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Two Republicans on the House Education and Workforce Committee accused Harvard of fostering “a hostile antisemitic environment” and demanded a series of internal records related to antisemitism complaints in a Monday letter to Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76.
Committee chair Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) and member Rep. Elise M. Stefanik ’06 (R-N.Y.) set an Oct. 13 deadline for Harvard to turn over a broad swathe of internal communications about how the University handled antisemitism complaints, prepared statements in the wake of protests related to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and Israel’s war in Gaza, and considered changes to curricula accused of “antisemitism or anti-Israel bias.”
The lawmakers also requested the University turn over all internal documents addressing an altercation that took place at an Oct. 18, 2023, protest on the Harvard Business School campus.
The letter also demanded information on the status of a partnership between the Harvard School of Public Health and Birzeit University in the West Bank. Harvard suspended the partnership in late 2024 or early 2025 as the school conducted an internal review, which was set to finish in spring 2025. An HSPH spokesperson told The Crimson in May that the school would decide whether to permanently discontinue the relationship after the review concluded.
“The Committee is concerned that Harvard has not made its decision, if any, public,” Stefanik and Walberg wrote.
Their letter was the first public announcement in months in the Education and Workforce Committee’s investigation of antisemitism complaints at Harvard, which began in December 2023. The last update in the investigation came under the 118th Congress in a December 2024 report by six House committees. Since then, lawmakers have targeted Harvard with investigations into its foreign ties, financial aid practices, and hiring practices.
But antisemitism has been the most persistent refrain in federal Republicans’ financial and legal attacks on Harvard. Stefanik and Walberg issued their request three months after the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights concluded Harvard had acted with “deliberate indifference” toward antisemitic incidents on campus and warned that a failure to make “adequate changes” would harm its ability to access federal resources.
The HBS incident included in the letter refers to an altercation between pro-Palestine protestors and a Jewish student that has remained unresolved nearly two years after the initial conflict. The student, Yoav Segev, stepped over protesters and filmed their faces as they lay on the ground for a “die-in” demonstration. Several protesters surrounded Segev, tried to cover his camera lens with keffiyehs and safety vests, and escorted him out of the crowd.
The confrontation drew national attention, and Segev sued Harvard and its police department, accusing them of failing to protect him and obstructing the district attorney’s investigation. Two graduate students involved in the altercation were charged with assault and battery, but the case did not go to trial, and the charges were dismissed after the students completed pretrial diversion requirements including anger management training, a course on negotiation, and community service.
Stefanik and Walberg on Monday accused Harvard of obstructing the Suffolk County District Attorney’s investigation into the incident and alleged that Garber had stopped HBS Dean Srikant Datar from sending a community message about it, citing text messages obtained by the committee.
“Another complication is that, although [the Israeli student] was technically within his rights … [t]he way he was taking videos appears provocative,” Garber allegedly wrote in one of the messages. The context of the message was not clear.
In a later email, Datar said Garber had told him that Middle Eastern and North African students “will be very upset by” a proposed email addressing the altercation, according to a brief excerpt published in the lawmakers’ letter.
The confrontation took place at a moment when friction and grief on campus were thrust into a national spotlight. Some Jewish students felt threatened by pro-Palestine activism and sharper anti-Israel sentiment on campus, and many students involved in the protests feared doxxing and harassment.
Stefanik previously accused Harvard of delaying “justice” for the students involved in an April 2024 letter to Harvard leadership.
The letter also doubled down on Stefanik’s campaign to make Harvard cut ties with Birzeit, which she and other House Republicans have accused of harboring ties to Hamas. Hamas — which has controlled the Gazan government for 18 years and is one of two major Palestinian political parties — has been popular in Birzeit’s student government elections.
Materials published in the Monday letter suggest that Garber was at least initially ambivalent about the demands. In a brief excerpt from a Jan. 24 email, Garber wrote that “if the big issue is that Hamas is popular on the Birzeit campus … were we to shut down the program on that basis, we’d give ammunition to [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS)] advocates.”
The lawmakers’ letter did not include any further context from Garber’s email. But it appeared to be an allusion to longstanding calls by student activists for Harvard to cut ties with Israeli universities over Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and, later, the war in Gaza.
Garber has said that academic boycotts “run contrary to academic principles and University principles,” and Harvard has strengthened its ties with Israeli universities over the past year, even as its tactics in Gaza drew widespread international condemnation.
Stefanik and Walberg’s letter also requested action plans that Harvard’s schools submitted to the president in April as part of the Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism, as well as former University President Claudine Gay’s short-lived Antisemitism Advisory Group. The letter also requested every communication since October 2023 from the University-wide Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging referring to antisemitism, Israel, or Palestine.
A spokesperson for Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
—Staff writer Avani B. Rai can be reached at avani.rai@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @avaniiiirai.
—Staff writer Saketh Sundar can be reached at saketh.sundar@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @saketh_sundar.
