US House committee subpoenas Harvard over tuition costs
(Reuters) -The U.S. House Judiciary Committee sent a subpoena to Harvard University on Thursday seeking documents and communications for its probe into tuition costs and financial aid for Ivy League students.
A letter to Harvard President Alan Garber, signed by committee chairman Jim Jordan and U.S. Representative Scott Fitzgerald, both Republicans, described Harvard's response to previous requests for documents as inadequate and said the committee needs the documents "to fulfill its oversight and legislative responsibilities."
A spokesperson for Harvard said in a statement: "We are disappointed that the Committee has chosen to issue a subpoena and believe it is unwarranted, unfair and unnecessary."
It added: "There is no basis for an allegation of collusion in Harvard's setting of tuition and financial aid."
The investigation into tuition is part of a larger fight between Harvard and the White House and Congress, including over cuts to federal funding and efforts to block foreign students from attending the university.
President Donald Trump has said he is trying to force change at Harvard - and other top-level universities across the U.S. - because in his view they have been captured by leftist "woke" thought and become bastions of antisemitism.
The subpoena comes as part of an investigation by the Republican-controlled U.S. House Judiciary Committee into whether Harvard and other Ivy League schools broke antitrust laws by raising tuition costs.
"We are concerned that Ivy League member institutions appear to be collectively raising tuition prices while engaging in perfect price discrimination by offering selective financial aid packages to maximize profits," the letter to Harvard's Garber said.
U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee, called the investigation "plainly ridiculous" and "based on pathetically weak allegations."
The Harvard spokesperson said the school has produced thousands of pages of documents on its tuition-setting process and financial aid.
While the Judiciary Committee said it had received hundreds of requested documents, it added that some of them contained publicly available facts and lacked specific information that was desired.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNN
16 minutes ago
- CNN
Analysis: Trump is losing support among independent voters. Who are they?
We'll have to wait and see exactly what the American bombing raid on Iranian nuclear sites accomplished and how far it set back the country's nuclear ambitions. The White House and Pentagon have launched a concerted effort to convince Americans the mission was successful and needed. At a Pentagon news conference, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine went into great detail to explain the years of planning that underpinned readiness for the attack and how it was executed. Details like those Caine shared could help sway public opinion and bring Americans behind strikes. But the early assessment of how the public views the strikes is probably not what the administration was hoping for. A majority, 56%, disapproved of the strikes in a CNN poll released this week, before conflicting assessments of the mission's success. The results in CNN's poll fall along predictable ideological lines. Democrats will pretty much always disapprove of what the Trump administration does, and Republicans will pretty much always approve. Here's how CNN's polling team put it in their report: Majorities of independents (60%) and Democrats (88%) disapprove of the decision to take military action in Iran. Republicans largely approve (82%). But just 44% of Republicans strongly approve of the airstrikes, far smaller than the group of Democrats who strongly disapprove (60%), perhaps reflecting that some in Trump's coalition are broadly distrustful of military action abroad. It's an obvious rule of US politics that independent voters are generally the ones who might, as their opinions shift sway, tilt power in the country. And on a range of issues, they have been turning against Trump. CNN's Aaron Blake looked last week at numerous polls on Trump's sweeping domestic policy bill. 'Independents opposed the bill by around a 3-to-1 margin … The KFF and Fox News polls – the ones with the fewest undecideds – showed 7 in 10 independents opposed it,' Blake wrote. On what may be Trump's signature issue, deportations and immigration policy, CNN's polling editor Ariel Edwards-Levy wrote about a CNN poll in April, 'more than half of independents now say they have no real confidence in him to deal with the topic, with 56% now saying he has gone too far on deportations.' On tariffs, the economy and government cuts, Trump has failed, at least so far, to convince Americans who don't identify with either party, that his agenda is the right thing to do. I went to CNN's chief data analyst, Harry Enten, who has been tracking this trend for some time. 'It's pretty clear that independents and independent voters have turned against Trump,' he told me. Back in April, Enten's analysis said that Trump had the worst approval rating on record with independents at that point in a presidency. 'His issue is he has completely lost the center of the electorate,' Enten said, offering two very obvious and simple reasons why. Independents don't like what Trump is doing on the economy. They don't seem to like the bulk of his agenda otherwise (see the 'Big, Beautiful Bill'). This will present major problems for Trump and the GOP going forward. 'Now, it's possible that Trump and the GOP can do well going forward without independents breaking overwhelmingly for them,' Enten said, pointing out that independents broke for Trump in 2024. 'The problem is you can't be losing independents 20+ points and survive in American politics,' he added. At the same time, independents are hard to track for a variety of reasons. Unlike Republicans and Democrats, they don't act as a unified voting bloc, as Edwards-Levy and CNN's Jennifer Agiesta wrote a few years ago. 'Plenty of independents are in fact partisan and they're certainly not de facto moderates,' Edwards-Levy told me. What do independents have in common? 'They're less strongly tethered to particular partisan loyalties and less likely to be closely engaged with politics, all of which makes their views potentially more malleable than those of stronger partisans,' Edwards-Levy said. In a recent Washington Post poll about the Trump's agenda bill, for instance, only 18% of Democrats and 25% of Republicans said they hadn't heard anything about the controversial proposal to extend Trump's first-term tax cuts, create new tax cuts and slash spending, including on Medicaid. It was a much larger portion of independents, 34%, who hadn't heard anything at all about the president's top legislative priority.
