Two internal reports released by Harvard University on Tuesday paint a picture of a hostile campus climate for Jewish, Israeli, Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian community members, and highlight perceptions that the university’s administration failed to support and protect students, faculty, and staff members from those backgrounds.
The reports are the work of two task forces that examined antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias and anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias during the 2023-24 academic year, as the campus was roiled by student encampments and protests surrounding the war in Gaza and the administration’s public messaging on the war met with widespread criticism. Harvard’s then-interim president, Alan M. Garber, created the task forces in January 2024. Led by faculty members, the groups were intended to hear from constituents and suggest changes to help students and employees feel more included. They released interim reports last summer.
The release of the final reports, totaling more than 500 pages, also comes as Harvard finds itself in a complicated dance with the Trump administration over billions of dollars in federal funding, amid allegations of antisemitism from a White House task force. Harvard sued the Trump administration over its funding pause last week, arguing that it violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights.
In a Tuesday message to the campus community, Garber called the previous academic year “disappointing and painful” and said progress was already being made toward implementing the task forces’ recommendations. He did not speak to the likely effects of the reports on the university’s ongoing tussle with the federal government, or acknowledge that some of the committees’ observations and suggestions appeared to be in tension with each other.
Inside the Reports
In listening sessions held by each task force, Jewish and Israeli students as well as Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, and pro-Palestinian (MAP) community members reported feeling ostracized by their peers and experiencing online harassment. Members of both populations expressed deep dissatisfaction with Harvard administrators’ responses, noting that responses to student complaints were “unclear and unconscionably slow,” as the antisemitism report put it. Both perceived a double standard in Harvard’s public responses as well as in its handling of disciplinary proceedings. Each population felt its concerns were not taken as seriously as those from other groups.
The anti-Muslim task force noted particular skepticism about its work, saying that some faculty members and students declined to participate because of concerns for their safety. Listening-session and survey participants “expressed little confidence that the task force would matter or that this report would be read widely or carefully, let alone that its recommendations would be acted upon.”
Garber, though, said in his letter that work on both groups’ recommendations is already underway and that deans will share action plans with him by the end of the semester. In their reports, both groups emphasized Harvard’s historically decentralized nature, including complaints from community members that that infrastructure had been used to explain away what they saw as uneven policy enforcement.
A joint survey commissioned by the task forces attempted to gauge students and faculty and staff members’ sense of safety and belonging on campus and ability to voice their views. That survey, which received almost 2,300 responses, indicated that both Jewish and Israeli students and those of Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian descent felt significantly hampered and uneasy at Harvard.
Among Muslim respondents, 47 percent said they felt physically unsafe on campus; for Jewish respondents, that figure was 15 percent. An overwhelming majority of Muslim respondents — 92 percent — believed they’d face professional or academic repercussions for sharing their political views, while 61 percent of Jewish students said the same. (In total, 11 percent of respondents reported feeling physically unsafe on campus, about half felt uncomfortable expressing personal or political opinions, and 59 percent feared academic and professional penalties for doing so.)
Those disparities persisted across racial lines, with 52 percent of Middle Eastern and North African, or MENA, respondents saying they felt they didn’t belong at Harvard and 76 percent feeling uncomfortable expressing their opinions. For white respondents, those numbers were 14 percent and 36 percent, respectively. Both reports note that the statistics were not intended to “engage in a contest to prove which group has suffered more,” as the antisemitism task force wrote.
Some of the task forces’ recommendations seemed to conflict with one another. For example, the antisemitism report calls for the university to create a set of rules governing permissible behavior for instructors in classrooms. Meanwhile, recommendations in the MAP report advocate that the university do more to protect academic freedom and free speech.
Both reports noted that the task forces’ mandate was not to investigate or adjudicate individual cases, and neither group sought to confirm allegations of harassment. Harvard did not make Garber available for an interview. The Chronicle reached out to all members of both task forces. Those who responded declined to comment. One said she’d been “been asked to refer press inquiries to the university.”
