Harvard University has spent the last year slowly dismantling a religious-studies program that critics said was biased against Israel, five current and former university employees told The Chronicle. Last week, the final hammer fell: The five remaining staff members employed by the Religion and Public Life program were called, one by one, into meetings with a representative from Harvard’s human-resources department and the program’s interim director, David F. Holland. There, all learned their contracts would not be renewed.
The nonrenewals mark the end of a saga that began in the days after Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023. They suggest how thoroughly Harvard intends to overhaul Religion and Public Life: After June 30, none of the program’s original leaders will be left at the university. Most of the staff will be gone, too, although two people may be granted temporary extensions, sources said. The sources who spoke to The Chronicle — four of whom asked for anonymity out of fear of retaliation — were unsure about how exactly these extensions might work.
“With ongoing financial constraints and other considerations at the University and School level, the Religion and Public Life (RPL) program is being integrated more fully within the Harvard Divinity School’s broader administrative structure and programmatic offerings,” Tyler Sprouse, a spokesperson for the Divinity School, wrote in a statement. He said the school’s leaders were “grateful to these colleagues for their dedication and contributions to the program.”
The program has a new permanent director — Terrence L. Johnson, a professor of African American religious studies — who will begin in the new academic year.
Religion and Public Life is “essential” to helping the Divinity School fulfill its strategic goal of sharing knowledge about religion with the public and with students in secular career fields, such as journalism and public policy, said Dan McKanan, a senior lecturer at the school and its representative to Harvard’s American Association of University Professors chapter. “I’ve been a consistent advocate for keeping the Religion and Public Life program strong,” he said, “and this dismantling of its staff raises really serious questions for me about Harvard’s ongoing commitment to something that it has been naming a strategic priority for as long as I’ve been at Harvard.”
The program “and its ongoing mission will be sustained by Harvard Divinity School’s existing administrative support structures,” Sprouse wrote.
The program puts out a “wide range” of events and courses, McKanan said. But since the October 7 attacks, the program’s teaching around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has drawn criticism from those who argue Harvard’s campus is a hotbed of antisemitism.
The Trump administration has canceled billions of dollars in federal grants to Harvard over accusations that the university didn’t protect students from antisemitic discrimination. In negotiations with Harvard’s leadership over funding, the Trump administration named Religion and Public Life specifically as needing greater oversight — though the program had been facing challenges long before the current administration began.
Two years of challenges
The program’s fate offers one example of how Harvard’s public promises to deal with campus antisemitism look on the ground.
In an internal report on antisemitism published in April, a task force of professors, students, and advisers had suggested that a lack of rigor among “nonladder” faculty at Harvard was partly to blame for programs and events that task-force members characterized as antisemitic. The task force recommended tenured Harvard faculty members exercise greater oversight of programs.
Nonladder — or non-tenure-track — faculty deliver about half of the curriculum at the Divinity School, said McKanan, who has a nonladder contract and has been at Harvard for 17 years. “When Harvard chooses to rely on nonladder faculty,” he said, “it becomes a little bit strange and unnatural to exclude that half of the faculty from program leadership and from sponsoring public events on issues of urgent public concern.”
Religion and Public Life is one of a handful of programs Harvard’s antisemitism report singles out as being especially problematic. It was founded in 2020 to give students an understanding of how religion functions in society, according to the program site and student journalism from the time. One half of the program, called the Religious Literacy and the Professions Initiative, did not seem to have drawn complaints of antisemitism. But that initiative shared staff with the other half of the program — the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative — which did. All parts of the program have always been led by nontenured faculty members.
Religion and Public Life first drew intense attention across Harvard four days after Hamas’s October 7th attack. Five instructors across the program sent out a statement in the program’s newsletter, which called on readers to consider the history of Israel’s “illegal occupation of Palestinian land” and its blockade of Gaza. Critics considered it callous — at worst, antisemitic — to put out such a statement so soon after Hamas militants killed about 1,200 people in Israel and took more than 250 hostage.
“To acknowledge the context out of which this latest spate of violence arises is not to diminish the pain and suffering of Israeli and Palestinian victims,” says the statement, which calls the October 7th attack “horrendous.” The statement’s writers’ intent was “not to condone anything,” Atalia Omer said in an interview. Omer, one of the cosigners, is a former instructor with the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative (RCPI) and a tenured professor of religion, conflict, and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame. She and her colleagues wanted to put current events “within the broader context of 100 years of Palestinian experience,” she said.
Holland, then the interim dean of Harvard’s Divinity School, quickly distanced the school from Omer and her colleagues’ statement. A few months later, the statement showed up in a lawsuit filed by students, accusing Harvard of being a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred.” It’s also included in reports on antisemitism on campus by the internal Harvard task force and by a Jewish alumni group.
At the time of the attacks, RCPI had its students working on a six-year “case study” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Community members interviewed by Harvard’s antisemitism task force complained that talks and an annual trip to Israel and the West Bank that RCPI hosted disproportionately criticized Zionism, which the task force argued created the impression that Jews are guilty of “great sins” in establishing the state of Israel.
Omer said the program’s instructors were trying to present various narratives about the region and who belonged there. Inflammatory quotes in the report don’t give an accurate impression of the program overall, she said. At one point, the report quotes from the abstract of a paper that Omer and colleagues wrote about their approach to the Israel trip, which talks about “the urgent need to de-Zionize Jewish consciousness.” But Omer denied that the goal of the trip was to “de-Zionize” students: “It is to introduce students to different voices, to different stories, often people and voices that don’t get to come to Harvard.” Those voices included Jewish people who were critical of Zionism; Omer herself is Jewish and Israeli and moved to the United States in 1995. Harvard’s institutional-antisemitism report criticized RCPI’s focus on “non-mainstream Jewish perspectives.”
In the spring of 2024, Omer was told her contract with Harvard would not be renewed. In January of 2025, Diane L. Moore, then the associate dean of the Religion and Public Life program, was removed from the deanship, months ahead of her planned retirement in July. The next day, Hussein Rashid, Religion and Public Life’s assistant dean, announced he was resigning in a letter that accused Harvard of institutional anti-Muslim bias.
In the meantime, Frederick, the divinity-school dean, had assembled a committee of outside experts to review Religion and Public Life. During the review, the last member of the program’s senior leadership — Hilary Rantisi, associate director of RCPI — was told her contract would not be renewed.
An internal report about anti-Muslim bias at Harvard, which published at the same time as the institutional-antisemitism report, raised concerns that changes Harvard was making to Religion and Public Life and other programs diminished “the extent and content of intellectual programming on Palestine, Muslims, and the broader region” at the university.
“For as long as it lasted, which is five years,” Omer said of RCPI, “it was really an amazing space, intellectually.”
Eric Kelderman, a senior writer for The Chronicle, contributed reporting.
