Harvard University wants to have its cake and eat it, too. While insisting it doesn’t need governmental intervention to fulfill its responsibilities and commitments as a federally-funded academic institution, the university has also demonstrated little interest in actually fulfilling said responsibilities without governmental intervention.
On May 12, Harvard University President Alan Garber penned a letter to Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. In his letter, Garber claimed to share with McMahon a belief in “the importance of ending antisemitism and…foster[ing] an academic environment that encourages freedom of thought and expression…” But, Garber argued, “Harvard’s efforts to achieve these goals are undermined and threatened by the federal government’s overreach…”
A few weeks earlier, Rabbi David Wolpe – who served on Harvard’s Antisemitism Advisory Group in 2023 – was quoted in the Free Press offering an insider perspective on Garber and Harvard’s efforts on antisemitism:
When I asked Wolpe about Harvard’s current antisemitism task force, he told me that while Garber “takes antisemitism seriously, people underestimate the amount of institutional resistance at many, many levels that a president of Harvard finds when it comes to dealing with antisemitism.” Wolpe added that “many people at Harvard are themselves either mildly or seriously antisemitic,” and others “don’t believe that antisemitism is a problem, and Jews are just the paragon of white privilege.” Between those two constituencies, said Wolpe, “I don’t know how much more Garber could or couldn’t do,” and that “it’s an extraordinarily thorny path to navigate to change that ethos.”
Wolpe’s description of the environment evidences that Garber does, in fact, need external help.
Wolpe’s sentiment is also supported by the findings of a Congressional investigation into antisemitism at universities. At Harvard, it found institutional resistance among both administrators and faculty toward addressing antisemitism and anti-Israel extremism. Among the report’s findings, it was revealed that “Harvard’s faculty intervened to prevent meaningful discipline toward antisemitic conduct violations on numerous occasions.” It was also revealed that Garber himself intervened to stop a corporation senior fellow from describing as antisemitic an eliminationist slogan that called for the destruction of the Jewish state.
Despite Garber’s protestations, a toxic, fundamentally anti-academic, and antisemitic culture remains unimpeded within Harvard.
Consider just some of the recent headlines out of Harvard. Instead of facing condemnation, a student who faces criminal charges for assaulting a Jewish student during a protest was rewarded by the Harvard Law Review with a $65,000 fellowship. An undergraduate organization hosted an antisemitic, extremist speaker who told the student newspaper that “if Zionists,” i.e. the vast majority of Jews, “do not want to be compared to Nazis, they should stop acting like Nazis.” The university’s Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine organization released a statement that made the astonishingly brainless claim that Israel has been committing genocide for “over 76 years.”
There is no indication of any serious plan to counteract this bigoted and unintellectual culture. Instead, it seems Harvard is only acting to create an illusion of concern.
Harvard’s establishment of a “task force” on antisemitism after October 7 is perhaps the clearest illustration of this. The university appointed Derek Penslar, who had long been downplaying and whitewashing antisemitism at Harvard, as co-chair. The other co-chair ended up resigning shortly after her appointment, and sources close to her indicated she believed the university wasn’t taking the issue seriously. Wolpe himself also resigned from a university “Antisemitism Advisory Group” when he realized he could not make a difference given the university’s leadership.
To be clear, it’s not that Harvard is incapable of decisiveness. Rather, it seems to find urgency only when federal funding is on the line. As the new U.S. administration took power and began threatening such funding, Harvard acted quickly – by shoveling money into its Washington D.C. lobbying budget.
To be fair, Harvard isn’t the only university that requires governmental prompting to start taking antisemitism seriously. For years, CAMERA has been raising the alarm about the university’s Choices Program, which was feeding deeply flawed and at times antisemitic curriculum to K-12 students. The university refused to take any action until the threat of losing federal funding became real. Shortly after, the university suddenly discovered that Choices was “no longer economically viable” and thus it decided to “discontinue hosting” the program.
Brown, like Harvard, has also shown it can act decisively when it wants. While the university has still failed to address the rampant antisemitism and extremism pervading its Center for Middle East Studies, it moved quickly to punish a student who criticized the proliferation of administrative jobs at the university.
One can legitimately question the wisdom and even the motivations of government officials exerting financial pressure on universities over their handling of antisemitism. But the toxic culture that has burgeoned at Harvard, and the university’s failure to take meaningful steps to reverse it, discredit Garber’s self-serving declarations that he can address the problem without external intervention. As the last year and a half illustrated, the same is true for many of the nation’s top universities.