‘Shunned’ on Campus
The antisemitism task force’s report describes a campus climate in which some Jewish students were told by peers and, in some cases, faculty members, “that they were associated with something offensive, and, in some cases, that their very presence was an offense.” Some had decided to conceal their identities from classmates, while other Jewish community members were asked to renounce any attachment to Israel in order to prove they were “one of the good ones.”
That environment posed a threat to Harvard’s academic enterprise, the task force, which was led by Jared A. Ellias, a law professor, and Derek J. Penslar, a professor of Jewish history, found. Some Jewish students declined admission and postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard, and some Jewish medical-school students avoided residencies at Harvard hospitals because of the political climate.
Alongside “partisan and one-sided pedagogy” that failed to represent Jewish and Israeli perspectives, the task forces documented instances where faculty members canceled or ended class early on the day of a protest or “gave time at the end of class for students to promote various solidarity groups.” Concerns of bias were concentrated in the public-health, law, divinity, and medical schools.
Israeli Jewish students also described feeling unwelcome and “shunned” on campus, saying some people refused to engage with them because of their heritage. “My friend has been told that others would not attend social gatherings if I was present, as they couldn’t risk the social consequences of being seen with an Israeli,” one undergraduate student said. Another reported seeing someone walk away from a student mid-conversation during an orientation session after learning the student was Israeli. Several said they felt unsafe walking on campus.
Some social strain came between members of the Jewish community on campus. One Jewish student noted that they faced the most antisemitism from fellow Jewish students who “are interested in policing the bounds of Jewish identity one way or the other”; another reported not feeling comfortable at Hillel and Chabad because of those organizations’ pro-Israel stances. And the task force said that both Zionist and anti-Zionist Jewish students saw elements of antisemitism in the pro-Palestinian movement on campus.
The task force chose not to endorse a particular definition of antisemitism, instead opting “to prioritize faculty, staff, and students’ actual experiences over definitions developed by outside parties.” In January, Harvard formally adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definition of antisemitism as part of a Title VI settlement agreement. The IHRA definition is controversial because it says some forms of criticism of Israel may be considered antisemitic.
The task force made a host of recommendations to Harvard, including:
- Emphasizing in the admissions process qualities like “bridge-building” and incorporating application questions about dealing with conflicting viewpoints;
- Developing rules for classroom instruction and considering instructors’ ability to “engage diverse opinions” in hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions;
- Creating a more-comprehensive course of study on Israel and the Palestinians, Jewish Studies, and Peace and Conflict Studies;
- Establishing a center for religious pluralism; and
- Banning masks at campus protests.
Jason Rubenstein, the executive director of Harvard Hillel, told The Chronicle that “Jewish students recognize their and their friends’ experiences in the report,” especially the idea that antisemitism was not limited to encampments and had been part of campus climate long before October 7.
“One of the strengths of this report is that it gets at causes rather than symptoms, and that what we saw at Harvard and other elite institutions is downstream and is the expression of a certain type of politics and epistemology,” he said.
‘Tangible Feeling of Suffocation’
The task force on combating anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias emphasized community members’ experiences of doxxing, violence, and online harassment and their dissatisfaction with the university’s response to reporting of those incidents. The committee was led by Wafaie Fawzi, a professor of nutrition, epidemiology, and global health at the School of Public Health; Asim Ijaz Khwaja, director of the center for international development at the Harvard Kennedy School; and Ali Asani, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard College.
Students said they saw their faces on doxxing trucks that went around campus and on websites that disclosed their private information. They said they were harassed for wearing keffiyehs — symbols of Palestinian solidarity — and received hateful anonymous messages online. Some said they felt like they had to conceal their Palestinian identities.
“There’s a tangible feeling of suffocation on campus,” one student told the committee.
But the Harvard administration did not appear to take their experiences seriously, students said, offering up an inadequate response to doxxing and failing to mention Palestine, Palestinians, or the humanitarian crisis in Gaza in mass communications. Community members said Harvard leaders were disengaged in their interactions with students from Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian backgrounds and displayed a lack of investment in their religious life.
