This piece is firsthand account from a woman who served on Harvard’s Antisemitism Advisory Group. Her account does not paint the school in a favorable light.
From the Wall Street Journal:
Harvard’s Antisemitism Begins in the ClassroomI had the dubious distinction last fall of serving on Harvard’s Antisemitism Advisory Group. It went so badly that I wound up as a witness in Congress’s investigation of Harvard. When I spoke at a summit for the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance last week, I had to be escorted across campus by an armed guard.At our advisory group’s first meeting last October, a senior Harvard administrator admitted, “Students are very ignorant about the Middle East or Israel or Zionism.” If only there were an educational institution with a $50.7 billion endowment that could address that ignorance.No one in the advisory group argued against free speech. Students can chant “globalize the intifada” all they want. As the screaming students point out, “intifada” simply means “uprising.” True. Also, “Sieg Heil” simply means “Hail victory,” and Confederate flags are simply regional symbols. Students can scream whatever racist things they like. But this evades the question: Why is Harvard full of screaming racists?Our recommendations sought to address this question, but Harvard’s only major reforms since have been rules around protests—suggesting that Harvard believes it plays no role in shaping its students’ ideas. The school completely ignored our most important recommendation, which suggested that if students raised concerns about antisemitic content in courses or lectures, Harvard should review those academic events—not for the opinions expressed, but for academic rigor.What is Harvard doing to advance academic rigor? As the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance revealed in a May 2024 audit of Harvard’s educational offerings, the answer is worse than nothing.Harvard’s School of Public Health, for instance, has a partnership program with Birzeit University in Ramallah. Harvard is usually allergic to bigotry—so much so that it changed its official law school crest in 2021 to avoid connections with a slaveholder who died centuries ago. At Birzeit, buildings are named after antisemitic murderers and students host Hamas military parades. Why does Harvard maintain a partnership with Birzeit, of all the universities on the planet? (In July Harvard moved the partnership program from the West Bank to Jordan due to “security concerns”—though not, presumably, due to Birzeit’s institutional enthusiasm for murdering Jews.)
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