On September 26, U.S. Representative Virginia Foxx (R-North Carolina), chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, issued a press release in which she “denounced Harvard University for its refusal to hold those responsible for the antisemitic protests that consumed its campus accountable with meaningful discipline.” This is the latest salvo from the committee that has spearheaded investigations into and severe criticisms of Harvard and many other universities since last autumn (including the December 5 hearing at which then-President Claudine Gay came in for severe condemnation for her testimony), and is consistent with some of its members’ continued focus on the issues arising from the Hamas attack on Israel and war in the Middle East.
Foxx’s news release cites Harvard records provided to the committee. It concludes that the University “failed to discipline the overwhelming majority of those involved in the protests, and none of those found responsible for the spring encampment were suspended.” That, in turn, in Foxx’s views, “amounts to a likely failure to provide a safe learning environment for Jewish students, a violation of Harvard’s responsibilities under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
As reported, Harvard’s disciplinary processes are convoluted, vary by school, and are subject to differing interpretations by members of the community and external audiences (see “Locked In,” July-August, page 17, and “Own Goals,” September-October, page 5, respectively on the spring protests and pro-Palestinian encampment, and the ensuing results of school disciplinary processes and student appeals). It was almost foreordained that Foxx would criticize the outcome of the disciplinary decisions following the spring pro-Palestinian encampment; in an August news release, Columbia came in for the same treatment for its troubles.
Foxx’s news release singles Harvard out for, among other incidents, failing to deal more severely with the “occupation of a campus building” (a November 2023 protest in which seven students sat in at a University Hall room overnight, and for which they were ultimately admonished, rather than put on probation). According to the redacted Administrative Board case report, the student protestors said they acted to call for an immediate ceasefire as a step toward “Palestinian liberation”; to protect students’ free speech; and to “make clear that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.” Foxx characterized the protest as an example of “antisemitic conduct violations.” She also objected to the discipline following the spring encampment in Harvard Yard, with 52 of 68 students referred for disciplinary action now in “good standing.”
More broadly, she concludes, “Failure to punish these students for their antisemitic actions amounts to a likely failure to provide a safe learning environment for Jewish students, a violation of Harvard’s responsibilities under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” The administrators responsible, she continues, “failed their Jewish students and faculty…and in this case, Harvard may have failed to fulfill its legal responsibilities to protect students from a hostile environment.” (The news release makes no mention of recent changes in disciplinary oversight at the University level, nor of the University task forces on antisemitism and anti-Muslim, -Arab, and -Palestinian bias, whose final reports are expected soon; committee members have focused almost exclusively on antisemitism.)
The language about a “hostile environment” and Title VI bears on the current situation for universities generally. As Inside Higher Education has reported (“How Title VI Is Tripping up Colleges,” September 4), the U. S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has now resolved six of its dozens of investigations into colleges’ responses to reports of antisemitism during the past traumatic year. (Harvard is not facing such an investigation now, because similar allegations are being raised in a private lawsuit, as the Crimson reported.)
Those investigations have determined that a “hostile environment” is one that ““limits or denies a person’s ability to participate in or benefit from a recipient’s education program or activity.” Institutions are under the Title VI obligation to determine whether such conditions exist, and if so, to address them and prevent them from recurring. Title VI prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin—the latter encompassing discrimination based on shared ancestry, including antisemitism and Islamophobia. Those institutional determinations depend not on analysis of individual complaints case by case, but rather on considering what the federal officials deem “the totality of the circumstances.” In turn, these OCR determinations raise challenging free-speech issues for administrators, as analyzed by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Foxx’s broadside is part of the continuing political response to the divisions created by the Hamas attack and the widening war—divisions on campuses, in the country at large, and around the world. As such, they are less news (although it is interesting to see the format of the Ad Board reports with their many redactions) than an indicator of the real challenges facing Harvard’s leaders as they navigate the institution’s course through the immediate controversies, and the larger environment of polarized antipathy to elite institutions of higher education.
