Revealed: Harvard publisher cancels entire journal issue on Palestine shortly before publication
As
Harvard’s feud with Trump escalated, so did tensions over an ‘education
and Palestine’ issue of a prestigious journal. Scholars blame the
‘Palestine exception’ to academic freedom
In March 2024, six months into Israel’s war in Gaza,
education in the territory was decimated. Schools were closed – most
had been turned into shelters – and all 12 of the strip’s universities
were partially or fully destroyed.
Against
that backdrop, a prestigious American education journal decided to
dedicate a special issue to “education and Palestine”. The Harvard
Educational Review (HER) put out a call for submissions, asking
academics around the world for ideas for articles grappling with the
education of Palestinians, education about Palestine and Palestinians,
and related debates in schools and colleges in the US.
“The
field of education has an important role to play in supporting
students, educators, and policymakers in contextualizing what has been
happening in Gaza with histories and continuing impacts of occupation,
genocide, and political contestations,” the journal’s editors wrote in
their call for abstracts.
A
little more than a year later, the scale of destruction in Gaza was
exponentially larger. The special issue, which was slated to be
published this summer, was just about ready – contracts with most
authors were finalized and articles were edited. They covered topics
from the annihilation of Gaza’s schools to the challenges of teaching
about Israel and Palestine in the US.
But on 9
June, the Harvard Education Publishing Group, the journal’s publisher,
abruptly canceled the release. In an email to the issue’s contributors,
the publisher cited “a number of complex issues”, shocking authors and
editors alike, the Guardian has learned.
US universities have come under intensifying attacks from the Trump administration
over accusations of tolerating antisemitism on campuses. Many have
responded by restricting protest, punishing students and faculty
outspoken about Palestinian rights, and scrutinizing academic programs
home to scholarship about Palestine.
But the
cancellation of an entire issue of an academic journal, which has not
been previously reported, is a remarkable new development in a mounting
list of examples of censorship of pro-Palestinian speech.
The
Guardian spoke with four scholars who had written for the issue, and
one of the journal’s editors. It also reviewed internal emails that
capture how enthusiasm about a special issue intended to promote
“scholarly conversation on education and Palestine amid repression,
occupation, and genocide” was derailed by fears of legal liability and
devolved into recriminations about censorship, integrity and what many
scholars have come to refer to as the “Palestine exception” to academic
freedom.
If
the universities are not willing to stand up for what is core to their
mission, I don’t know what they’re doing. What’s the point?
Thea Abu El-HajPaul
Belsito, a spokesperson for the Harvard Graduate School of Education,
wrote in a statement to the Guardian that the decision to cancel the
special issue followed nine months of conversations and an “overall lack
of internal alignment” about the issue.
The
authors see it differently. “If the universities – or in this case a
university press – are not willing to stand up for what is core to their
mission, I don’t know what they’re doing. What’s the point?” said Thea
Abu El-Haj, a Palestinian-American anthropologist of education at
Barnard College, the women’s school affiliated with Columbia University,
who was one of the solicited authors.
Harvard
has been embroiled in a bitter battle with the Trump administration
over millions in federal funding cuts and the revocation of its
eligibility to host international students. In April, it became the
first and so far only university to sue the administration, earning praise for its resistance to Trump’s onslaught.
Demonstrators
rally on Cambridge Common calling on Harvard leadership to resist
federal government interference at the university in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, on 12 April. Photograph: Nicholas Pfosi/Reuters
But Harvard has also cracked down on Palestine scholarship, demotings scholars and canceling related programs.
“Harvard is being held up as the heroic institution, but what’s
happening internally is much more complicated,” said Abu El-Haj.
In
January, as part of a legal settlement with Jewish students who had
accused Harvard of tolerating and promoting antisemitism on campus, the
university adopted a controversial definition that critics argue conflates antisemitism with criticism of Israel.
In
an email to the authors announcing the cancellation, the executive
director of the publishing group did not cite antisemitism; she wrote
the decision stemmed from what she described as an inadequate review
process and the need for “considerable copy editing”.