Chicago Tribune
31 minutes ago
- Chicago Tribune
Editorial: Is centrism in the Democratic Party dead? Let's hope not.
An interesting question has emerged after socialist Zohran Mamdani's primary triumph in the race for New York City mayor. Is the primary electorate simply unreceptive to centrist points of view? In that case, Democrats nationally are likely to spend a good long while in the political wilderness. Or, is this high-profile loss, and others of recent vintage, for the middle lane of the Democratic Party due more to poor centrist standard-bearers (and enigmatic extremists) rather than the actual political positions themselves? There are many, of course, who argue Chicago recently went through its own version of what New York City just experienced. But NYC, given its size and prominence, is generating political shockwaves far exceeding the reaction when Brandon Johnson pulled off his own surprise win in 2023. Establishment Democrats, and NYC's financial elite, rallied around Andrew Cuomo, a polarizing figure who had the benefit of widespread name recognition but also the massive liability of having been forced out of office as New York governor in 2021 because of sexual harassment allegations (which he continues to deny). Cuomo saw this moment, with an incumbent New York mayor crippled by scandal, as his opportunity to resurrect his career, positioning himself as the only seasoned, competent politician in the race able to steer the Big Apple back to normalcy. Trouble was, too many New York City Democrats — particularly young voters who chafe at the city's near-impossible cost of living — weren't interested in preserving the status quo and recoiled at voting for such a scandal-tarred candidate. They wanted change, and the 33-year-old Mamdani, a state assemblyman with little to no managerial experience, promised to address their most pressing concerns. Rent. Food costs. Transit. And perhaps more importantly, he campaigned with verve and creativity, striking even plenty of folks who thought his ideas were impractical as a better leader than the 67-year-old Cuomo, who relied on attack ads funded by the likes of billionaire and former Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Former Cuomo aide (and now critic) Lis Smith spoke for many observers when she diagnosed Mamdani's win this way: 'If you don't want to lose to a socialist, don't run a fatally flawed candidate like Andrew Cuomo.' We could not have put that better ourselves. But does the NYC establishment's failure to back the right horse mean that the centrist platform on which Cuomo ran is a loser with Democratic voters, too? It's tempting to conclude as such, and far-left voices are trying to sell that story. We think what's happening within the Democratic tent is more nuanced. For example, we've seen politicians on the far left (including Mamdani) seize on the so-called abundance agenda popularized by podcaster Ezra Klein in making their appeals to voters. Klein critiques blue cities and states that have made building projects Democratic politicians enthusiastically support (think high-speed rail and affordable housing) exorbitantly costly and difficult to complete, due to red tape and environmental bells and whistles. There are vast differences in approach to pursuing the abundance agenda. Mamdani and others on the far left place more emphasis on governmental involvement while center-right and center-left voices argue that the private sector should be freed to build more. But the critique itself is a centrist one, and leftists wouldn't be seeking to offer their own version if they didn't tacitly agree with Klein's criticisms. All of this is to say that centrism and pragmatic politics are no means dead in the Democratic Party. What is kaput — or should be — is running tarnished political brands from yesteryear to try to stop younger, fresher, more radical candidates from succeeding. President Donald Trump's return to office notwithstanding, voters yearn for new blood as much as they desire new ideas. They want to see politicians with the energy and creativity to reframe policies and positions that establishment figures have reduced to snooze-worthy buzzwords and make them relevant to a highly restive electorate. Election after election has demonstrated that Americans, both in blue cities and red towns and villages, are unhappy with how things are going, nationally and often locally too. Voters also want to see candidates willing to challenge their own party's orthodoxies. Authenticity — a quality Mamdani seemed to have in abundance — is not optional in today's politics. Yes, we'll allow that it's more difficult to come off as exciting when you're espousing common-sense policy positions and admitting there are limits to what government should or can do to improve people's lives. But it's not impossible. A certain former Chicagoan named Barack Obama demonstrated that it can be done. Following the beating Democrats took at the polls last November, the party has barely started to chart a way forward to be more competitive at the national level. Voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin are highly unlikely to find full-throated, Mamdani-style socialism to be a viable alternative to ascendant Trumpism. Centrists need to get in the game. And that means offering up fresh faces willing to take chances.
