A second investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services is the latest action in a long dispute between Trump and America’s oldest university.
Just more than a week after President Donald Trump announced that he was very close to resolving his differences with Harvard University and reaching an agreement, his administration cited findings of a second probe into anti-Semitism and civil rights violations on the Ivy League campus.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights said Monday that Harvard acted “with deliberate indifference toward harassment of Jewish and Israeli students by other students and faculty from October 7, 2023, through the present.”
“Harvard’s public pledges to improve its disciplinary framework for harassment and misconduct are inadequate to meaningfully address these serious findings,” Paula Stannard, the agency’s civil rights director, said in a June 30 statement.
“HHS stands ready to reengage in productive discussions with Harvard to reach resolution on the corrective action that Harvard can take to remedy the violations and come into compliance with its Title VI obligations.”
Continuing civil rights violations on the campus include harassing speech, threats, and intimidation targeting Jewish and Israeli students, including calls for genocide and murder, the federal agency reported.
“Such educational opportunities denied include safe class attendance, access to campus facilities such as libraries, dining halls, dorms, and other common areas, participation in extracurricular activities, and overall physical and emotional well-being on campus,” it added.
Since 2023, Harvard and its subrecipients have received more than $794 million from HHS, the statement said.
The agency’s June 30 letter to Harvard President Alan Garber acknowledged Harvard’s own investigation into campus anti-Semitism and its corrective measures, but said those actions are ineffective because the school is relying on “pre-existing—not new or strengthened policies.”
It said the university has not provided any indication that the major campus organization behind anti-Semitic activity, the Palestine Solidarity Committee, has been dissolved.
“The need for federal intervention is clear; Harvard’s lack of a progressively punitive response is unreasonable,” the letter said.
