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The GOP-led House Oversight Committee is opening an inquiry into Harvard University’s compliance with civil rights laws after the Ivy League school rejected demands from the Trump administration to tighten rules against antisemitism and other hate speech on campus.
Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) penned a letter to university President Alan Garber Thursday demanding a massive trove of documents to determine whether Harvard obeyed federal law while receiving federal funding.
“Harvard is apparently so unable or unwilling to prevent unlawful discrimination that the institution, at your direction, is refusing to enter into a reasonable settlement agreement proposed by federal officials intended to put Harvard back in compliance with the law,” Comer and Stefanik wrote.
“No matter how entitled your behavior, no institution is entitled to violate the law,” they added. “Longstanding civil rights law prohibits any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance from discriminating.”
Comer and Stefanik — herself a 2006 Harvard College graduate — noted the school’s April 14 rejection of demands that included establishing more merit-based hiring; ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs; reforming “programs with egregious records of antisemitism and other bias”; and stepping up admissions screening of international applicants to “prevent admitting students hostile to the American values,” including those “supportive of terrorism or antisemitism.”
Garber rejected the proposal and declared that no government “should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”
Soon after, the Trump administration announced a freeze on $2.2 billion in multi-year grants and $60 million in multi-year contracts.
President Trump has also publicly mused about stripping Harvard of its tax-exempt status.
“It should come as no surprise that Harvard would continue to advocate for illegal discrimination and violate its obligations under the law, as it has a long, consistent history of defending racial discrimination and antisemitic activities on campus,” Stefanik and Comer chided.
“Harvard recently—merely two years ago—fought all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States to defend the institution’s desire to discriminate on the basis of race in admissions programs,” they added.
In June 2023, the high court ruled against Harvard, finding its affirmative action policies to be a violation of the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.
Stefanik has clashed with her alma mater in the past.
In December 2023, during a House Education and Workforce Committee hearing, Stefanik grilled the heads of Harvard, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania over their policies to combat antisemitism on campus.
Then-Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned a few weeks later amid a plagiarism scandal.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 restricts programs from discriminating if they receive funding from the federal government.
Trump has leveraged Title VI to crack down on elite colleges and universities across the country and press them to pursue stronger safeguards for Jewish students.
Stefanik and Comer demanded that Harvard cough up a range of documents from Jan. 1, 2023, to the present by May 1.
The request includes internal documents about hiring practices, activism on campus, internal communications pertaining to the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack against Israel as well as the subsequent protests, details about DEI programs, material on whistleblower reporting, foreign gifts, and material on the Student and Exchange Visitor Program.
