Claudine Gay’s resignation as Harvard’s president hasn’t lessened the anti-Semitism controversy surrounding the nation’s oldest college.
Critics charge that under Ms. Gay’s leadership, the university didn’t do enough to stop a wave of anti-Semitism following the Oct. 7 terrorist massacre of Jews in Israel.
Ten days after Ms. Gay’s resignation, Jewish students at Harvard sued the university in a Massachusetts District Court on Jan. 12. They alleged that Harvard is “egregiously violating the civil rights of its Jewish students, who are subjected to a severe and pervasive anti-Semitic hostile educational environment,” according to the lawsuit, this environment has worsened since Oct. 7.
A day earlier in Washington, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce continued its investigation into alleged anti-Semitism at Harvard. The committee made a new request for documents detailing the university’s internal reporting and adjudication of harassment targeting Jewish people.
The committee’s chairwoman, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), sent a nine-page letter to Harvard on Jan. 9., requesting all reports of anti-Semitic acts or incidents at Harvard and records of resulting investigations and disciplinary actions.
She said Ms. Gay’s Dec. 5 testimony raised doubts as to whether Harvard was willing to address anti-Semitism and said evidence suggested the problem existed well before the Oct. 7 massacre. Ms. Foxx cites a report by a nonprofit studying anti-Semitism on campuses which “found Harvard had the highest rate of threats based on Jewish identity of the 109 campuses they surveyed.”
The controversy at Harvard was sparked during a Dec. 5 Congressional hearing. At this hearing, Ms. Gay and two other college presidents, Liz Magill of Penn and Sally Kornbluth of MIT, testified. They equivocated when asked if calls for genocide against the Jews would violate campus speech codes.
Congressional Probe
Ms. Foxx, the Congressional committee chairwoman, cited details of numerous instances of anti-Semitism at Harvard in her Jan. 9 letter:“Following the October 7 attack, social media platforms were flooded with anti-Semitic social media posts by Harvard students. To provide several representative examples, one post stated, ‘Harvard Hillel is burning in hell / Harvard Hillel is burning in hell / And they got funded by Epstein as well.’ Posts on the anonymous messaging platform SideChat, which requires a Harvard email address to access, stated: ‘Let em cook’ next to a Palestinian flag emoji and ‘I proudly accept the label of terrorist.’
Ms. Foxx listed numerous other examples.
A Jewish grad student was surrounded and assaulted at an Oct. 18 protest organized by two Harvard pro-Palestine groups. Activists disrupted classes on Nov. 29 using bullhorns to shout “hateful messages” including “Globalize the intifada” and “From the river to the sea.”
Harvard Hillel said in a statement students were terrified by the violence. Some could not resume work for hours. Demonstrations became “increasingly normalized” causing Jewish and Israeli students to avoid class, events, and dining halls.
Harvard required the public Hanukkah menorah lit nightly outside the university library to be removed each night to avoid vandalism, she said.
Kennedy School lecturer Marshall Ganz was found by an external review to have discriminated against three Israeli students in a spring 2023 course. The review found he denigrated the students and tried to silence them, gave preferential treatment to Arab and Muslim students, and created a hostile learning environment.
Hillel estimates Harvard’s Jewish undergraduate population has fallen from about 1,675 students in 2013, or 25 percent of the student body, to 700 in 2023, about 9 percent. Only 5.4 percent of the class of 2027 identifies as Jewish, she said.
The university’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies continues to fund the nonprofit Middle East Studies Association (MESA), despite MESA’s support for the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel and Israeli universities.
Ms. Foxx then took on Ms. Gay’s defense, in which she cited Harvard’s “supposed commitment” to free speech as limiting it from taking action against anti-Semitism.
But the university has demonstrated a “clear double standard” because it suppresses and penalizes other expressions “deemed problematic,” Ms. Foxx said.
A scholar was disinvited because of her public statements on gender identity. The university canceled a course because students said it studied a policing method. Law professor Ronald Sullivan lost his position as Winthrop House Faculty Dean because he represented Harvey Weinstein. Harvard requested students remove from their dorm window a poster of a swimsuit-clad celebrity saluting in front of an American flag.
Ms. Foxx said it was “unsurprising” that Harvard ranks last out of 248 institutions surveyed in a college free speech ranking, with a speech climate rated as “abysmal.”
This, she said, “exposes the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of its leadership’s rationalizations for its inaction towards anti-Semitism on campus.”
Pervasive Anti-Semitism
The Harvard students who filed the lawsuit, identified as Alexander Kestenbaum and Students Against Antisemitism Inc., describe some of the recent incidents at Harvard as “particularly severe and pervasive.” They allege that mobs of pro-Hamas students and faculty have marched by the hundreds through Harvard’s campus, shouting vile anti-Semitic slogans and calling for the death of Jews and Israel.“These mobs have occupied buildings, classrooms, libraries, student lounges, plazas, and study halls, often for days or weeks at a time, promoting violence against Jews and harassing and assaulting them on campus,” they said in the lawsuit.
