Tuskegee, Taylor U, Austin Community College Heads Testify

The presidents of Tuskegee and Taylor Universities and the chancellor of Austin Community College District will testify this week before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, according to a committee news release. The listed topic is “The State of Higher Education.”

“Rarely are HBCUs or religiously oriented universities mentioned in conversations about how to improve America’s higher education system,” committee chair Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican, said in the release. “This needs to change because they have their own valuable stories to tell.”

Tuskegee is a historically Black university in Alabama and Taylor is a Christian university in Indiana.

Also appearing at the meeting—which begins 10 a.m. Eastern time Wednesday and will be live streamed—are the Student Borrower Protection Center’s executive director and a research fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. Not appearing will be Harvard University president Alan Garber, whom Cassidy said he invited.

“It is universally known that Harvard’s medical research, funded in part by NIH, has made great contributions to making America healthy,” Cassidy said in the release. “At the same time, there appears to have been tolerance of antisemitism on Harvard’s campus. This would have been the chance for Harvard to emphasize its value as a research institution and to tell the committee and the country how it is addressing antisemitism.”

Harvard didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment Monday on why Garber isn’t attending. Former Harvard president Claudine Gay resigned after her December 2023 testimony to the House Education and the Workforce Committee on addressing antisemitism was widely panned (Gay also faced plagiarism allegations).