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Muslim and Jewish students at Harvard University experienced bigotry and abuse as the Massachusetts campus was roiled by protests last year, according to two reports released on Tuesday that found many felt shunned by peers and professors for expressing political beliefs.
Harvard and other universities face extraordinary pressure from Donald Trump’s administration over allegations of antisemitism and leftist bias. The reports, jointly amounting to more than 500 pages, were the result of two taskforces Harvard set up a year before Trump took office, one on combating antisemitism and anti-Israel bias, the other on combating anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bias.
Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, wrote in a letter accompanying the reports that they included “searing personal accounts” drawn from about 50 listening sessions with about 500 students and employees.
He wrote that Harvard would do more to teach its students how to have “productive and civil dialogue” with people from different backgrounds and would promote “viewpoint diversity”.
The taskforces recommended that Harvard review its admissions, appointments, curriculum and orientation and training programs, as well as change its disciplinary processes. They also encouraged more classroom teaching about “Israel/Palestine and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” and made extensive recommendations around fostering pluralism on campus.
Garber wrote that Harvard would begin a research project on antisemitism and support “a comprehensive historical analysis” of Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians at the university. He said the school would also make its disciplinary processes more “fair, consistent and effective”.
The Trump administration has demanded that Harvard work to reduce the influence of faculty, staff and students deemed activists, as part of a crackdown on what it says is antisemitism that erupted on college campuses in 2023 after the Palestinian militant group Hamas’s attack on Israel and subsequent war in Hamas-controlled Gaza. It also urged Harvard to audit departments to ensure “viewpoint diversity” and take other steps.
The administration froze $2.2bn in grants, most of it for medical and scientific research, following Harvard’s denunciation of its demands as an unconstitutional attempt to control the school, and Harvard sued.
In a note at the start of the antisemitism taskforce report, its writers take some pains to distance their recommendations from the administration’s pressure campaign. “These significant reforms must be adopted through internal processes that have widespread buy-in within the Harvard community,” they write. “We are concerned that external parties, even if well-intentioned, will seek to compel adoption of some of our proposed reforms. If they do so, they will make it more difficult for Harvard to fix itself.”
Doxxing and bullying
Both Harvard taskforces conducted an online joint survey last year, gathering 2,295 responses from students, faculty and staff.
The survey found 47% of Muslim respondents and 15% of Jewish respondents did not feel physically safe on campus compared to 6% for Christians and non-believers, while 92% of Muslims and 61% of Jews felt there were academic or professional repercussions for expressing their political beliefs.
The taskforce on anti-Muslim bias said Arab-American students reported being called “terrorist, baby-killer, towelhead and antisemite” after they wore a keffiyeh to show solidarity with Palestinians. They heard repeatedly about a culture of fear and intimidation exacerbated by the doxxing of pro-Palestinian students falsely accused of supporting terrorism, the marginalization of Palestinian perspectives in official university discussions, and anxiety around retribution for expressing their political beliefs.
According to the taskforce on antisemitism, in late 2023 the campus became to many “what appeared to be a space for the unfettered expression of pro-Palestinian solidarity and rage at Israel – a rage that many Jewish and especially Israeli students felt was directed against them as well”.
The antisemitism taskforce chose not to apply one definition of antisemitism, in part given how contested the term has become, especially since 7 October 2023 and ensuing protests against Israel. “The Task Force opted to prioritize faculty, staff, and students’ actual experiences over definitions developed by outside parties,” the report says. “When members of the Harvard community experience hateful conduct and exclusion, the problem is the conduct and the exclusion – not whether it maps onto a lengthy definition of antisemitism or any other form of bias.
“Perhaps the best way to describe the existence of many Jewish and Israeli students at Harvard in the 2023-24 academic year is that their presence had become triggering, or the subject of political controversy,” the report says, with students finding themselves “on the wrong side of a political binary that provided no room for the complexity of history or current politics”.
Many Jewish or Israeli students reported being bullied or ostracized for their actual or assumed support for Israel or Zionism, or found themselves accused of supporting genocide.
A smaller group of anti-Zionist Jewish students who joined some of the pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protests said they felt shunned by Jewish campus groups.
In a statement, the Council on American Islamic Relations’ research and advocacy director, Corey Saylor, said his Muslim advocacy group stood by its designation of Harvard as hostile to Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians.
“If the university actually acts on its taskforce’s report to improve academic freedom, free expression, and address the rampant anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia that have been downplayed or outright ignored in public discourse, this may indicate that it is time to change that designation,” Saylor said.
Vlad Khaykin, an executive vice-president with the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish organization, sharply criticized how long it took Harvard “to even begin an honest reckoning” of antisemitism on campus, adding it “is not merely negligent – it is a disgrace of historic proportions.”
“Sadly, this is symptomatic of a broader trend we are seeing across academia,” Khaykin said. “Harvard is both a symptom and a progenitor of the problem, providing the imprimatur of academic legitimacy to naked antisemitism.”
