The Free Press
Trump officials have demanded that Harvard University provide them with a copy of a long-awaited report on antisemitism on its campus. It’s the latest salvo in a rapidly escalating confrontation between the Trump administration and the school.
In a letter obtained by The Free Press, the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights set forth a series of demands, including that they be sent any reports written by Harvard University’s antisemitism task force, any drafts of those reports, and the names of anyone involved in “preparing and editing the report.”
The letter was sent almost a week after Harvard president Alan Garber said the school would not comply with a list of sweeping demands from the Trump administration. The administration retaliated by pulling $2.2 billion in funding. On Wednesday, the administration asked the Internal Revenue Service to start the process of revoking Harvard’s tax-exempt status.
The demand is only the latest controversy for Harvard’s antisemitism task force, a committee that has been plagued by problems throughout its short existence.
Foremost among them: its failure to deliver a report. The task force had originally said they would publish their findings in the “early fall” of 2024, yet the report has still not been released. The report is meant to detail all occurrences of antisemitism at the university.
The committee has been mired in controversy from the moment it was announced in January 2024.
First, Derek J. Penslar’s appointment as co-chair of the task force was met with harsh criticism from the Harvard community over Penslar’s public comments about Israel and antisemitism on campus. Larry Summers, Harvard’s 27th president, wrote that “Penslar has publicly minimized Harvard’s antisemitism problem, rejected the definition used by the U.S. government in recent years of antisemitism as too broad, invoked the need for the concept of settler colonialism in analyzing Israel, referred to Israel as an apartheid state, and more.” Summers added that “none of this in my view is problematic for a professor at Harvard or even for a member of the task force, but for the co-chair of an antisemitism task force that is being paralleled with an Islamophobia task force it seems highly problematic.”
Then, less than a month after Harvard’s antisemitism task force was announced, its co-chair, Raffaella Sadun, resigned, claiming she wanted to “refocus her efforts on her research, teaching, and administrative responsibilities.”
A source close to Sadun told The Free Press that the real reason for her resignation was that “she found it impossible to make any progress” or to get the committee “to take the problem of antisemitism as seriously as she thought it ought to be taken.”
All of which is why some members of the Trump administration suspect Harvard may have edited the report to diminish its findings after the start of the government’s antisemitism task force review began in February 2025, a source close to the matter told The Free Press.
Garber insists that the university has “made it abundantly clear that we do not take lightly our moral duty to fight antisemitism,” and has “taken many steps to address antisemitism on our campus,” as he wrote in his letter to the Harvard community last week. But not everyone sees it that way.
Rabbi David Wolpe is one of them. He received a call on October 8, 2023—a day after Hamas’s attack on Israel—from a “shaken up” Claudine Gay, asking the Harvard Divinity School visiting professor for advice. She ended up forming an Antisemitism Advisory Group and asking Wolpe to join. Summers cautioned Wolpe not to take the position for fear he was “being used,” but Wolpe accepted anyway. Two months later, in December 2023, Wolpe resigned from the advisory group, stating that “both events on campus and [Claudine Gay’s] painfully inadequate testimony reinforced the idea that I cannot make the sort of difference I had hoped.”
When I asked Wolpe about Harvard’s current antisemitism task force, he told me that while Garber “takes antisemitism seriously, people underestimate the amount of institutional resistance at many, many levels that a president of Harvard finds when it comes to dealing with antisemitism.”
Wolpe added that “many people at Harvard are themselves either mildly or seriously antisemitic,” and others “don’t believe that antisemitism is a problem, and Jews are just the paragon of white privilege.” Between those two constituencies, said Wolpe, “I don’t know how much more Garber could or couldn’t do,” and that “it’s an extraordinarily thorny path to navigate to change that ethos.”
Adding to concerns about Harvard’s antisemitism problem are fears over the precipitous fall in the number of Jewish undergraduates at the university. As of 2023, that figure is estimated at lower than 5 percent, compared to almost 25 percent in the 1970s.
When I asked Larry Summers about the decline in Jewish students at Harvard, he told me that he does not think it is evidence of 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,” he said. “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.”
The only thing Harvard’s task force has produced since it was established more than a year ago is a list of preliminary recommendations. They urged the university to issue “statements condemning forms of discrimination and affirming existing values” and “fund a visiting professorship in Palestinian studies.”
The preliminary recommendations also noted that the task force’s “listening sessions provided abundant reports that since last October, and to some extent long before then, many Jewish students (and especially Israeli students) have been subject to shunning, harassment, and intimidation.”
Last May, the co-chairs of the task force wrote an op-ed in which they detailed the “appalling” things they had heard in listening sessions with Harvard students and faculty members. They recounted instances of “doxxing,” and students who “did not take certain classes because they believed the instructor would treat a Jewish or Israeli student unfairly.” But since then, the task force has gone quiet.
Some wonder if the task force’s report was completed quite a while ago, and is being held in the midst of controversy with the government given the supposed severity of the report’s findings. Wolpe, who is no longer affiliated with the university, told me “it’s not impossible that they are going back and revising it,” a possibility acknowledged in the HHS letter.
A Harvard Crimson report from March noted that Harvard spokesperson Jason A. Newton “declined to comment on what has led to the delay in issuing the final task force reports.”
Summers, who has been highly critical of the government’s infringement on the university, says of the delay: “It’s baffling to me why it has taken more than 18 months to complete and release a report. We’re approaching half as long as it took America to win World War II.”
For more coverage on the government’s fight with Harvard, read Charles Lane’s most recent column, “Harvard Had It Coming. That Doesn’t Mean Trump Is Right.”