Did Harvard University publish a corrected version of a letter from Education Secretary Linda McMahon, complete with red pen markups? No, that's not true: the corrected version was posted by an X user in May 2025. Harvard's website and social media accounts showed no trace of the sarcastically annotated letter.
The claim appeared in a May 6, 2025, post on X (archived here), which consisted of an image of the corrected letter and the following text description:
HARVARD WON THIS ROUND!
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon wrote a letter to Harvard. The university responded by marking up the letter for spelling and punctuation mistakes- and then shared it on social media.
Your thoughts?
This is what it looked like at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot)
Education Secretary Linda McMahon did publish an authentic letter to Harvard on May 5, 2025, but Harvard did not make the red pen corrections and did not post the corrected letter. The earliest version of it that we could find was posted earlier on May 6 by Daniel Luo, an economics PhD student at MIT.
A search of Harvard's website, as well as its Facebook, X, YouTube, Instagram and LinkedIn profiles, revealed no trace of the letter.
