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With the Trump administration threatening to cut off its federal support, Harvard recently released its long-awaited internal report detailing rampant national-origin discrimination on campus – especially against Israelis and Jews. The administration claims that Harvard is rotten to the bone, hollowed out by ideological one-sidedness and an emphasis on social-justice activism rather than genuine inquiry. The university has countered that while it is working on rooting out discrimination, the administration has “overreached” to target the substance of what is studied and taught.
The report, prepared by the Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, puts the prestigious university in a difficult position. Its leadership has never denied that it has a serious discrimination problem, which has been substantiated in multiple reports compiled by the Task Force, alumni groups, and lawmakers. Nearly a year ago, the Task Force recommended that Harvard take “substantive disciplinary action” against those contributing to the “dire” conditions for Israeli students, in particular. No disciplinary action has been taken. Instead, a Harvard Law student who was videoed assaulting an Israeli classmate recently received a $65,000 school-sponsored fellowship to work at the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
Rather than expel the harassers and assaulters, Harvard has gone on the offensive. While admitting that it can improve its anti-discrimination efforts, it has accused the Trump administration of using antisemitism as an excuse to meddle with universities’ internal affairs. “No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” wrote Harvard President Alan Garber on April 14. The main Trump administration demands Garber rejected were “requirements to ‘audit’ the viewpoints of our student body, faculty, staff, and to ‘reduce the power’ of certain students, faculty, and administrators targeted because of their ideological views.”
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As the new report reveals, though, those demands have a lot to do with fighting discrimination. Example after example shows how ideological lopsidedness and occasional downright unseriousness fosters bigotry against Jews and Israelis. Fighting discrimination may well require more thoroughgoing reform than Garber is willing to offer.
Perhaps the most flagrant example in the report concerned a “Pyramid of White Supremacy” taught in a mandatory class at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. It categorizes “day-to-day racist norms” from the “covert” to the “overt” and scaling up to “genocide.” Most of it simply demonizes popular views that leftist radicals hate. The middle of the pyramid includes “colorblindness,” the “myth of meritocracy” and “anti-affirmative action.” But right there alongside it is “Anti-Defamation League” and “anti-BDS,” or the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against Israel.
The pyramid should primarily be a source of embarrassment. It reduces a Harvard graduate education to ideological indoctrination – a conspiratorial one, at that. But it also shows how bigotry against Jews and Israel, usually for being seen as “white,” fits right in with progressive orthodoxies about social justice.
That phenomenon is everywhere. As the report documents, Harvard students and faculty who engage in national-origin discrimination repeatedly grounded their discrimination in progressive justifications about victimhood, colonialism, and race.
When a School of Public Health webinar turned to criticizing Israel – doubtless on the intersectional theory that public health and the Middle East are somehow related – Jewish students asked why. They were met with a distinctly leftist retort: “Who is more marginalized, Jews or Palestinians?” Aside from the breathtaking historical illiteracy of such a question, it reveals the pervasiveness of the attitude thought to be confined to leftist activists: If you are not “marginalized” as a group, bigotry against you is no big deal.
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Harvard’s Divinity School told Jewish students to “embrace… ‘de-zionization.’” The report concludes that in doing so, Harvard faculty “attribute to Jews two great sins: first, in the Levant, the establishment of the State of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba; and second, in the United States, participation in White supremacy.” On this view, treating Jews poorly is no different from harassing someone for joining the KKK.
These are just a few examples, which do not even get into the horror of the cues Harvard students have taken from their teachers. The report puts it succinctly: “The notion that acceptance in a politically liberal or progressive on-campus space is contingent upon disavowing Israel was a recurring theme.”
“Friends who are more outwardly Jewish and Israelis, the things they are experiencing are horrible. I feel lucky I don’t look Jewish,” said one undergraduate. Jews and Israelis certainly don’t need to put up with being called genocide apologists or white supremacists as they traverse the quad. “Put your headphones in, make sure you’re not outwardly Jewish, and just walk to class.”
The problem is that they might just hear the exact same thing when they get there.
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