Internal Emails Show Harvard Leaders Debating Response to Hamas Attack

Messages among leaders at Harvard and other universities, published by House Republicans, reveal discussions on how to balance public statements about the war and how to negotiate with protesters.

Two days after Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel last year, senior administrators at Harvard University wrestled with how to respond. Drafting a public statement, they edited out the word “violent” to describe the attack, when a dean complained that it “sounded like assigning blame.”

They debated whether to explicitly disown a declaration by some Harvard student groups that Israel was responsible for the violence, but ultimately decided not to.

The internal debate among Harvard leaders including Claudine Gay, then the school’s president, played out furiously in emails and text messages that were released in a report on Thursday by the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

The report, part of a nearly yearlong inquiry by House Republicans investigating antisemitism on university campuses, offers a rare window into the discussions at multiple universities and how difficult judgment calls made by a small handful of people were scrutinized around the world.

The committee report accuses the schools’ leadership of permitting rampant antisemitism as pro-Palestinian students organized demonstrations at campuses across the country.

What is clear is that administrators struggled to find consensus on delicate moral judgments — like whether certain behavior constituted antisemitism — and how to take a stand on portentous affairs dividing the world.

Often, they seemed lost.

The Republican staff report releases 400,000 pages of documents from Harvard, Penn, M.I.T., Yale, Columbia, Barnard, Rutgers, Northwestern, George Washington, Berkeley and UCLA (the documents from Harvard and Columbia were obtained in part through subpoenas). It argues that the schools may have violated civil rights law that requires universities receiving federal funds to address a hostile environment against Jews.

“How could you be somebody with a job at a university and not recognize antisemitism and move to do something about it?” Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina and the chairwoman of the House committee, said in an interview on Thursday. “It is not complicated, and it wasn’t complicated on these campuses.”

The problem, she said, “is that they treated it as a public relations issue, not as an attack on the well-being of Jewish students.”

Jason Newton, a spokesman for Harvard, said on Thursday that “we have intensified our efforts to listen to, learn from, support and uplift our Jewish community, affirming their vital place at Harvard.”

The messages among school leaders show how the intensity and public scrutiny of the protests seemed to catch them flat-footed, grasping for ways to end the unrest and avoid attention. In the last year, several presidents of elite universities resigned after the protests, including Dr. Gay, M. Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Nemat Shafik of Columbia.

Northwestern University’s president, Michael Schill, testified before the committee in the spring. The report said Mr. Schill had appointed as university negotiators “radical” faculty members, who helped advance the protesters’ agenda. One proposed to “quietly find an alternative” to Sabra-brand hummus to placate protesting students. “It’s a very sore spot for Palestinians because it’s an Israeli hummus brand that’s penetrated most college campuses,” he said in a text message.

The provost responded, “I’m all for making a deal. Bargaining in action!”

Jon Yates, a spokesman for Northwestern, said the report “focused on events that were fully debated in the committee hearing last spring, and it ignores the hard work our community has put in since then” to create a safer learning environment.

He said it was “patently false” that Northwestern had “ever seriously considered” boycotting any Israeli company.

At Columbia, the report shows how university negotiators trying to bring the pro-Palestinian encampment to a peaceful end considered greater concessions to protesters than had been previously known. The potential concessions included a review of proposals to divest from companies “complicit in violating international law” or that “manufacture certain categories of weapons” and a scholarship fund for students who have lived, worked or studied in the West Bank or Gaza.

In the end, student negotiators rejected the university’s offer. Columbia “responsibly employed a range of approaches, including direct engagement with student organizers,” to try to end the encampment,” said Samantha Slater, a Columbia spokeswoman.

The report illustrates how difficult it is for universities to be apolitical. In early January, Dr. Shafik, then Columbia’s president, texted the co-chairs of the school’s board of trustees that Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, told her that universities’ “political problems are really among Republicans.”

“His staffer was of the view that best strategy is to keep heads down!” she wrote. One of the co-chairs, David Greenwald, replied, “We are likely in their sights already.”

Columbia said it had taken steps to address the concerns in the report, including creating a centralized office for all reports of discrimination and harassment.

Dr. Foxx’s term as House committee chairwoman ends this year. She said she expected the committee’s work to continue because “I don’t see this as a Republican or Democrat issue. It’s about hatred.”

The report excoriates universities generally for allowing pro-Palestinian protesters to set up encampments that in a few cases led to violence, and for failing to follow through on promises of serious punishment like suspensions for most of those involved.

It accuses “radical” faculty of fomenting some of the protests and it faults universities for negotiating with protesters.

