congressional committee that was also included in the report, Penny Pritzker, a senior member of the Harvard corporation, also said that Harvard’s disciplinary boards “have been uneven in their enforcement.” Pritzker called this lack of consistency “a very serious problem.”

The report does not mention that Harvard students and faculty members they were disciplined in recent weeks for silently protesting the war in the Middle East inside a library. The Ivy League school clarified its rules on speech and protest ahead of the fall semester after Garber was named the university’s permanent leader through 2027. Some students and faculty say the fall semester was calmer as a result of the new rules, although others say the rules go too far and limit free speech.

Running a large institution of any kind is difficult, Feldman said, and doing so under the threat of a subpoena and worrying that your statements might be made public makes it harder for leaders to do their jobs.

“When Congress intervenes in this highly intrusive way into campus life, it has a chilling effect on everyone at the university who wants to express their views,” Feldman said. “This is extremely damaging to the core function of the university, which is the pursuit of truth.”

Shabbos Kestenbaum, a recent Harvard graduate who sued the university over its response to anti-Semitism on campus, said the discussion among school administrators about how to frame their statement revealed that they are “bankrupt in point from a moral point of view”.

In particular, Kestenbaum said he and other Jewish students felt “personally betrayed” at some of the exchanges, including one by Harvard Medical School Dean George Daley, who suggested administrators remove the word “violent” from the joint statement of school on Oct. 9 to avoid “assigning blame.” (Daley said in a statement last October 30 that he reflected “deeply on my response to the current crisis” after hearing from grieving community members.)

“For the Jewish community, this was our October surprise,” Kestenbaum said. “We feel betrayed, we feel hurt and we feel angry. We want accountability.”

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Hilary Burns can be reached at [email protected]. Follow a @Hilarysburns.