My sister was standing with just a few different college students below the dim glow of Harvard Yard’s previous lampposts, casually smoking and chatting. “Oh, you’re Palestinian?” one in every of them requested as he leaned in to gentle his cigarette from hers. “My cousin is within the IDF [Israeli army].”
Then he positioned the cigarette in his mouth backwards, the lit finish burning between his tooth. “That is how my cousin smoked whereas taking pictures Palestinians on the border,” he mentioned. “So these idiots couldn’t see the flame.”
That night, shaken, my sister referred to as our mother and father and later reported the incident to her resident tutor. She looked for a technique to file a proper criticism however discovered none. Arabs weren’t thought of a “protected class”. Within the charged political local weather of late 2001, hate speech like this wasn’t simply tolerated – it was invisible.
Greater than 20 years later, little has modified. A report launched in April 2025 by the Harvard Presidential Process Drive on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias described a “deep-seated sense of concern” amongst Muslim and Arab college students, school and workers. The campus local weather, the report famous, was marked by “uncertainty, abandonment, risk, and isolation”. Practically half of Muslim college students surveyed mentioned they felt bodily unsafe at Harvard whereas an amazing 92 % of all Muslim college students, school and workers revealed that they feared skilled or educational penalties for expressing their private or political opinions.
Harvard has customary itself as a free-speech warrior on the nationwide stage for refusing to barter with the Trump administration on its sweeping calls for for the college to drop its variety, fairness and inclusion measures and punish scholar protesters.
Nevertheless, inside Harvard’s campus partitions, we’ve got seen President Alan Garber oversee a scientific erasure of instructing, analysis and scholarship about Palestine, at a time when greater than 51,000 Palestinians have been killed, and lots of of hundreds extra have been forcefully displaced and are going through hunger below a relentless Israeli siege. Lengthy earlier than Harvard evaded a hostile takeover from our billionaire president, it capitulated to the calls for of its billionaire donors in issues of scholar self-discipline, campus speech and educational freedom.
To please its right-wing donors, Harvard adopted a one-sided conceptualisation of campus security, by which talking up in opposition to Israeli state violence in the direction of Palestinians is taken into account threatening. In consequence, college directors rush to handle anti-Semitism on campus, as they need to, however in addition they censor and get rid of speech and scholarship which is important of Israel within the identify of preventing antisemitism. In the meantime, anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab racism, and Islamophobia are lower than an afterthought. College directors stay silent as college students, school and workers expertise doxxing, harassment and loss of life threats for talking up about Palestinian human rights. They’ve shared international students’ information with the Division of Homeland Safety, as college students on close by campuses have been kidnapped by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, detained and deported for objecting to Israel’s worldwide regulation violations.
Past turning a blind eye to intimidation and abuse, the college’s leaders additionally routinely take motion to erase Palestinian speech, scholarship, advocacy and views.
Final 12 months, the Harvard Company, the college’s unelected governing physique, overruled the college and barred 13 seniors from graduating for protesting the genocide in Gaza, breaking with many years of disciplinary precedent. The college has banned the one undergraduate Palestine advocacy group twice, by inconsistent enforcement of the college’s ambiguous and “ever-evolving” occasion co-sponsorship coverage, which, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) warned, “elevate[s] the specter of viewpoint discrimination”. In a little-publicised Title VI settlement from January, the US Division of Training discovered that Harvard didn’t meaningfully examine or sufficiently reply to 125 circumstances of discrimination and harassment reported by its nameless reporting hotline, notably these “based mostly on Palestinian, Arab, and/or Muslim shared ancestry”. Though President Garber has mentioned Harvard ought to condemn “hateful speech” below the institutional voice coverage, this didn’t apply to the ugly “jokes” former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett made about giving college students exploding pagers for interrupting his speech at Harvard Enterprise College in March 2025.
