a day ago
Harvard withheld their degrees for participating in a pro-Palestinian protest. They don't regret it.
'It felt like a culmination of things that had already been happening,' said Joshi in an interview this week with the Globe. 'It felt inseparable from the way they were treating pro-Palestinian protests in general.'
A year since Harvard refused to award degrees to the 13 graduating seniors who participated in a pro-Palestinian encampment on Harvard Yard, the students say the experience left them feeling disillusioned about their Ivy League education and frustrated with what transpired, but grounded in their activism and largely unscathed. A handful are now pursuing graduate degrees from other elite universities, and others are working. Some are still participating in protests.
A pro-Palestinian protest encampment behind a gate of Harvard Yard in April 2024.
Andrew Burke-Stevenson for The Boston Globe
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All were eventually awarded their Harvard degrees in the months after their intended graduation, the graduates said.
After the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas began, the 2024 tent encampments on Harvard Yard became one of the key symbols of a pro-Palestinian student movement that spread across the nation. At Harvard, both Jewish and Muslim students reported feeling uncomfortable, while a
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On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted 251 people from Israel. Gaza health authorities have said that Israel's retaliatory offensive has
The Harvard student protesters agreed days before commencement in 2024 to dismantle the encampment; university leaders
Days later, the students found out they wouldn't graduate since they were not in 'good standing' with the university due to multiple campus policy violations related to the encampment. That prompted another wave of outrage among students and faculty, more than 1,000 of whom reportedly
Graduating students walked out of the 373nd Commencement at Harvard University to call attention to the plight of Palestinians on May 23, 2024. The university's top governing board rejected the recommendation of faculty to allow 13 pro-Palestinian students who participated in a three-week encampment in Harvard Yard to graduate with their classmates.
Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff
Some protestors, including Joshi, were allowed to don their caps and gowns at Harvard's 2024 Commencement and walk across the stage. Joshi said she was handed a piece of white cardboard instead of a degree.
Others, however, were barred from commencement.
Syd Sanders, 23, was told to withdraw from the university (a directive that he says was later dropped) and was banned from graduation. He had several ongoing student disciplinary cases at the time related to what he described as 'a long and storied career' in on-campus activism.
'They kept trying to evict me,' Sanders said in an interview this week, 'They would go by my dorm and be like, 'Why is all your stuff still here?''
Sanders was the final of the 13 students to receive a degree, to his knowledge.
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'They mailed it to me in February,' Sanders said.
In a statement, Harvard spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo said that the university does not comment on student matters and did not further comment for this story.
The impact of the withheld degrees varied by graduate.
Phoebe Barr, 24, was among the protesters who were placed on an involuntary leave by the university, meaning she lost access to her dorm room and could not work at her on-campus job for the remainder of the semester.
'I was homeless and unemployed very suddenly,' Barr said. She stayed on the couch of someone who offered her a place to crash. Those are the memories of Harvard she wants to recall, she said, the acts of kindness in the community.
'For all the hostility we received, we also saw a real outpouring of support from the community of Harvard students, faculty, and those who lived around us in Cambridge,' she said.
Barr was denied access to the Harvard campus at the end of her senior year.
Lane Turner/Globe Staff
Barr's temporarily
withheld history and literature degree also impacted her search for a job after college: She could not list her undergraduate degree as her highest level of education. Not knowing when she would get her degree, she said, was difficult and stressful as she cobbled together cover letters and resumes. To potential employers, she wrote that her degree was still pending.
Her degree was conferred in July last year; she got a job at a Boston University library that fall.
Joshi's probation was initially to last until May 2025, meaning she would graduate a year later than planned. That timing
was a problem: If she weren't in good standing with the university, she'd lose her Harvard fellowship to fund a master's degree at the University of Cambridge in England.
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The funding securing her spot at Cambridge eventually came through after Harvard conferred her degree over the summer.
Sanders, however, said that, at least for him, the lack of a degree didn't have any impact on his professional life. He still moved to California and got his dream job as a union organizer. 'I can't imagine a career in college activism was an inhibitor to becoming a union organizer — it was probably an asset," Sanders said.
The encampment taught him how to do effective community organizing, lessons he said he is applying today as he helps organize support for immigrants targeted for Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests.
'It was the most sacred moment of community I have ever felt in my life,' Sanders said of the Harvard encampment. 'No regrets.'
A protester hung a Palestine flag in the pro-Palestinian encampment in Harvard Yard on May 7, 2024.
Lane Turner/Globe Staff
Sanders is now an activist in Oakland and is working as a bartender and waiter (he quit his union organizing job).
'Just like everybody else who graduated on time, I'm figuring life out,' Sanders said. He's thinking of applying to grad school or getting another union organizer job; he still participates in pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
Had the protesters' probation resulted in them walking at graduation this year, they would've been at a much different ceremony. This May, Garber was greeted by
'It was pretty jarring,' said Barr, who attended the commencement to take part in a pro-Palestinian demonstration. 'Last year, he was booed by the audience.'
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While she is glad to see Harvard fighting Trump, she said it does not negate her frustrations with how the university handled the encampment last year.
Joshi added that while there is a lot of excitement for Harvard's stance against Trump, the school's stance on free speech and academic freedom still 'rings hollow' to her.
She is now finishing a master's degree in sociology at the University of Cambridge — funded by the Harvard fellowship that almost didn't materialize — and writing her dissertation on South Asian involvement in the Palestinian movement in the UK. After graduation, she plans to find legal work at a nonprofit.
Overall, she remembers the Harvard protests as a success: They drew attention to the thousands of children who have died in Gaza and will never have the chance to grow up to get a degree, she said.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
Erin Douglas can be reached at
