Harvard has fashioned itself as a free-speech warrior on the national stage for refusing to negotiate with the Trump administration on its sweeping demands for the university to drop its diversity, equity and inclusion measures and punish student protesters.
However, inside Harvard’s campus walls, we have seen President Alan Garber oversee a systematic erasure of teaching, research and scholarship about Palestine, at a time when more than 51,000 Palestinians have been killed, and hundreds of thousands more have been forcefully displaced and are facing starvation under a relentless Israeli siege. Long before Harvard evaded a hostile takeover from our billionaire president, it capitulated to the demands of its billionaire donors in matters of student discipline, campus speech and academic freedom.
To please its right-wing donors, Harvard adopted a one-sided conceptualisation of campus safety, in which speaking up against Israeli state violence towards Palestinians is considered threatening. As a result, university administrators rush to address anti-Semitism on campus, as they should, but they also censor and eliminate speech and scholarship which is critical of Israel in the name of fighting antisemitism. Meanwhile, anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab racism, and Islamophobia are less than an afterthought. University administrators remain silent as students, faculty and staff experience doxxing, harassment and death threats for speaking up about Palestinian human rights. They have shared international students’ information with the Department of Homeland Security, as students on nearby campuses have been abducted by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, detained and deported for objecting to Israel’s international law violations.
Beyond turning a blind eye to intimidation and abuse, the university’s leaders also routinely take action to erase Palestinian speech, scholarship, advocacy and views.
Majority of people do not care, but certain very vocal and very rich people do care. AIPAC, wacky evangelical leaders who believe in end times, national security types who see Israel as paramount to US security in MidEast, etc. They get to influence policy because majority will not push back on their policy because Gaza is an afterthought.