Harvard professors criticize Congress' 'partisan' report

Brown and other professors accused Republican committee members of trying to make higher education institutions look bad with a biased and dishonest report that ignores other interests. forms of hatred common on college campuses.

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

A spokesperson for the congressional committee said: “The ridiculous idea that this investigation is government overreach is incorrect and not based in reality.

“This investigation has always been about protecting Jewish students,” the spokesperson said. “Period.”

The report includes internal emails from Harvard administrators that the committee obtained under a subpoena, showing their deliberations over the wording of a joint statement on the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and Israel’s military response. Harvard’s statement, which followed a controversial statement from student groups written by Palestinian Americans two days earlier led to resistance from alumni and politicians. They argued that Harvard should have condemned October 7 as terrorism rather than trying to find equivalence between the attack and Israel’s response.

Then-Harvard 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 individual views on the origins of long-standing conflict in the region.” Current Harvard President Alan Garber, then provost, told the Harvard Crimson student newspaper on Nov. 10 that he “regretted the initial statement.” Garber disagreed with other Harvard leaders on removing the word “violent” from a description of the attack in the joint statement, according to messages in the report.

For several professors, the conference report offers no meaning new information or insight 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. The internal emails in the report show that Harvard administrators, several of whom are Jewish, “think hard about difficult problems and do their best under difficult circumstances,” Feldman said.

“Wouldn’t you want a range of views to be considered when making a difficult decision?” Veldman said.

As donor responses increased last fall, Gay and the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania were called on December 5 to testify about pro-Palestinian protests and reports of rising anti-Semitism before the Education and Workforce Committee, led by Republican Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, on December 5. The leaders of the committee called everyone three female presidents to resign after providing legalistic answers to questions about whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated university rules. Former UPenn President Liz Magill resigned days later after 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 “steadfast in our efforts to create a safe, inclusive environment” and that work on civil dialogue, campus division, discipline and protest rules is “ongoing.”

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

About 1,200 Israelis were killed in the Hamas attack on October 7, and another 250 were kidnapped. Palestinian health authorities say some 42,000 people have been killed in Israel’s military response; their numbers do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The war sparked widespread protests at Harvard and other universities over the past academic year, and in May Harvard instituted a policy of neutrality, under which its leaders would no longer officially comment on world events unless they directly affect university affairs.

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

“(S)tudents who occupy a building may receive drastically different punishments (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, Harvard Corporation senior fellow Penny Pritzker 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 have been disciplined in recent weeks because he silently protested in a library against the war in the Middle East. The Ivy League school clarified its rules on speech and protest ahead of the fall semester after Garber was named permanent leader of the university until 2027. Some students and professors say the fall semester has been quieter as a result of the new rules, while others say the fall semester has been quieter as a result of the new rules. say the rules go too far and restrict free speech.

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

“When Congress intervenes in campus life in this very intrusive way, it has a chilling effect on anyone at the university who wants to express their views,” Feldman said. “That is extremely harmful to the core function of the university, namely the pursuit of truth.”

Shabbos Kestenbaum, a recent Harvard graduate who has sued the university over its response to anti-Semitism on campus, said the debate among school administrators over how to word their statement revealed that they were “morally bankrupt.”

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

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

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