The
journal’s editorial board rejected that characterization and said they
had been sidelined by the publisher in making the decision. The decision
to cancel the issue was “out of alignment with the values that have
guided HER for nearly a century”, the board members wrote in a
collective statement.
The
announcement came after the publishers had demanded that the articles
be submitted to a legal review late into the process – a step the
authors found highly unusual and called a “dangerous form of
institutional censorship” in a joint letter objecting to the demand. The
publisher’s request was prompted by fear the issue would attract
antisemitism claims, said one editor.
The
dispute underscores the unprecedented restraints placed on knowledge
production amid escalating accusations of antisemitism on campuses and
the Trump administration’s crusade against higher education. But it also
signals the levels to which universities are abandoning their stated
commitments out of fears of legal or financial repercussions.
“Even within the broader landscape around Palestine in the university, it’s unprecedented,” said Chandni Desai,
a professor at the University of Toronto and author of one of the
scrapped articles. “You just don’t solicit work, peer-review it, have
people sign contracts, advertise the articles, and then cancel not just
one article, but an entire special issue.”
Tensions boil over
The
Harvard Educational Review is a century-old academic journal that
publishes research and opinion geared to education academics and
professionals and is considered a leading publication in the field. It
is published by the Harvard Education Publishing Group, a division of
the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and edited by doctoral
students at the university.
The Palestine
issue was slated to include a dozen research articles, essays and other
writings on topics ranging from education in Israel-Palestine and among
the Palestinian diaspora, to academic freedom in the US. They explored
the evolution of the concept of “scholasticide”, a term describing the
systematic annihilation of education first coined during Israel’s 2008
invasion of Gaza; the “ethical and educational responsibilities” of
English language teachers in the West Bank; and the impact of
“crackdowns on dissent” on teaching about Palestine in US higher
education institutions, according to finalized abstracts of the articles
shared with the Guardian.
Abu El-Haj’s piece,
co-authored with two other scholars, explored the “centrality of
education in the struggle for Palestinian liberation”, drawing from an
oral history project on the experiences of teachers with the UN agency
for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The journal’s editors were so
enthusiastic about her piece that last spring they selected it with two
others to promote the upcoming special issue on the back cover of the
spring one.
A copy of the Harvard Education Review previewing a future issue dedicated to education in and about Palestine. Photograph: Thea Abu El-Haj
The
special issue was also formally announced at an annual gathering of
education scholars in Chicago in March. “There was quite a lot of
interest in it,” said Jo Kelcey, a professor at the Lebanese American
University in Beirut and one of Abu El-Haj’s co-authors.
The authors received the first inkling of trouble shortly after that.
Rabea
Eghbariah, a Palestinian doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School, had
been solicited to write the afterword for the special issue. In 2023, a
different Harvard journal, the Harvard Law Review, had blocked
publication of an article it had commissioned from him. When the
Columbia Law Review published the piece instead, that journal’s board
responded by temporarily shutting down
its entire website. Wary of that experience, Eghbariah specifically
requested to amend his contract with the Harvard Educational Review to
add a clause seeking to safeguard his academic freedom. After a long
silence, the journal declined his request in April.
“It
is incredibly shameful to see a university publication so explicitly
betraying its mission and rejecting a clause on protecting academic
freedom,” said Eghbariah, who did not sign the contract. “My afterword
specifically is about Nakba denialism – the phenomenon of manipulating
facts to affirm Zionism and shape knowledge with regards to Palestine –
and it is quite ironic that it is being denied publication.”
Palestinian human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah. Photograph: Courtesy Rabea Eghbariah
Days
after their response to Eghbariah, the journal’s editorial board wrote
to the authors, citing an “increasingly challenging climate” and asking
for their availability for a meeting, which never ended up happening.
“As a part of a scholarly community deeply committed to uplifting
Palestinian voices and scholarship, we are facing some increasingly
unprecedented contexts,” they wrote.
