Harvard releases searing reports on antisemitism, Islamophobia. ‘I am sorry,’ President Alan Garber says.
Jewish students described being treated as pariahs. Arab and Muslim students said they were “second-class citizens.” Both groups said their peers viewed them with suspicion, leading them to play down their identities.
Those were some of the findings of two searing reports on antisemitism and anti-Arab or anti-Muslim bias Harvard University released Tuesday in the midst of its extraordinary confrontation with the Trump administration, which has accused the school of violating the civil rights of its Jewish students.
The reports each made recommendations for how Harvard should address the issues, some of which the school is already acting on.
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What does Harvard’s antisemitism problem really look like?In Globe interview, Harvard president Alan Garber casts doubt on Trump administration’s motives in antisemitism campaignHow Harvard president Alan Garber came to lead the higher ed resistance against TrumpA task force on antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias urged the school to expand academic offerings related to antisemitism and Jewish history and to train students to more constructively debate and disagree with each other.The task force on anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian bias asked Harvard to provide legal and technical support to students who have been outed online as pro-Palestinian and faced harassment. It also asked the university to define and denounce anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian bias.
Additionally, the reports contained the results of a survey that found that Jewish, Israeli, Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian students felt more alienated from the Harvard community than their peers from other identity groups, and less comfortable candidly sharing their opinions.
Harvard released the pair of long-awaited reports at an especially fraught moment. The school is locked in a struggle with President Trump, who is wielding the full powers of the federal government to intervene in the affairs of elite universities, including Harvard. Facing more than $2 billion of funding cuts and demands to submit parts of the university to federal oversight, Harvard sued the Trump administration last week arguing that the government’s actions violated the US Constitution.
Since then, federal officials have redoubled their accusations that Harvard has failed to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment and discrimination, even as Harvard leaders say they have taken action to address the issue and some Jewish students say the situation on campus has significantly improved since the height of the Gaza war protests last year.
On April 19, the Trump administration demanded Harvard turn over all documents, including any drafts and edits, related to the antisemitism report.
That report may bolster the Trump administration’s accusations, although, as the report’s authors note, it is focused on the events of the past academic year, not the current one.
In an open letter Tuesday, Harvard president Alan Garber emphasized that point in the letter’s first sentence. “The 2023-24 academic year was disappointing and painful,” he wrote in the letter’s first sentence.
Taken together, the reports described an institution that had failed to provide adequate support to its minority students at a time when they needed it most.
“I am sorry for the moments when we failed to meet the high expectations we rightfully set for our community,” he wrote. Garber was Harvard’s provost during the fall 2023 semester and assumed the presidency when Claudine Gay resigned following criticism of Harvard’s handling of the protest movement and allegations of plagiarism in her scholarly works.
The turmoil at Harvard has played out against the backdrop of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the Israeli military campaign in Gaza that followed. Some Jewish students were disturbed by seeing their peers seemingly apologizing for, or celebrating, the Oct. 7 attack, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Arab, Palestinian, and Muslim students felt the university’s leaders minimized the staggering death toll and destruction in Gaza, according to the reports.
The reports described certain commonalities in the experiences of Jewish, Israeli, Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian students. Members of those groups reported feeling that their identities made them suspect in the eyes of their peers. Jewish students said they were treated as “oppressors.” Arab and Muslim students said they were disparaged as “terrorists.” Some members of all of these groups said they made efforts to hide outward signs of their identity.
Both reports also described vicious, bigoted social media posts, especially on Sidechat, a platform that allows users with Harvard email addresses to post anonymously.
There were also notable differences between the report’s findings. For Jewish and Israeli students, the primary source of animus was their peers. Arab, Muslim, Palestinian, and pro-Palestinian students spoke more of being “abandoned and silenced” by Harvard’s leaders.
Garber convened the task forces last January when Harvard was under intense scrutiny for its handling of student activism over the Israel-Hamas war and reports of intensifying antisemitism on campus. Each task force has approximately a dozen members including professors, administrators, and students.
They conducted most of their research for the reports last spring and summer, beginning around the time that pro-Palestinian activists set up an encampment that occupied part of Harvard Yard for weeks.
The demonstrators used language and imagery that in at least some cases was antisemitic; at one point demonstrators hung up a poster of Garber, who is Jewish, depicted with horns and a tail, invoking antisemitic tropes. Others viewed Harvard’s disciplinary response, including suspensions of participating students, as excessive and politically motivated.
The task force on anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian bias conducted nearly 50 “listening sessions” between April and July 2024. The sessions included students, faculty, and staff from across Harvard’s schools and divisions and was open to people of all identity groups, including people with pro-Palestinian views but no ties to the region. The task force on antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias also conducted approximately 50 listening sessions with more than 500 participants. “Attendees reflected a diverse range of religious observance levels, Jewish backgrounds and identifications, and attitudes towards Israel,” according to the report.
The task forces also received written submissions and conducted a joint university-wide survey.
In the antisemitism report, Jewish students said their classmates sometimes treated their family histories as inherently problematic.
One student recounted that they had been preparing a short speech for a Harvard-organized event. The student wanted to describe how their grandfather had survived the Holocaust by migrating to what was then called the British Mandate of Palestine. The grandfather had then helped tens of thousands of other Jews find refuge in territory that is now part of Israel.