USA Today
35 minutes ago
- USA Today
Supreme Court decision dump
Good morning!🙋🏼♀️ I'm Nicole Fallert. Can we survive this record heat? Supreme Court is dropping major decisions in one final swoop The court is dropping the rest of its biggest decisions in one final swoop. Six major rulings related to President Donald Trump and birthright citizenship, LGBTQ+ schoolbooks and online porn will be released in an ultimate decision drop on Friday. Most anticipated: Whether the court will allow Trump to enforce his changes to birthright citizenship while his new policy is being litigated. The ruling could make it harder for judges to block any of the president's policies. Time off request: Not approved President Donald Trump directed Republican lawmakers to stay in Washington and skip a planned recess heading into the July 4 holiday if they must, in order to get his signature tax bill to his desk by Independence Day. Trump's administration said it still expected Congress to meet the ambitious timeline, but the major tax, spending and policy legislative package suffered a blow on Thursday when the Senate's parliamentarian ruled that several key Medicaid provisions designed to help cajole nervous Republicans into voting yes can't be included in the bill. Trump and fellow Republicans aim to reduce Medicaid spending by requiring work by able-bodied adults and denying access to non-citizens. More news to know now What's the weather today? Check your local forecast here. Iran-Israel conflict leaves Iranian Americans feeling helpless ~ Reza Rajebi, an Iranian-born novelist and physician who now lives in Houston, Texas, said he worries daily about loved ones still living in his homeland. As the conflict between Israel and Iran rests on a fragile ceasefire, Rajebi and other Iranian Americans told USA TODAY about dismay at American involvement and fear for loved ones still in Iran, saying a resurgence in violence could ripple around the world. Surviving abuse: Cassie Ventura Fine and the unlikely bond with her mother-in-law Pamela Parker Fine didn't know much about the woman, best known as Cassie, who later that year would become her daughter-in-law. She knew only that her son was in love, and that Cassie came to support them at the sentencing hearing for a high-profile domestic violence case against a football coach at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Four more years would pass before the two women would learn that they had more in common than either of them wanted to share. Cassie would become the main witness in Sean "Diddy" Combs' sex trafficking and racketeering case. Both would stand up to powerful men. Both women walked away from men they loved – men who had hurt them. Today's talkers 'AWOK' no more?! For decades "Anna Wintour OK" has been the coveted signature of approval from Vogue's editor-in-chief. But now Anna Wintour, 75, will step down this year and the magazine will seek a new head of editorial content as part of a different organizational structure adopted four years ago. The style icon, known for her stern management style and iconic A-frame bob, will stay on as Condé Nast's chief content officer and Vogue's global editorial director. Since her start at Vogue in 1988, Wintour's influence on style extends far beyond magazine pages. Photo of the day: Wave to the bride! The world's elite are gathered in Venice, Italy, this weekend for the nuptials of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and journalist Lauren Sánchez. Celebrities in superyachts and taxi boats are sailing into the three-day wedding party while protests spread throughout the city ahead of the lavish wedding. Nicole Fallert is a newsletter writer at USA TODAY, sign up for the email here. Want to send Nicole a note? Shoot her an email at NFallert@
