The Harvard Task Force released a scathing university account on Tuesday, finding that anti-Semitism has permeated the worldview of coursework, social life, employment of some faculty members, and certain academic programs.
Another report on anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian bias on campus was also released Tuesday, finding widespread discomfort and alienation among those students as well.
The findings are presented in dense reports of hundreds of pages long, and are at a delicate time for the university. Harvard is being scrutinized by the Trump administration over anti-Semitism accusations, fighting the retraction of a multi-billion dollar administration in federal fundraising.
Harvard sued the Trump administration in hoping to recover funds. Other schools targeted by the administration are watching the lawsuit closely.
In a letter accompanying the two reports, Harvard University President Dr. Alan Gerber apologised for the issues revealed by the task force. He said Hamas' attacks on Israel in 2023 and subsequent wars brought long boiling tensions to the surface, and they promised to deal with them.
“The 2023-24 grade school year was disappointing and painful,” wrote Dr. Gerber, who took office in January 2024. “I'm sorry for the moment when we didn't live up to the high expectations that we had just set for our community.”
He continued: “Harvard cannot protect prejudice.”
The anti-Semitism report was prepared by a task force consisting primarily of faculty, including students who were former Hillel directors and chief community and campus life officers at Harvard University. The report said that prejudice incidents had occurred before the Hamas attacks, and that the war in Gaza had intensified. Anti-Semitism seemed more pronounced in university branches where social justice was shaky, such as graduate schools, seminaries, and public health departments.
A similar task force held hundreds of conversations with Muslim, Arab and Palestinian students, staff and faculty members about anti-Muslim bias. The task force summarized the feelings many of those people expressed in two terms: “abandoned and silent.”
The university commissioned two reports, which were not intended to be investigated. The authors did not attempt to examine the experiences described by the people studied.
The Anti-Semitism Report recounts an episode in which students asked not to work with Israeli partners and an episode in which instructors admitted their demands because students who support the cause of the oppressed group should not be forced to work with students identified as members of the oppressor group. ”
In another episode mentioned in the report, those who arrived on the day of their visit for the newly recognized Harvard Medical School encountered students screaming “Free Palestine” from the sidewalk.
The report said several courses on Israel and Palestine have been partisan and politicized. The courses were disproportionately taught by Nontenure Track faculty, who were not as carefully vetted as the more advanced faculty, the report says.
Since October 7th, the report found that there has been an “avallowance” in the anti-Semitism ratio by members of Harvard's community trafficking. The Jewish student told the story of a university management training session on privileges that were said to have given him more privilege than white people to be Jewish.
Israeli students felt shunned. “Some people say when they learn that I am Israeli, they won't talk to anyone in the 'genocide state',” the undergraduate said.
The university recently adopted the contested definition of anti-Semitism, presented by the International Holocaust Memory Alliance, which counts Israel's criticism as anti-Semitists. The definition is contested, and critics say it silences the speech.
Anecdotes gathered from listening sessions with around 500 participants could expose Harvard to more attacks from the Trump administration.
“The longer we spent time on this issue, the more we learned how Israel's demonization influenced the swass of campus life that was far more broad than we had imagined,” the report said. “Bullying and attempts to intimidate Jewish students have been successful in several places.”
The two task forces worked together to create a campus-wide survey that received nearly 2,300 responses from faculty, staff and students. We found that 6% of Christian respondents reported feeling physically unsafe on campus, with 15% of Jewish respondents and 47% of Muslim respondents reporting the same. (The university does not track the total population of these groups on campus.)
In addition to 92% of Muslim respondents who were worried about expressing their opinions, 51% of Christian respondents and 61% of Jewish respondents said they felt the same way.
“Freedom of expression is one of the most important issues facing the entire Harvard campus community,” the Anti-Muslim Bias Task Force said.
The findings highlighted the dilemma Harvard and other universities faced as protests and rebellion over the war in Gaza. While some Jewish students and alumni have expressed concern about their actions and programming, for example, against anti-Israel prejudice, supporters of the Palestinian cause have said they would categorize the war as anti-Semitic and opposition to Israel.
Several of the students interviewed expressed a constant fear of revealing their pro-Palestinian views along with their identities, they worried that it would lead to an offer of work to cancel it. They reported that they are called slurs like “terrorists” and “towel heads” because they wear kaffiers.
The Palestinian student said he felt that Harvard administrators were not supported by Harvard administrators as they grieved their loved ones who died in Gaza.
“The sense of Palestinians over and over is that their lives aren't that important,” one student told the task force.
Palestinian teachers said they were worried that every commentary in the class and every article in the syllabus has been dissected and that the administration is trying to curb speeches to appease critics.
“There was an obvious sense,” the report states, “free speech and academic freedom are under serious threats, and many forms of student activity could be virtually dead.”
In response to many discoveries in anti-Semitism reports, the task force has discovered that Jewish students critical of Israel may not be welcomed by major Jewish organizations such as Hillel and Chabad on campus. We recommend that you integrate your religious life into campus life.
In his letter, Dr. Gerber listed a series of actions the university takes to curb the bias that closely aligns with the list of demands by the Trump administration's own anti-Semitism task force.
These requests deeply rocked Harvard University when it was delivered to the university on April 11th.
The Trump administration has called for Harvard Institutes to reform “met-based” employment and enrollment, regardless of race, religion, gender or country of origin. They also requested external audits of student organizations, faculty, staff and leadership for “diversity of perspectives” within each department, field or educational unit.
It also called for external audits of programs “reflecting the capture of most fuel anti-Semitism harassment or ideological” to designate divinity, education and public schools as the “center of concern.” And it spurred protests that sought sanctions against teachers who discriminated against Jewish students and violated campus rules.
Dr. Gerber said the university's dean is “considering recommendations regarding hospitalization, appointments, curriculum, orientation and training programs.”
He also pledged a university-wide initiative to “promote and support diversity of perspectives.”