The forum’s student organizers objected, according to the report. They told the student not to mention the grandfather’s rescue missions because the narrative was not “tasteful,” according to the student.
“They told me that my family history is inherently one-sided because it does not acknowledge the displacements of Palestinian populations, and I believe this accusation is an antisemitic double standard,” the student said, according to the report.
Other Jewish students spoke of facing a kind of litmus test to be accepted in politically progressive groups. They felt the need to denounce Israel or disavow Zionism, the belief that Jews have a right to self-determination in the land of Palestine and Israel, a place where both Jews and Palestinians have historical roots.
“There’s a good-Jew, bad-Jew dynamic,” one student told the antisemitism task force. “I’m a Zionist. The experience of being a Jewish student at Harvard in progressive spaces requires incredible emotional labor.”
The report also described anti-Israel bias advanced by some faculty members that had the effect, intended or not, of holding all Jews responsible for Israel’s actions.
The authors quote from a description written by Harvard educators of a trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories for Harvard students. The educators wrote that Jewish American students on the trip “became overwhelmed with their sorrow at how the Jewish tradition has become indistinct from a settler colonial nation-state project. They aspire to extricate themselves from such a conflation, which implicates them in atrocities.”
“This is describing a form of hereditary and collective guilt, where American Jews are guilty of alleged crimes committed in some cases generations ago by other people. In this formulation, American Jews are guilty of ‘atrocities’ unless they distance themselves from the State of Israel. This is not simply ‘criticism of Israel’ — except insomuch as ‘Israel’ is the ancient sobriquet of the Jewish people," the report says.
Israelis and Israeli Americans faced particular discrimination and ostracism, according to the report. “Israeli students at Harvard are not merely subjected to implicit bias, but instead face explicit, deliberate discrimination,” one student told the antisemitism task force.
The report on anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias described a widespread sense of chilled speech on issues related to Palestinians and the Palestinian territories. Professors withheld mentions of Palestine from course syllabi because they feared that teaching on the subject could negatively affect their ability to get tenure, according to the report.
Students and faculty with pro-Palestinian views felt that their speech was subject to surveillance and possible disciplinary action. They said that Harvard’s leaders had conflated legitimate criticism of Israel with antisemitism in a way that made the _expression_ of pro-Palestinian viewpoints perilous. Pro-Palestinian students and faculty were especially alarmed by Harvard’s adoption in January of a definition of antisemitism that free speech advocates say can be wielded to shut down criticism of Israel.
The Trump administration has pushed some universities to adopt the definition — known as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism — and use it in disciplinary procedures.
Pro-Palestinian students and faculty also said that the university had selectively enforced rules governing protests to shut down pro-Palestinian activism.
They also said Harvard had failed to protect them from “doxxing.” Since the fall of 2023, outside groups have posted the names and photos of pro-Palestinians online, exposing them to harassment and reprisals such as losing job offers.
One faculty member told the task force that a student had their name and photo displayed on a truck that drove through Harvard Square. The student “received calls with death and rape threats.”
When students appealed to Harvard’s leaders for help, they found the response inadequate, according to the report. Although Harvard established a group to address doxxing, students said that when they complained of targeted harassment, they received standardized responses, or no response at all.
One student recalled raising concerns to Harvard deans after being “coughed on and yelled at by students for wearing a keffiyeh” — a patterned scarf associated with Palestinian nationalism. “I received a form response,” the student said.
The task force did not reach a consensus on the question of whether Harvard should cut all ties with Israel, although the report said the question was a key theme throughout its research. That idea — to divest from or boycott Israel — is controversial and some see it as antisemitic. But many people who spoke with the task force compared the idea to Harvard’s decision in the 1980s to cut some ties with the apartheid government of South Africa.
“Students expressed frustration with what they felt were dismissive attitudes from [Harvard] leaders, who argued that divestment from Israel lacked moral clarity,” the report’s authors wrote. “Many students linked divestment to their safety and sense of belonging on campus.”
The listening sessions also captured a broader feeling of alienation on campus. “I hate this place. I hate being here,” said one student. “The reason for that has been the administration — a complete erasure of Palestinian [and] brown students.”
Overall, the report reflected a sense that Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian students were expendable at Harvard. Arabs and Muslims, one person told the task force, “are treated as second-class members of this community, our feelings do not matter at all, we are not reached out to or valued or protected to the same degree as others; we are disposable.”
In his open letter Tuesday, Garber described actions Harvard will take to address the findings and recommendations of the two reports.
The school will launch a research project on antisemitism and a historical analysis of Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians at Harvard. (The antisemitism report includes a lengthy history of Jews at Harvard, including past discrimination.)
Deans of Harvard schools, Garber said, are reviewing recommendations from the task forces related to admissions, curricula, and orientation and training programs.
Harvard is taking steps to nurture “viewpoint diversity” on campus, meaning expanding the range of ideologies and political views that can be expressed on campus without fear of retaliation or ostracism.
“My goal now is to ensure that we continue to find ways to strengthen the fabric of our community as we meet unprecedented challenges,” Garber wrote in his Tuesday letter.
Mike Damiano can be reached at mike.damiano@globe.com. Brooke Hauser can be reached at brooke.hauser@globe.com. Follow her @brookehauser.