“Jewish students have been attacked on social media, and Harvard faculty members have promulgated anti-Semitism in their course and dismissed and intimidated students who object.”
The lawsuit goes on to allege that Harvard has “a double standard invidious to Jews,” selectively enforcing its policies to avoid protecting Jewish students from harassment and ignoring their pleas for protection.
It accuses the university of hiring professors “who support anti-Jewish violence and spread anti-Semitic propaganda.”
“Those professors teach and advocate through a binary oppressor-oppressed lens, through which Jews, one of history’s most persecuted peoples, are typically designated ”oppressor,“ and therefore unworthy of support or sympathy.”
The lawsuit alleges that the “double standard starts at the top,” pointing to Ms. Gay’s testimony. Following this, the only rabbi on Harvard’s recently appointed anti-Semitism advisory group resigned. He said: “Both events on campus and the painfully inadequate testimony reinforced the idea that I cannot make the sort of difference I had hoped.”
Donor Backlash
Jewish and Israeli students, like those at numerous college campuses, said they felt targeted by slogans such as “From the river to the sea” and “Globalize the intifada.” Gay’s steps to remedy the situation were seen as inadequate, and her Congressional testimony on Dec. 5 only inflamed matters.Significant donors to Harvard—and other elite universities like Penn and Columbia—questioned their relationships with their alma maters. Some resigned from prestigious campus advisory positions. Some withdrew or formally ended donations.
Others, most notably Harvard alum Bill Ackman, a financial magnate and graduate of the class of ‘88 who has donated $26 million to Harvard, applied pressure on the institutions to change.
‘New McCarthyism’
In a lengthy X post on Jan. 3, Mr. Ackman said he saw the problem as far more profound than campus anti-Semitism.A few weeks after the massacre, he wrote: “I met with 15 or so members of the faculty and a few hundred students in small and large settings, and a clearer picture began to emerge.
“I ultimately concluded that anti-Semitism was not the core of the problem, it was simply a troubling warning sign. It was the ‘canary in the coal mine,’ despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus.”
Researching it, he said, he found that what caused the university’s anti-Semitism was the DEI ideology. It promoted “an oppressor/oppressed framework” throughout the world of education which in turn generated anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment, he wrote.
“I came to understand that DEI was not what I had naively thought these words meant,” he wrote. He called it “a new kind of McCarthyism.”
Mr. Ackman has said he didn’t halt his donations to Harvard. Others did, though. Billionaire Leslie Wexner, after whom a building at Harvard’s Kennedy School is named, cut ties with the university, as did Israeli shipping magnet Idan Ofer, who quit the Kennedy School’s executive board.
And Mr. Ackman has faced retaliation. His wife, Neri Oxman, an architect and a former MIT professor, was accused of plagiarism in her doctoral dissertation in an article published by Business Insider on Jan. 4, just two days after Ms. Gay’s resignation. On Jan. 7, Mr. Ackman posted that “we have good reason to believe” the attack was orchestrated by MIT’s board.
In other posts tracing a minute-to-minute timeline of their contact with the publication, Mr. Ackman says they were given less than four hours to respond, were on vacation out of the country, didn’t have the connectivity to receive a copy of her 330-page dissertation, nor a printer to print one out.
The reporter, in an email, cited five instances of plagiarism, Ackman said, but used a bold font for only one question: “Do you expect your wife to remain at MIT in light of these instances of plagiarism?”
Ackman said he and his wife concluded the publication was trying to get her fired from MIT. But, he said, only now finding his wife left MIT in 2020, they sought instead to destroy her reputation and career.
They got a 4-hour deadline extension out of Business Insider and found that she neglected to put quotation marks on four paragraphs in the document, which has 2,774 paragraphs.
She also neglected to mention one author when she properly paraphrased something, but, Ackman wrote, that she properly cited him in eight other places in the document and expressed gratefulness for his contribution to the field.
A few minutes after the story was published, Ms. Oxman posted a brief apology on X for any errors she may have made.
A spokesman for Business Insider’s parent company, Axel Springer, the German media company, said on Jan. 14 that after an internal investigation, it stands by Business Insider’s reporting. Other stories have also targeted Ms. Oxman. Some tried to tie her to the late pedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.
Harvard Led in Anti-Semitism
“I’ve never felt so alone,” Harvard’s Chabad rabbi, Hirschy Zarchi, said at the December menorah lighting ceremony Ms. Foxx mentioned in her Congressional letter to Harvard.He told the gathering that the ceremony the previous evening had been disrupted by a woman who yelled that the Holocaust was fake. When Harvard Chabad screened an Israeli military film with footage from the Oct. 7 attacks, campus police advised him to get security for his family.