The task force also highlighted community members’ concerns that actions by the Harvard administration had a chilling effect on free speech and open dialogue. Students and faculty members said Harvard placed barriers on talks and programs that would discuss Palestine and disciplined pro-Palestinian protesters unwarrantedly. They expressed apprehension that the adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism would further silence pro-Palestinian speech.
The committee’s recommendations to Harvard included:
- Investing in “culturally competent” mental-health providers;
- Defining Islamophobia, anti-Arab bias, and anti-Palestinian bias;
- Standing up an advisory committee on Middle Eastern history;
- Training employees on Islamophobia and issues pertinent to Palestinians;
- Implementing measures to support academic freedom, particularly regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict;
- Addressing divestment, possibly through academic programming;
- Supporting campus programs focused on Palestine, Islamophobia, and the Middle East, and having senior leaders attend them; and
- Conducting a historical analysis of Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian community members at Harvard
What’s Next
One professor in the social sciences at Harvard, who requested anonymity for fear of professional and governmental repercussions, said that while the reports contained some examples of “genuinely objectionable statements” and “direct physical intimidation,” “none of it comes anywhere close to substantiating the wild and dangerous assertions that centers at the university are pro-Hamas” — a claim the professor said some of their colleagues had made — “nor the idea that there is an ‘antisemitism crisis’ that merits federal intervention.”
Instead, the professor wrote in a message to The Chronicle, “it is mostly an account of young people feeling scorned and shunned by other young people, which, sadly, is fairly common at Harvard.”
The professor also expressed concern about the antisemitism report’s “investigations” of class syllabi and assigned reading, which they called “wildly inappropriate.” A clause stipulating that deans will work with faculty members to maintain an “appropriate focus on course subject matter” was of particular concern for the professor, who wrote: “Is no longer the province of the teacher to decide what the subject of their courses is?”
While Garber’s Tuesday statement did not mention the university’s lawsuit against the Trump administration, the first page of the antisemitism task force’s report seemed to nod to such considerations. “We are concerned that external parties, even if well-intentioned, will seek to compel adoption of some of our proposed reforms. If they do so, they will make it more difficult to fix itself,” the task force warned.
Miriam A. Nunberg, a former lawyer for the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, doubted Harvard’s antisemitism report would affect the Trump administration’s inquiry into the university, because she didn’t think the investigation was in good faith. “I don’t believe for a second that they actually care about antisemitism,” she said. That said, in Nunberg’s experience, the office often asked colleges that had been found to violate federal rules to do this kind of in-depth self-investigation. So, in theory, it is supposed to help.
Nunberg also worried that one task force’s recommendations might get greater consideration than the other’s. Given that many universities’ Title VI offices are understaffed, she said: “I suspect that what will happen is if the equity office has limited resources, then they’re going to end up only focusing on the things that they know they’re going to get scrutinized for” — namely, claims of antisemitism.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration sent Harvard a far-reaching list of demands on which it conditioned continued federal funding. They included eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion programming, removing race as a criterion in admissions and hiring, and working with the Department of Homeland Security.
Almost immediately after Harvard rejected the requirements, the Trump administration froze more than $2 billion in contracts and grants. A few officials later said the list of demands was sent by mistake, and the university should have confirmed its legitimacy. Harvard sued the Trump administration last week.
On Monday, the university appeared to give in to some of the Trump administration’s demands when it announced the renaming of the diversity, equity, and inclusion office to the office of community and campus life. The same day, the Trump administration announced it was investigating the Harvard Law Review for racial discrimination in membership and article selection. Garber’s message to the campus community on Tuesday also says the university will work to promote viewpoint diversity, something the Trump administration demanded Harvard audit and report back on by the end of the year.
In a statement on Tuesday, the chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce said the antisemitism committee’s report “shows what Committee Republicans have highlighted for years: antisemitism is running rampant on Harvard’s campus.” Tim Walberg, a Republican from Minnesota, added: “Harvard’s president said the school will not abide bigotry, yet that’s exactly what the school’s feckless leadership did.”
Walberg’s statement did not mention the report from the task force on combating anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias.
