Yesterday, the House Committee on Education & the Workforce released its Majority Staff Report, “How Campuses Became Hotbeds: The Rise of Radical Antisemitism on College Campuses.” A follow-up to its earlier investigation into how universities handled antisemitism in the aftermath of October 7, the new report uses case studies from Harvard and several peer institutions to examine the broader “institutional, ideological, and financial forces” driving antisemitism on college campuses today.
The report and its nearly 900-page appendix of source documents include never-before released Harvard materials — including emails, written statements, and antisemitism committee findings.
Here are the key revelations from the new Harvard documents.
Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH): Leaders at HSPH’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights denounced Harvard’s Antisemitism Task Force report before it was even released — and continued criticizing it after publication.
When Harvard released its Antisemitism Task Force report in April 2025 (alongside a separate report on anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias), it highlighted problems with HSPH’s François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights. These included “one-sided” programming students said presented “a demonizing view of Israel and Israelis” and a “pervasive yet at best incomplete framing of facts and history.” Some students said that when they objected, they were asked, “Who is more marginalized, Jews or Palestinians?”
The new documents show that a month before the University’s Antisemitism Task Force report was released, then-FXB director Mary Bassett (AB ‘74) drafted an op-ed calling its allegations about FXB “astonishing” and “unsubstantiated.”
After publication, FXB executive director Jehane Sedky circulated an internal memo arguing that the report “exhibits all six elements of anti-Palestinian racism,” including “Nakba denial,” “Denial of Palestinian Indigeneity and rights,” “Dehumanization,” and “Excluding Palestinians” — even while acknowledging that the “report is not about the treatment of Palestinians at Harvard.”
The documents also show that in November 2024, as HSPH considered an external review of an FXB faculty affiliate’s “Settler Colonial Determinants of Health” course, the school’s head of communications created and shared a proposed reviewer list with the School’s dean. It included two scholars whose work focused on Israel and Palestine — one whose books include Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba and another described as “one of the leading historians of modern Palestine” — as well as two other scholars whose work “is on the framework of settler colonialism more broadly.”
While Bassett stepped down as FXB’s director in December 2025 as part of HSPH’s decision to refocus the center around children’s health, Sedky remains FXB’s executive director.
Harvard Business School (HBS): The Committee released excerpts from the still-unreleased HBS Antisemitism Working Group report, which described a post-October 7 climate of fear, silence, and mistrust among Jewish students, staff, and faculty.
The HBS Antisemitism Working Group (ASWG) report describes “a palpable experience of feeling unwelcomed, abandoned, fearful, and silenced,” with students saying, “Feels like Jews can’t talk about Israel” and “Never been in such a hostile environment.” Another said: “HBS doesn’t care about Jews unless it comes to donations.”
The report also describes “ignorance, insensitivity, and arrogance” and “anti-intellectual tendencies” among students. Students said many of their classmates came to HBS “with expectation to NOT change their mind,” were there mainly “for networking,” and feared being “canceled” for saying something wrong — “Not a conducive Socratic environment.” These findings echo those in our 1636 Forum State of HBS Briefing.
Among staff, the ASWG report said many felt communications from Harvard and HBS “missed the mark” and that managers were unprepared to support Jewish employees. Shortly after October 7, one staff member received an email from management asking whether the crisis would reduce revenue. Reflecting on that message, the staff member told the ASWG: “Feels like the main concern is the alumni/dollar.”
Faculty reportedly did not perceive much antisemitism at HBS before October 7, but afterward said they were “shocked by the hatred that lay beneath the surface and the world view with little nuance.”
To date, HBS has not released its ASWG report in full.
Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) & Harvard College: This fall, the former Center for Middle Eastern Studies director and another Harvard History professor hired for instructional roles a Divinity School alum previously charged in the assault of HBS student Yoav Segev.
During an October 2023 “die-in” protest on the HBS campus, HBS student Yoav Segev (MBA ‘25) was assaulted by Harvard Law School (HLS) student Ibrahim Bharmal (JD ’25, MPP ‘25) and Harvard Divinity School (HDS) student Elom Tettey-Tamaklo (MTS ’25). The two were charged by the Suffolk County District Attorney with assault and battery and violating the Massachusetts Civil Rights Act, and the incident was later cited in open letters from alumni like Seth Klarman (MBA ‘82) and Mitt Romney (MBA ‘74, JD ‘75).
In Fall 2025, after graduation from HDS, Tettey-Tamaklo was hired by former Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) director and Harvard History professor Cemal Kafadar as a Teaching Assistant (TA) for “Coffee and Nighttime: History and Politics, 1400-2020.” Under Kafadar’s leadership, CMES was regularly criticized for its “blatantly one-sided framing” of topics around Israel-Palestine.
Also in Fall 2025, Tettey-Tamaklo served as a TA for “A Black History of Electronic Dance Music,” taught by History assistant professor George Aumoithe.
At Harvard, such instructional support roles like these are more typically filled by currently enrolled graduate students serving as Teaching Fellows; TA roles are rarer, externally hired equivalents.
Harvard Kennedy School (HKS): Even after accepting a finding that a faculty member had discriminated against Jewish students, HKS Dean Doug Elmendorf responded with praise, sympathy, and no distinct individual sanction.
In June 2023 — before October 7 — a third-party investigator hired by Harvard found that HKS Senior Lecturer Marshall Ganz (AB ‘92, MPA ‘93, PhD ‘00) had violated school policy by giving “differential treatment based on [the students’] backgrounds” after directing Israeli Jewish students away from a project “relevant to their identity.”
But in a September 2023 letter to Ganz accepting those findings, HKS Dean Elmendorf (PhD ‘89) called Ganz’s contributions to the School “vital,” praised his “commitment to fair and powerful teaching,” and expressed “great sympathy for the bind” Ganz had faced during the class.
The only concrete follow-up Elmendorf described was requiring Ganz to attend sessions HKS was already organizing “for all faculty members regarding difficult conversations in class,” plus a later check-in on his fall courses and monitoring of future student feedback and complaints.
The Committee acknowledges that Harvard has made progress under President Garber’s leadership, but says more remains to be done.
The Committee's report notes that “under different leadership,” Harvard has since taken “some steps to address antisemitism at some of its schools.” That includes leadership changes at programs cited in the Committee’s report, such as Bassett stepping down from Harvard’s FXB Center (though executive director Sedky remains) and Kafadar being dismissed from CMES.
But, it says, “such changes are some of many needed to root out the institutionalized antisemitism within these and other programs.”
We’ll continue unpacking these findings and what they mean for Harvard in the weeks ahead — including where meaningful changes have been made already, and what deeper institutional problems these documents may point to.