Harvard Promises Changes After Reports on Antisemitism and Islamophobia

New York Times

29-04-2025

A Harvard task force released a scathing account of the university on Tuesday, finding that antisemitism had infiltrated coursework, social life, the hiring of some faculty members and the worldview of certain academic programs.
A separate report on anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian bias on campus, also released on Tuesday, found widespread discomfort and alienation among those students as well, with 92 percent of Muslim survey respondents saying they believed they would face an academic or professional penalty for expressing their political opinions.
The findings, conveyed in densely packed reports that are hundreds of pages long, come at a delicate time for the university. Harvard is being scrutinized by the Trump administration over accusations of antisemitism, and is fighting the administration's withdrawal of billions of dollars in federal funding.
Harvard has sued the Trump administration in hopes of restoring the funding, the first university to do so. Other schools that have been targeted by the administration are watching the litigation closely.
In a letter accompanying the two reports, Dr. Alan Garber, Harvard's president, apologized for the problems that the task forces revealed. He said the Hamas attack on Israel in 2023 and the war that followed had brought long simmering tensions to the surface, and promised to address them.
'The 2023-24 academic year was disappointing and painful,' Dr. Garber, who took office in January 2024, wrote in the letter. 'I am sorry for the moments when we failed to meet the high expectations we rightfully set for our community.'
He continued: 'Harvard cannot — and will not — abide bigotry.'
The antisemitism report was produced by a task force made up mainly of faculty, but that also included students, a former Hillel director and Harvard's chief community and campus life officer, whose title was changed from chief diversity and inclusion officer on Tuesday. The report said that bias incidents had been occurring before the Hamas attack and were intensified by the war in Gaza. It found that antisemitism seemed to be more pronounced in branches of the university with a social justice bent, including the graduate school of education, the divinity school and the school of public health.
A similar task force held hundreds of conversations with Muslim, Arab and Palestinian students, staff and faculty members about anti-Muslim bias. That task force summed up the feelings expressed by many of those people in two words: 'abandoned and silenced.'
The university commissioned the two reports, which were not meant to be investigative. The authors did not seek to verify the experiences described by the people who were surveyed.
The antisemitism report recounted an episode in which a student asked not to work with an Israeli partner, and an instructor granted the request because 'in their view, a student who supported the cause of an oppressed group should not be forced to work with a student identified as a member of an 'oppressor group.''
In another episode recounted in the report, people arriving at a visitation day for newly admitted Harvard Medical School encountered students yelling 'Free Palestine' from a walkway.
The report said that some courses on Israel and Palestine were partisan and politicized. These courses were disproportionately taught by nontenure track faculty members, who were not as carefully vetted as more senior faculty are, the report said.
After Oct. 7, the report said, there was an 'avalanche' of posts by members of the Harvard community trafficking in antisemitic tropes. Jewish students told stories of university-run training sessions about privilege in which they said they were told that being Jewish made them more privileged than being white.
Israeli students felt shunned. 'Some people, upon learning that I'm Israeli, tell me they won't talk with someone from a 'genocidal country,'' an undergraduate is quoted saying.
The university recently adopted a contested definition of antisemitism, put forward by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, that counts some criticism of Israel as antisemitic. The definition is disputed, and critics say that it silences speech.
The anecdotes — gathered from listening sessions with some 500 participants — could expose Harvard to more attacks from the Trump administration.
'The more time we spent on this problem, the more we learned about how demonization of Israel has impacted a much wider swath of campus life than we would have imagined,' the report said. It added: 'The bullying and attempts to intimidate Jewish students were in some places successful.'
The two task forces worked together to create a campuswide survey that received nearly 2,300 responses from faculty, staff and students. It found that 6 percent of Christian respondents reported feeling physically unsafe on campus, while 15 percent of Jewish respondents and 47 percent of Muslim respondents reported the same. (The university does not track the total population of these groups on campus.)
In addition to the 92 percent of Muslim respondents who worried about expressing their views, 51 percent of Christian respondents and 61 percent of Jewish respondents said they felt the same way.
'Freedom of expression is one of the most critical issues facing the entire Harvard campus community,' the anti-Muslim bias task force said.
The results of the survey underscored a dilemma that Harvard and other universities have faced as protests and counterprotests over the war in Gaza intensified. Some Jewish students and alumni have expressed worries about activism and programming veering into anti-Israel bigotry, for example, while supporters of the Palestinian cause say that categorizing their opposition to the war and Israel as antisemitism silences their speech.
Some of the students interviewed expressed a constant fear of having their pro-Palestinian views revealed along with their identities, which they worried would lead to revoked job offers. They reported being called slurs like 'terrorist' and 'towelhead' for wearing kaffiyehs.
Palestinian students said they felt unsupported by Harvard administrators as they mourned loved ones who had died in Gaza.
'The feeling over and over again for Palestinians is that their lives don't matter as much,' one student told the task force.
Pro-Palestinian faculty said they worried that every comment in class and every article in their syllabuses would be dissected and that the administration was seeking to curb speech to placate critics.
'There was a palpable sense,' the report stated, 'that free speech and academic freedom are under grave threat and that many forms of student activism may effectively be dead.'
In a counterpoint to many findings in the antisemitism report, the task force found that Jewish students who were critical of Israel sometimes did not feel welcome at major Jewish organizations, like Hillel and Chabad, on campus. It recommended better integrating religious life into campus life.
In his letter, Dr. Garber listed a series of actions the university would take to curb bigotry that closely paralleled a list of demands by the Trump administration's own antisemitism task force.
Those demands deeply shook Harvard when they were delivered to the university on April 11, because they were viewed as an unconstitutional government infringement on academic freedom.
The Trump administration demanded that Harvard institute 'merit-based' hiring and admissions reform, meaning without regard to race, religion, sex and national origin. And it demanded an outside audit of the student body, faculty, staff and leadership, for 'viewpoint diversity,' within each department, field or teaching unit.
It also called for an outside audit of programs 'that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture,' specifying the divinity, education and public health schools among others as 'centers of concern.' And it called for sanctions against faculty members who discriminated against Jewish students or incited protests that broke campus rules.
Dr. Garber said that the university's deans were 'reviewing recommendations concerning admissions, appointments, curriculum and orientation and training programs.'
He also promised a universitywide initiative to 'promote and support viewpoint diversity.'