House education committee threatens to subpoena Bowdoin College over antisemitism records
Senior GOP officials on the committee allege that the Maine liberal arts school failed to comply with repeated requests for documentation regarding disciplinary action taken against those involved with a campus encampment
Tim Greenway/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images
Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, on February 3, 2014
The House Education and Workforce Committee threatened on Monday to subpoena Bowdoin College, accusing the school of failing to comply with the committee’s requests for information regarding antisemitism on campus.
A letter from Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), the committee chair, and Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT), a subcommittee chair, states that the Maine liberal arts college failed to comply with the committee’s repeated requests for documentation regarding disciplinary action taken against those involved with an encampment on the school’s campus earlier this year, as well as all students disciplined for antisemitic incidents since Oct. 7, 2023.
The committee leaders provided a June 16 deadline for the documentation requested, and stated they would pursue subpoenas if the deadline is not met.
The letter states that “Bowdoin provided a narrative response that briefly summarized the administration’s conversations with the encampment participants, but it did not provide documents related to any disciplinary action, documents related to any understanding it reached to disband the encampment, or a list of student disciplinary or conduct cases relating to alleged antisemitic incidents or encampments.”
After being pressed further, the school provided a “a brief summary of Bowdoin’s actions addressing the encampment and noted that the College revoked the charter of Students for Justice in Palestine for the remainder of the 2024-2025 academic year and the next academic year.”
The school subsequently provided 225 pages of documents, including summaries of the school’s actions regarding the encampment, “a generalized summary of disciplinary measures taken against 66 students, and a summary of actions taken against Students for Justice in Palestine.”
According to the committee, the vast majority of the documents included were “publicly available policies and procedures, none of which are directly responsive to the Committee’s requests,” lacked the “individualized detail requested” or were public emails from administrators to the campus community about the encampment.