Protesters had disrupted lectures. Anti-Semitic messages had been posted on social media. Some religious students had stopped wearing kippahs. On the very day of the Oct. 7 massacre, 33 Harvard student groups, in a social media statement, declared Israel “entirely responsible” for it.
Incidents like these, and those cited by Ms. Foxx in her Congressional letter, weren’t the first time this type of anti-Semitism had arisen. One report found that in 2021, Harvard led colleges in the number of reported anti-Semitic incidents, with a total of 25. This occurred after tensions between Jews and Arabs escalated into violence in Israel that year.
The Jewish student group Harvard Hillel condemned Gay in a public statement.
“We are appalled by the need to state the obvious. A call for genocide against Jews is always a hateful incitement of violence. President Gay’s failure to properly condemn this speech calls into question her ability to protect Jewish students on Harvard’s campus,” the group said.
University policies explicitly prohibit this kind of bullying and harassment, the group said, making Ms. Gay’s refusal to draw a line against it “profoundly shocking.”
The chant “Globalize the intifada” endorses violent terrorist attacks against Jews and Israeli civilians, it said. “From the river to the sea” is “an eliminationist slogan” to deprive them of their right to self-determination, and these chants have become “tragically routine” at Harvard, it said.
The Harvard Republican Club called Ms. Gay’s resignation a “pivotal moment,” viewing it as an opportunity for Harvard to change its culture and strengthen its commitment to ’veritas’ or ’truth,' which is its motto.
Does Yale Live Up to Its Principles?
Lauren Noble, founder and executive director of the conservative Buckley Institute at Yale University, the nation’s second-oldest college, said its president, Peter Salovey, was lucky he wasn’t called by Congress. s. According to her, if he had been, his appearance would have been just as unfavorable as his statements after Oct. 7 required him to issue several subsequent clarifications.“The issue here is that these elite universities have a double standard on free speech. Not just the university presidents but also the governing boards,” Ms. Noble told The Epoch Times.
She termed Yale’s 50-year-old policy on free speech, contained in the Woodward Report, as “excellent.” Describing it as “a strong statement of principle,” she noted that it “calls for the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.”
But, she said; “I think the reality is Yale has very often not lived up to the principles of the Woodward Report.”
Harvard ranked dead last in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) 2024 ranking of 248 colleges for free speech, she said. Yale at 234th was close to the bottom, she added.
“The progressive echo chamber has gotten worse. I think there’s less and less diversity of thought on campus. And more and more self-censorship on campus.
“And I think the DEI push, this mindset of everyone’s either an oppressor or oppressed, certainly does not help things in this regard,” she said.
Ms. Noble said she wasn’t aware of large donors to Yale pulling their donations since Oct. 7. She said there had been some incidents, including a faculty member celebrating the massacre as “an extraordinary day” in social media posts and the hanging of a Palestinian flag on a menorah on the New Haven Green, not on the Yale campus but next to it.
More than 1,500 alumni, faculty, and parents asked Yale in a letter to do better on Jew-hatred. Signers to the letter included alumni such as former U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren, and the father of a Yale graduate, former UN ambassador John Bolton.
But one reason big donors didn’t stop giving to Yale this fall, Ms. Noble said, was that some already had in 2015.
That year, a video went viral of a Yale professor, Nicholas Christakis, surrounded by a group of students, with some shouting obscenities at him.
Mr. Christakis, master of Yale’s Silliman College, was trying to explain why he and his wife, Erika Christakis, also a professor and associate master of the college, declined to regulate student Halloween costumes. Ms. Christakis had written an email to that effect.
They had made similar free speech arguments a few years earlier as masters of Harvard’s Pforzheimer House, defending the right of minority students to make fun of the college’s elite clubs.
‘A Lot More Work To Do’
Mr. Ackman, in his Jan. 3 post on X, criticized Harvard for having made DEI approval a prerequisite in its search for a president, which led to Ms. Gay’s appointment.“It appears Gay’s leadership in the creation of Harvard’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging and the penetration of DEI ideology into the corporation board room perhaps made Gay the favored candidate,” he said.
He cited the Harvard Corporation board for numerous failures: failure to keep discrimination off campus, failure in Ms. Gay’s selection, failure to condemn her alleged plagiarism, and failure as a business, given the four-year cost of attending Harvard is now $320,000. He called for the resignation of the entire board and its replacement through a more transparent process. Additionally, he advocated for the closing of the school’s DEI office.
“Harvard must create an academic environment with real academic freedom and free speech, where self-censoring speech codes, and cancel culture are forever banished from campus,” he wrote.
“We have a lot more work to do. Let’s get at it.”