The email
offered little detail, but for weeks, the journal’s editors had been
under mounting pressure from the publisher. In January, they were told
that an “institutional review” of the manuscripts would be required. In
February, the publisher tried – without the editors’ knowledge – to
alter the back cover of the spring issue promoting some of the
forthcoming articles, according to email correspondence reviewed by the
Guardian. (The printing company flagged the change to the editors, who
reversed it.) In conversations with the editors – although not in
writing – the publisher acknowledged that it was seeking a “risk
assessment” legal review by Harvard’s counsel out of fear the issue’s
publication would prompt antisemitism claims, an editor said.
As tensions came to a head, the board again contacted the authors in early May, to inform them of the requested legal review.
It
was an extraordinary demand, the authors and editor interviewed by the
Guardian said. Legal reviews would sometimes be requested for a specific
article when there is a libel concern – but early in the process, and
not for an entire issue, they noted.
“This
doesn’t happen, certainly not at the point where you’ve been accepted
for publication and you’ve signed contracts,” said Kelcey. “This is not
the way scholarship is supposed to operate.”
By
then, the Trump administration had upended higher education by
threatening billions of dollars in funding from universities in the US
over their responses to pro-Palestinian protests. Harvard had sued in
April, escalating its feud with the president. The authors, who hadn’t
initially been in touch, found each other and organised a collective
response, slamming the request for a legal review at that stage as
“unprecedented”, they wrote in a 15 May letter to the journal’s
editorial board and publisher. “This sends a dangerous message to
scholars globally: that academic publishing contracts are conditional,
revocable, and subject to external political calculations.”
Students
protesting against the war in Gaza, and passersby walking through
Harvard Yard, at an encampment at Harvard University in Massachusetts,
on 25 April 2024. Photograph: Ben Curtis/AP
The
authors asked for the legal review to be reconsidered. But less than a
month later, the press’s executive director, Jessica Fiorillo, wrote to
them that the issue was being pulled altogether. In an email seen by the
Guardian, she claimed the manuscripts were “unready for publication”,
in part due to a copy editor’s resignation. She also cited an
unspecified “failure to adhere to an adequate review process”, a “lack
of internal alignment” between the authors, editors and the publisher,
and “the lack of a clear and expedient path forward to resolving the
myriad issues at play”.
“This
difficult situation is exacerbated by very significant lack of
agreement about the path forward, including and especially whether to
publish such a special issue at this time,” she wrote.
The
copy-editing issue wasn’t just a personnel one. The publisher’s letter
claimed that the review editors “provided highly restrictive editing
guidelines to the copy editor under contract to work on the special
issue, limiting her focus to grammar, punctuation, and syntax errors,
and directing her to refrain from offering any editorial suggestions to
address, in the editors’ words, ‘politically charged’ content”. It
claimed that the copy editor resigned in large part because of those
restrictions.
Fiorillo added that it would be
“entirely appropriate” to subject the work to legal checks for “any
libelous or unlawful material” but that no such review had taken place.
She added that the cancellation was not “due to censorship of a
particular viewpoint nor does it connect to matters of academic
freedom”.
A ‘deep loss’
The
journal’s editors were blindsided. “The Editorial Board has not been
made privy to any internal decision-making at HEPG regarding the Special
Issue, and we only learned about this communication and decision 30
minutes before it was sent out,” they wrote to the authors shortly after
Fiorillo’s email.
In a longer letter to the
authors, two days later, they rebutted Fiorillo’s claims about
irregularities in the review process and expressed disappointment with
the decision to cancel the issue.
“It is a
deep loss that your work will not appear in the pages of [Harvard
Educational Review] as we intended – for HER, for the field of
education, and for social justice,” they wrote.
Regarding
the publisher’s claim regarding overly restrictive copy-editing
guidelines, the editors said that they were asked by the publisher to
develop copy-editing guidelines – something that hadn’t been required
for previous issues – and that they invited feedback at multiple points
in the process.
It is not clear how far up
within Harvard’s administration the decision to cancel the issue had
come from. Belsito, the spokesperson for the Harvard Graduate School of
Education, wrote that Harvard’s office of the general counsel does not
“make or direct editorial decisions” for the school or its publishing
group.
