By Madeleine Farr | Special to the Courier

The U.S. House Committee on Education and Workforce and its higher education subcommittee sent Pomona College a letter March 27 requesting information about “antisemitic incidents” on campus since Oct. 7, 2023; many in the 5C community remain uncertain about Pomona’s plans to respond and cooperate with the investigation.

The letter cited the Associated Students of Pomona College conducting a referendum aligned with the “antisemitic” Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, the pro-Palestine demonstration at Alexander Hall and encampment on Marston Quad last year, and the occupation of Carnegie Hall on Oct. 7, 2024 as examples of such incidents.

Acting Pomona President Robert Gaines informed the college community about the letter March 30 via email and linked it in his message. He added that, in an effort to be transparent with students, Pomona “has two instructive legal obligations.”

The first, according to Gaines, was to respond “in good faith” to the committee’s request for information, given that House committees have the right under federal law to ask for and receive such information. The second was to protect student privacy as stipulated in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

“We take this responsibility seriously and have consistently sought to follow the spirit and letter of this legal requirement,” Gaines said, referring to Pomona’s FERPA obligations.

The day before Gaines informed the Pomona community of the House’s letter, an article by 5C student publication Undercurrents circled widely on Instagram with the headline, “Pomona College says it will turn over student disciplinary records to Congress.”

Undercurrents cited Pomona’s statement to a March 27 article by the LA Times in which the college said they would “fully cooperate” and is “firmly committed to assuring the right of all of our students, including our Jewish students, to a Pomona education, including to taking every appropriate step to prevent antisemitism.”

Gaines followed up on his previous message to the community in a March 31 email with the subject line, “Correcting Misinformation Circulating on Campus.”

“I have been made aware of a flyer being distributed on campus that suggests the College will expose student identities in its response to the recent Congressional inquiry we received,” he wrote. “This flyer misrepresents matters grossly, and I am concerned about the unfounded worries it could create about matters of critical importance to all of us.”

Gaines reaffirmed the college’s commitment to FERPA, referring to his email the day before.

“This means, contrary to the misinformation on the flyer and in some media reports, that the College will not expose student identities unless obligations to the law stipulate otherwise—and that is not the case at this time,” he wrote. “The College cannot act lawlessly, but the College will take every appropriate step to protect student identities.”

Gaines did not explicitly name the LA Times or Undercurrents.

Some 5C faculty amplified his message by forwarding it to their own students, including Scripps College Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students Dr. Sha Bradley on April 2.

Pomona College sophomore Mira Chenok, like many students, heard about the House committee’s letter before receiving Gaines’ message to the school community.

“Speaking from experience as a Jewish student at Pomona, some of the incidents that happened last year should be taken seriously and were harmful to the Jewish community,” she said. “But the general overall messaging, with some exceptions, I didn’t feel was blatantly antisemitic.”

As a result, Chenok said, she thought that an investigation of this scope was going too far. She added that Pomona’s slightly lower profile than some other schools being targeted by the Trump administration, such as Columbia University, might cause the situation to play out differently — but that she couldn’t predict how.