The handful of instructing and analysis applications the place school examine Palestine at Harvard have been censored, eradicated, or are below risk of elimination. In a matter of months, Harvard cancelled a panel that includes Palestinian youngsters from Gaza at Harvard Medical College, ended its solely partnership with a Palestinian college, and eradicated the Faith and Public Life program on the Harvard Divinity College, which addressed Israel/Palestine as a case examine. Harvard additionally dismissed the management of the Middle for Center East Research, as an “providing of kinds to its critics”, in accordance with The New York Instances.
The elimination of Harvard programmes about Palestine is particularly chilling given that each one of Gaza’s universities have been demolished, greater than 80 % of its colleges have been destroyed or broken, and professors, academics and college students in Gaza have been systematically attacked. The UN calls this “scholasticide” – the systemic obliteration of schooling by the destruction of academic infrastructure and arrest, detention, or killing of scholars, workers, and academics.
The erasure and elimination of data manufacturing by Palestinians and about Palestine at Harvard and different universities chills speech in defence of Palestinian human rights within the US, and thus materially impacts the protection of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Financial institution.
Presently final 12 months, campuses throughout the US skilled an unprecedented mobilisation in assist of Palestinian freedom, which put a highlight on the overwhelming public opposition to Israel’s assault on Gaza. Finally, the opposition to Israel’s conduct in opposition to Palestinians grew to become so vocal that then-President Joe Biden – an ardent supporter of Israel – threatened an arms embargo in opposition to Israel if the humanitarian state of affairs in Gaza didn’t enhance.
In the present day, after Harvard and different universities suppressed protests in opposition to Israel’s complete warfare on Gaza, Palestinian struggling and loss of life are met with rising silence within the US. As public and media consideration drifts away from Gaza, the stress on American leaders to intervene – and even acknowledge the dimensions of the disaster – has all however disappeared.
The United Nations Workplace for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) lately declared that “the humanitarian state of affairs in Gaza is now doubtless the worst it has been within the 18 months for the reason that outbreak of hostilities.” Jonathan Whittall, the native head of OCHA, harassed that what’s unfolding in Gaza now not resembles standard warfare. “Individuals in Gaza are telling me they really feel prefer it’s the deliberate dismantling of Palestinian life in plain sight,” he mentioned. Malnutrition is surging as Israel has sealed the borders to meals, drugs, and all humanitarian help for over two months. In the meantime, scenes that ought to shock the world – youngsters’s our bodies thrown into the air by explosions, households burned alive – have change into what Whittall referred to as “on a regular basis atrocities”.
Each the Trump administration and Harvard’s billionaire donors clearly perceive the vital function universities play in shaping US society and public opinion. As Harvard leaders proclaim their dedication to “viewpoint variety”, we are able to relaxation assured that we are going to hear extra from audio system like Jared Kushner, who spoke on the Harvard Kennedy College final 12 months about his plan to “end the job” and develop Gaza’s “worthwhile waterfront property”, as a substitute of Palestinian little one amputees whose plight may make us really feel uncomfortable or complicit.
It’s heartening that lots of of college presidents signed a letter opposing President Trump’s tried takeover of US larger schooling. However for many years, their establishments have eagerly bent to the desire of billionaire donors. In simply the previous 12 months and a half, these donors have formed every little thing from campus speech to scholar self-discipline – even course syllabi. On this corrupt cut price, the idea of “campus security” has been weaponised to suppress speech on what the UN and different human rights organisations have referred to as genocide. The language of anti-discrimination has been twisted to dismantle variety, fairness, and inclusion applications – Harvard’s personal DEI workplace now quietly renamed the “Workplace of Group and Campus Life”.
This second can’t be separated from a broader historical past. It echoes the 1971 Lewis Powell memo, which outlined how companies may infiltrate US establishments – particularly universities – to align them with company pursuits. In the present day, the “Palestine exception” has change into a key entry level for an ideological seize of upper schooling, many years within the making.
For Harvard and its friends to withstand federal overreach whereas yielding to oligarchic donors just isn’t resistance in any respect – it’s give up. If we don’t battle each forces collectively, we could quickly be unable to battle in any respect. If, as President Garber wrote, “the fearless and unfettered pursuit of fact liberates humanity,” then he – and all of us – should demand that liberation with out exceptions, caveats, or concern. For each single one in every of us.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.