House Education Chair Foxx Says Harvard Investigation To Continue Past Initial Report

The House Committee on Education and the Workforces’s Thursday report on Harvard’s response to antisemitism was the culmination of a months-long investigation into the University.

Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) said it is also just the beginning.

Foxx said in a Friday interview with The Crimson that the 42-page report will just be the first in a series of reports on Harvard’s response to antisemitism as they continue to receive documents from the University following the subpoenas issued in February.

“We’ll just have to see how serious Harvard is about correcting the problems,” Foxx said.

Thursday’s report revealed a serious internal rift between former Harvard President Claudine Gay and her antisemitism advisory group.

Days after Gay announced the group’s formation, the majority of its members threatened to resign over the University’s response to antisemitism. The members outlined 14 changes to Harvard policies in a Nov. 5 email to Gay and then-Provost Alan M. Garber ’76. The recommendations were not public until the committee released its report.

“It’s Harvard people themselves who are damning Harvard with this report,” Foxx said. “That isn’t coming from us.”

“It’s the antisemitism advisory group that found all these things that were going on at Harvard, they gave the report to the administration, and then the administration did nothing,” she added.

Gay did agree to meet some of the group’s demands, including condemning the use of the phrase “from the river to the sea ” just four days later. She declined to ban masked protests and make other policy changes.

Since the committee’s investigation began in early December, the University has submitted more than 30,000 pages of material to the committee.

Harvard spokesperson Jason A. Newton wrote in a Thursday statement following the report’s release that “it is disappointing to see selective excerpts from internal documents, shared in good faith, released in this manner, offering an incomplete and inaccurate view of Harvard’s overall efforts to combat antisemitism last fall and in the months since.”

Foxx said partially because of the sheer size of the total submission, the committee has not gone through all of the information they have from Harvard. She said the committee plans to do an additional assessment during the summer before issuing a follow-up report. The committee has also requested information about campus antisemitism from several other universities in recent weeks.

“Remember, we’re not just dealing with Harvard now,” she said.

While the report itself was focused on Gay’s administration, Garber’s response to antisemitism largely hinges on the upcoming recommendations of his antisemitism task force. The group expects to release an initial set of recommendations this spring.

Those recommendations — and Garber’s ability to implement them — will likely play a large role in the intensity and duration of the investigation’s next stage.

“It’s mostly going to be up to them, again, as to whether they decide to solve the problems at Harvard,” Foxx said of the University’s leadership, including Penny S. Pritzker ’81, the senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation. “If they don’t solve the problems at Harvard, I hope a lot of people will call for resignations of people there.”

“I have not called for that at any point because I’m waiting to see what the results are,” she added.

Foxx did not specify what actions Garber must take to win the committee’s approval.

While Foxx left open the possibility of calling Garber to testify before the committee, she said hearings themselves were not the focus.

“All is going to depend on what the reaction is of the Harvard administrators and faculty,” Foxx said.

—Staff writer Emma H. Haidar contributed reporting.

—Staff writer Cam E. Kettles can be reached at cam.kettles@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @cam_kettles or on Threads @camkettles.