The Trump administration is again instructing Harvard University to deliver on its anticipated report on antisemitism concerns at the elite institution.
Larry Summers, former president of Harvard, told The Free Press that he did not understand the delay from his alma mater.
“It’s baffling to me why it has taken more than 18 months to complete and release a report,” Summers said. “We’re approaching half as long as it took America to win World War II.”
In a letter sent from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights, Harvard was instructed to send reports from Harvard’s Antisemitism Task Force to the government.
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The demands on Harvard to deliver on its report come amid pressure from Congress over the university’s use of taxpayer funds. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is currently investigating how Harvard University uses taxpayer money as the school faces scrutiny on civil rights issues like antisemitism.
“I certainly am not serene about Harvard and antisemitism, but I have seen no credible basis for believing that the decline in the Jewish fraction of the Harvard student body results from anti-Jewish discrimination,” Summers said when confronted by The Free Press about the effects of antisemitism concerns at the institution on its declining Jewish student body.
“Rather, it is an arithmetic consequence of efforts and developments leading to more African American, Hispanic, Asian, and more students from disadvantaged backgrounds—which had been a priority of mine—and more foreign students being admitted to Harvard,” he said.
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Rabbi David Wolpe, who previously joined the Antisemitism Advisory Group at Harvard at the request of ex-Harvard President Claudine Gay, said that antisemitism was a serious problem at the university.
“[M]any people at Harvard are themselves either mildly or seriously antisemitic,” Wolpe said, adding that other students “don’t believe that antisemitism is a problem, and Jews are just the paragon of white privilege.”
Wolpe said that the current president of Harvard, Alan Garber, faces “an extraordinarily thorny path to navigate to change that ethos.”
Wolpe said he left the Antisemitism Advisory Group after listening to Gay’s testimony in front of Congress as anti-Israel protests rocked Harvard’s campus.
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Committee Chairman James Comer and House Republican Leadership Chairwoman Elise Stefanik sent a letter to the university president, Dr. Alan M. Garber, Thursday afternoon, after the Trump administration halted $2.2 billion in funding to the school.
The Department of Homeland Security is also scrapping $2.7 million in grants, and the IRS is weighing an end to the university’s tax-exempt status.
Fox News’ Cameron Arcand contributed to this report.