The committee began its inquiry with a hearing last December that contributed to the resignations of Dr. Gay and Ms. Magill.

Among the most revealing documents in the report are the internal communications at Harvard.

The documents show Dr. Gay engaging in detailed discussions of the meaning of “from the river to the sea,” a phrase that some Palestinians see as a call to action but that many Jews construe as calling for Israel to be replaced by a Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

The documents show Penny Pritzker, the lead member of the Harvard Corporation, the school’s main governing board, asking for guidance on how to respond to alumni asking about a sign displaying the slogan at an Oct. 18 protest.

“Clearly an antisemitic sign which calls for the annihilation of the Jewish state and Jews,” Ms. Pritzker wrote in an email to Dr. Gay. “I am being asked by some why we would tolerate that and not signage calling for lynchings by the K.K.K.”

Dr. Gay asked her to check with Alan Garber, then the provost, who replied that “it’s not as simple as some of our friends would have it.” He continued: “Its genocidal implications when used by Hamas supporters seem clear enough to me, but that’s not the same as saying that there is a consensus that the phrase itself is always antisemitic.”

He cited language supporting his case from the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee. (Dr. Garber became president of Harvard in August.)

Dr. Gay did eventually weigh in, worrying that calling the phrase antisemitic would prompt questions about why Harvard was not disciplining students for using it. She recommended leaving a judgment to a planned antisemitism advisory group.

The phrase was eventually brought up last December, when the committee invited Dr. Gay to appear before Congress to testify about antisemitism at Harvard. Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, asked: “Will admission offers be rescinded or any disciplinary action be taken against students or applicants who say ‘from the river to the sea’ or ‘intifada,’ advocating for the murder of Jews?”

Dr. Gay replied that she found those phrases “personally abhorrent,” but discipline would depend on the context in which they were used.

The report also dissects the drafting of Harvard’s first public statement on the Hamas attack, which it issued on Oct. 9.

Harvard’s statement came after more than 30 Harvard student groups issued their own statement holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

Pressured by outrage over the student statement, university leaders worked on a statement of their own. They considered including the sentence, “We denounce this act of terror.” It was taken out of the final draft.

They also debated whether to call the attack violent.

“I’m not sure why it’s necessary to delete the word ‘violent’ in the second line, unless it’s a thought that it’s redundant,” Dr. Garber said in an email that was released in the report.

The dean of Harvard’s medical school, George Q. Daley, objected that “on my first read it sounded like assigning blame when it’s best we express horror at the carnage that is unfolding.”

Two other deans disagreed.

“I think Hamas’s violence deserves singling out, and I think this word is a pretty small way to do that,” wrote Doug Elmendorf, the Harvard Kennedy School dean.

Dr. Gay asked Dr. Garber if he could live with removing the word for the sake of “getting to yes,” according to a text message. “Yes, I don’t love it but can live with the change,” Dr. Garber replied, adding he was more disturbed by the logic behind deleting it.

The leaders fretted over how to avoid offending anyone while avoiding setting up a moral equivalence.

Dr. Garber said he was “comfortable” with a line recognizing “divergent and passionately held views,” but noted “that it will be crossing a line for many members of our community and we’d have to consider whether this specific precedent is worth the consequences.”

Marc Goodheart, vice president and secretary of the University, wondered whether there “might still be a way to dissociate” the university from the statement by the student groups, but in the end, the student statement was not mentioned.

The final draft removed a reference to Israeli hostages, after John Manning, the law school dean who is now the provost, said mentioning the hostages might create an impression that Harvard did not care about those “who may be hurt in the escalation of the conflict.”

After it was issued, the statement was criticized for being too weak. Dr. Gay released a stronger statement the next day, condemning “terrorist atrocities” and saying that no student group spoke for Harvard.

Not long after, Dr. Garber expressed regrets about the original statement, and Dr. Daley, the medical school dean, said he had learned from the criticism of it.

Sharon Otterman contributed reporting.

Colleges and the War in Gaza

• Academic Freedom: Universities have cracked down on professors for pro-Palestinian activism, saying they are protecting students and tamping down on hate speech. Faculty members say punishments have put a “chill in the air.”
• Columbia University: The university has temporarily barred a vocal pro-Israel professor from campus, saying he repeatedly harassed and intimidated employees.
• University of Michigan: In a tense meeting, the school’s student government restored funding for campus activities and clubs, which had been paused for months in protest of the war in Gaza.
• Brown: The university had made a deal with pro-Palestinian students to consider their demands if they ended a protest encampment. But the university board voted against divestment.
• Calmer but Not Normal: A year of war in Gaza has left college students and faculty feeling shaken and angry, with the world and with each other.