Yesterday, two Harvard University task forces submitted reports on their investigations of bias at the university. The report of the Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias is here. It is 311 pages long, so I have only skimmed it. The New York Times notes the report’s unfortunate timing:
A Harvard task force released a scathing account of the university on Tuesday, finding that antisemitism had infiltrated coursework, social life, the hiring of some faculty members and the worldview of certain academic programs.
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The findings, conveyed in densely packed reports that are hundreds of pages long, come at a delicate time for the university. Harvard is being scrutinized by the Trump administration over accusations of antisemitism, and is fighting the administration’s withdrawal of billions of dollars in federal funding.
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In a letter accompanying the two reports, Dr. Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, apologized 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 promised to address them.
These are a few excerpts from the report that I noted:
We must undo an environment at Harvard where, as an Israeli Arab student told us:
Instead of diversity moderating people, people become more extreme. One Palestinian student showed up [at Harvard], talking with Israelis. By the end [of their time at Harvard, the student] cut off ties with Israelis and posted [on social media] in favor of Hamas.
We heard similar statements from many other people, including faculty and staff who work closely with students. They saw Harvard as a place where, over time, many students’ politics become more radical and where students become less tolerant of people who disagree with them. Faculty who work closely with students told us that in this generation, students too often feel they are carrying the weight of their identities, since they say that is how they sold themselves to Harvard in the application process. This positioning contributes to a kind of affective polarization that, we believe, Harvard has neither anticipated nor developed a set of tools to counteract. Reversing this polarization will require hard decisions and strong leadership. The Israeli Arab student we spoke with provided a suggestion that we think is crucial for moving forward:
Harvard should change [its] admissions policy to reflect what campus should look like: people listening to each other.
We agree….
Emphasis added. The anti-Semitism report includes several references to Harvard’s applications process, and the changing demographics of its student body, as contributors to the problem.
There is a certain dark humor here:
One Jewish graduate student who had been at Harvard as an undergraduate years before told us that “Jews are now being treated like Republicans were when I was in college,” which of course points to another problem with which elite universities have been struggling.
Finally this, on the connection between progressive politics and anti-Semitism:
During the latter half of the 2010s, in the view of some in the Harvard community, anti-Israel bias had become normalized, especially within politically progressive spaces. This normalization, we were told, put pressure on Jewish students to disavow Israel and are especially difficult for Jewish students with progressive politics who wanted to inhabit those spaces. Norms about non-discrimination and equal treatment among Harvard students appear to have faded, or at the very least, we were told there is an “Israel exception” to those rules (or an equally pernicious notion that anti-discrimination norms apply unevenly to Harvard affiliates based on supposed relative privilege).
Anti-Semitism is of course a unique form of bigotry with a very long history, but the task force’s report leaves the impression that in order to address the issue effectively, Harvard will have to look more broadly at the ideology of “identity,” at the way the university recruits students, and at the prevailing view of the university as a partisan actor in the political world.