“HEPG acknowledges the disappointment
this decision may have caused for the authors and remains deeply
committed to our robust editorial process, only publishing work of the
highest scholarly quality through a process rooted in integrity,
collaboration, and editorial rigor,” he added.
To us, it sounded like a textbook example of the killing of speech and academic inquiry related to Palestine
Kirsten WeldThe Harvard chapter of the American Association of University Professors which got involved after learning about the cancellation, believes the decision came from the publisher.
“To
us, it sounded like a textbook example of the killing of speech and
academic inquiry related to Palestine,” said Kirsten Weld, a history
professor and the chapter’s president. “Thus far, though our
fact-finding remains incomplete, it looks like the impetus came from
Harvard Education Publishing Group.”
One of
the editors of the Harvard Educational Review, who asked for anonymity
citing the repressive climate in academia, said that the pressure from
the publisher on the editors ramped up shortly before Trump took office.
The request to subject the entirety of the edited manuscripts to a risk
assessment was “totally abnormal” the editor said. “I didn’t even know
the [office of the general counsel] review was an option, I had never
heard of it.”
The censorship of the issue, the editor added, is “exactly how authoritarianism grows”.
The
members of the editorial board who worked on the issue said that they
had done their best to “advance this work amidst a climate of repression
and institutional accommodation”.
“As we
reflect on this moment, we urge the scholarly community to defend the
ability to publish rigorous, justice-oriented scholarship without
interference and repression,” they added.
The
ordeal was a “test case” for academic freedom, said Desai, whose article
on scholasticide, co-written with three Palestinian colleagues, was
also directly solicited and advertised on the back of the spring journal
issue. (It was the teaser to their article that the publishers tried to
remove from the back of the previous issue, without the editors’
knowledge.)
Desai criticized the cancellation
as a “serious breach and violation of academic freedom and integrity”
but also an affront to the labor of scholars who are “writing these
articles during a genocide”.
The heavily damaged building of Al-Azhar University in Gaza City, on 15 February 2024. Photograph: AFP via Getty Images
She
and her co-authors, including a dean at Al-Azhar University in Gaza,
were not merely documenting the resilience of Palestinian education amid
the destruction but were personally involved in those efforts,
she noted. Many of their colleagues and students were killed as the
group worked on the article. “This is not some abstract academic
exercise,” said Desai. “I can’t keep stressing the urgency of this
article as we’re watching universities being blown up.”
The
authors are in talks with other journals and hope their pieces can be
published together as planned. All those interviewed by the Guardian
expressed fear that the incident would deter other scholars from
pursuing work on Palestine – a longstanding problem that they say has
only been exacerbated over the last two years. “There’s this risk of
kind of closing down the democratic space,” said Kelcey.
As
Israel and Palestine have become the flashpoint for a rapidly
deteriorating climate for free speech and academic freedom in the US,
Harvard has already demoted two faculty members leading the Center for
Middle Eastern Studies (one of whom wrote the forward for the cancelled
issue), suspended a partnership with Birzeit University in the
Israeli-occupied West Bank, and ended a divinity school initiative
dedicated to the conflict.
Scholars fear that
the the capitulation of universities is hurting an entire field of study
at the time when it’s most needed. But Abu El-Haj warned that the
special issue’s cancellation also set a dangerous precedent for the
independence of scholarship on a variety of subjects. She accused the
publisher of “anticipatory compliance” and warned that “it’s not going
to stop with Palestine,” she said.
But she
also sounded a note of optimism. In a sign of the growing chasm between
decision-makers and the broader public on the issue, she said that the
war in Gaza had led to unprecedented interest among students in
Palestine coursework and scholarship.
She
recalled being a student in the US during Israel’s 1982 invasion of
Lebanon and the massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and
Shatila by Israeli-backed Lebanese militias. “There were three of us
protesting,” she recalled. “I never would have imagined in my life I’d
see the encampments that happened last year.
“We’re
in a really critical juncture,” she added. “The level of repression
that we’re seeing is related to the shift in the narrative, and the loss
of control over that narrative.”