Harvard University faced new challenges Tuesday, from pro-Palestinian and Muslim students alleging the school has not protected them from harassment and racism, and from alumni pressuring school leadership to focus on free speech and broadening the school’s conception of diversity.
A legal group representing 14 Harvard students asked the Department of Education this week to investigate the school for allegedly failing to protect them from discrimination and targeted harassment due to their Muslim, Arab, or Palestinian backgrounds, or their pro-Palestinian views.
Six alumni, with wholly different views of what ails Harvard, are racing to collect thousands of signatures as part of an insurgent campaign to join Harvard’s Board of Overseers and steer the school in a different direction.
Meanwhile, Kenneth Griffin, a megadonor who gave Harvard so much money that it named its largest graduate school after him last year, said at a conference Tuesday that elite universities now produce “whiny snowflakes” instead of “leaders and problem solvers” because of their excessive focus on “microaggressions [and] a DEI agenda.”
Griffin said he is not currently supporting Harvard financially, joining a chorus of other major donors who have lambasted the school since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel.
The fallout from that brutal incursion, and the retaliatory war it sparked in the Gaza Strip, has split Harvard’s campus. There were protests, charges of antisemitism and Islamophobia, and fury about Harvard’s response, especially from some Jewish, Muslim, and Palestinian students who said the university turned its back on them during the turmoil that consumed the fall semester and stretched into the new year.
Pro-Palestinian students allege the school did not adequately support them as they faced a targeted harassment campaign by outside activists and vitriol on campus due to their identities and advocacy against Israel’s war in Gaza , which has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced nearly 2 million more.
Christina Jump, a lawyer with the Muslim Legal Fund of America, said her group sent a civil rights complaint to the Department of Education Monday on the students’ behalf. Typically, the department’s Office for Civil Rights will open an investigation based on such a complaint. (The department declined to confirm or deny receipt of the complaint.)
The students were targeted, Jump said, for their pro-Palestinian views and for expressions of Palestinian solidarity, such as wearing a keffiyeh, a traditional scarf associated with the Palestinian liberation movement.
Harvard’s turmoil began on Oct. 7, after more than 30 student groups co-signed a statement that held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” and said “[t]oday’s events did not occur in a vacuum.”
Critics, including lawmakers, denounced the statement, which came as Israel was still counting its dead, as a justification for terrorism. The attack killed about 1,200 Israelis and included the murder of families in their homes, a massacre at a music festival, and kidnapping of children and the elderly. The statement’s authors said they sought to place the attack in the context of the decades of violence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and what they described as Israel’s longtime oppression of Palestinians.
Then the trucks appeared. Emblazoned with photos of students connected to the statement beneath the words “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites,” the trucks circled Harvard Square and, eventually, drove around in some students’ hometowns. Some business executives pledged to blacklist any student associated with the statement. At least one job offer was revoked.
In October, Eve Gerber, the wife of Harvard professor Jason Furman, followed a person the Harvard Crimson identified as a student as she walked near campus. “Thank you for walking through neighborhoods and making families feel unsafe with your terrorist scarf,” she said to the student, who was wearing a keffiyeh. Gerber publicly apologized after a video of the encounter spread widely online.
Jump said the students she represents feel unsafe walking on campus for fear of harassment due to their identity or overt displays of their pro-Palestinian views.
Tala Alfoqaha, a Palestinian American Harvard Law student, told the Globe recently that Harvard should have publicly stood up for Muslim, Palestinian, and Arab students. Former Harvard president Claudine Gay was more energetic in responding to campus antisemitism, Alfoqaha said.
As the violence escalated in Gaza, sending Alfoqaha and her friends into despair, “my grief and my humanity and my suffering were not acknowledged at all,” she said.
It was not clear if Alfoqaha was one of the complainants.
Other students and alumni, meanwhile, contend the school’s leaders have been wishy-washy on antisemitism and they remain upset the university’s first statement on the Hamas attack did not immediately condemn it as terrorism.
In the latest fallout on that front, at least six Harvard alumni were making a last-ditch effort to gather more than 3,000 alumni signatures each by a Wednesday deadline to become candidates for Harvard’s Board of Overseers.
That body, one of Harvard’s two governing boards, consists of dozens of alumni elected by alumni. Together with the top governing board known as the Harvard Corporation, the Board of Overseers is meant to shape the school’s agenda and ensure it remains true to its educational mission.
The Corporation has faced intense criticism in recent months from professors, students, and alumni over its handling of the campus turmoil and the downfall of former president Gay, whom the Corporation’s members selected to serve as president. The Corporation is also facing two investigations from a congressional committee into its handling of allegations of plagiarism against Gay and how the school responded to resurgent antisemitism. Gay, Harvard’s first Black president, resigned on Jan. 2.
Bill Ackman, an alumnus and donor who helped mobilize support for Gay’s ouster, is now backing four of the candidates seeking seats on the Board of Overseers on a joint platform: Zoe Bedell, Logan Leslie, Alec Williams, and Julia Pollak.
They want to establish new criteria for selecting presidents that “prioritiz[e] candidates’ competence and aligns to the responsibilities of managing a large, complex enterprise like Harvard.”
They want to emphasize speech policies that foster open debate and prohibit students from shouting down or shunning speakers they don’t like.
And they want to push back against what they regard as administrative bloat; that is, Harvard’s costly employment of thousands of staffers who do not teach.
Sam Lessin, a former Facebook executive whose candidacy is backed by Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, a onetime Harvard College student, is also pursuing a seat on the Board of Overseers. Harvey Silverglate, a lawyer and free speech advocate, is campaigning with priorities that overlap with those of the Ackman slate of candidates.
Some of these candidates, and other critics of higher education in recent months, have tied Harvard’s and other universities’ problems to what they characterize as an overly narrow view of diversity and the excesses of universities’ diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies.
“It’s pretty clear their obsession with race has caused them a lot of difficulty they otherwise wouldn’t have faced,” Leslie, an entrepreneur and Army veteran, said, referring to Harvard.
Harvard has been engaging with some of the issues raised by its critics this week.
Interim president Alan Garber created two task forces this month to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia. He also sent a statement to the campus community emphasizing the importance of free speech, as well as the limits of campus protest.
Students, he said, can debate a wide range of views, but they cannot inhibit the university’s business, such as by disrupting lectures with megaphones, as several students have done in recent months, or shouting down speakers.
As members of the Harvard community have mobilized to change the course of the school’s future this week, former president Lawrence Summers lamented its recent past.
In a social media post Tuesday, Summers questioned the will of Harvard leaders to confront antisemitism since Oct. 7 and foster constructive debate about fraught issues such as the war in the Middle East.
“I cannot think,” he said, “of a worse stretch in Harvard history than the last few months.”
Mike Damiano can be reached at mike.damiano@globe.com. Hilary Burns can be reached at hilary.burns@globe.com.