A Harvard University task force released a scathing account of the college on Tuesday, finding that anti-Semitism had infiltrated coursework, social life, the hiring of some faculty members and the worldview of certain academic programmess.
A separate report on anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian bias on campus, also released Tuesday, found widespread discomfort and alienation among those students as well, with 92 per cent of Muslim survey respondents saying they believed they would face an academic or professional penalty for expressing their political opinions.
The findings, come at a delicate time for the university, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard is being scrutinised by the Trump administration over accusations of anti-Semitism, and is fighting the administration’s withdrawal of billions of dollars in federal funding.
Harvard has sued the administration in hopes of restoring the funding, the first university to do so.
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In a letter accompanying the two reports, Dr Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, apologised for the problems that the task forces revealed. He said the Hamas attack on Israel in 2023 and the war that followed had brought long simmering tensions to the surface, and he promised to address them.
“The 2023-24 academic year was disappointing and painful,” Dr Garber, who took office in January 2024, wrote in the letter. “I am sorry for the moments when we failed to meet the high expectations we rightfully set for our community.”
The anti-Semitism report was produced by a task force made up mainly of faculty, but also included students, a former Hillel director and Harvard’s chief community and campus life officer, whose title was changed from chief diversity and inclusion officer Tuesday.
The report said that bias incidents had been occurring before the Hamas attack and were intensified by the war in the Gaza Strip. It found that anti-Semitism seemed to be more pronounced in branches of the university with a social justice bent, including the graduate school of education, the divinity school and the school of public health.
A similar task force held hundreds of conversations with Muslim, Arab and Palestinian students, staff and faculty members about anti-Muslim bias. That task force summed up the feelings expressed by many of those people in two words: “abandoned and silenced.”
The university commissioned the two reports, which were not meant to be investigative. The authors did not seek to verify the experiences described by people who were surveyed.
“The more time we spent on this problem, the more we learned about how demonisation of Israel has impacted a much wider swathe of campus life than we would have imagined,” the report said. “The bullying and attempts to intimidate Jewish students were in some places successful.” - The New York Times.
