Jewish students described being treated as pariahs. Arab and Muslim students said they felt like “second-class citizens.” Both groups said their peers viewed them with suspicion, leading them to play down their identities.
Those were some of the findings of two searing reports on antisemitism and anti-Arab or anti-Muslim bias that Harvard University released Tuesday in the midst of its extraordinary confrontation with the Trump administration, which has accused the school of violating the civil rights of its Jewish students.
Work on the reports began last year at the height of the campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war, and they largely describe events of the previous academic year.
Nonetheless, the findings on the climate for Jewish students in particular may bolster the Trump administration’s accusation that Harvard violated their civil rights by failing to protect them from antisemitic harassment and discrimination.
The reports were originally to be released last fall. But, following delays, the Trump administration demanded on April 19 that Harvard turn over all documents, including any drafts and edits, related to the antisemitism report.
Even before its current confrontation with President Trump, Harvard took pains to highlight its actions to combat antisemitism, including revamping campus rules related to protest and student discipline. Some Jewish students say the climate has significantly improved since last year.
In an open letter Tuesday, Harvard president Alan Garber emphasized the reports focused on events that are now a year old. “The 2023-24 academic year was disappointing and painful,” he wrote.
Both reports show where Harvard failed to support students at a time when they needed it most — in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel and during Israel’s military campaign in Gaza that followed.
Some Jewish students were disturbed at seeing peers seemingly apologizing for, or even celebrating, the attack by Hamas, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Arab, Palestinian, and Muslim students, meanwhile, felt university leaders minimized the staggering death toll and destruction in Gaza.
“I am sorry for the moments when we failed to meet the high expectations we rightfully set for our community,” Garber wrote. He was Harvard’s provost during the fall 2023 semester and promptly convened the two task forces after assuming the presidency when Claudine Gay resigned last January.
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The reports described certain commonalities in the experiences of Jewish, Israeli, Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian students, that their identities made them suspect in the eyes of peers. Jewish students said they were treated as “oppressors”; Arab and Muslim students said they were disparaged as “terrorists.” Some said they sought to hide outward signs of their identity.
Both reports also described vicious, bigoted social media posts, especially on Sidechat, a platform that allows users with Harvard email addresses to post anonymously.
There were also notable differences: For Jewish and Israeli students, the primary source of animus was their peers. Meanwhile, Arab, Muslim, Palestinian, and pro-Palestinian students pointed to Harvard leaders, saying they had “abandoned and silenced” them.
The two task forces, each with roughly a dozen members including professors, administrators, and students, conducted around 50 “listening sessions” on campus, collected written testimony, and commissioned a joint survey. The antisemitism task force said approximately 500 people participated in its sessions.
In the antisemitism report, Jewish students said their classmates sometimes treated their family histories as inherently problematic.
One student recounted they had been preparing a short speech for a Harvard-organized event. The student wanted to describe how their grandfather had survived the Holocaust by migrating to what was then called the British Mandate of Palestine, and then helped thousands of other Jews find refuge in what is now Israel.
The student organizers of the forum objected, according to the report, telling this student to not mention the grandfather’s rescue missions because the narrative was not “tasteful,” according to the student.
“They told me that my family history is inherently one-sided because it does not acknowledge the displacements of Palestinian populations, and I believe this accusation is an antisemitic double standard,” the student told the task force.
Other Jewish students spoke of the pressure to pass a litmus test to be accepted in politically progressive groups, or else face social shunning. They felt the need to denounce Israel or disavow Zionism, the belief that Jews have a right to self-determination in the land of Palestine and Israel, a place where both Jews and Palestinians have historical roots.
“There’s a good-Jew, bad-Jew dynamic,” one student told the antisemitism task force. “I’m a Zionist. The experience of being a Jewish student at Harvard in progressive spaces requires incredible emotional labor.”
The report also described anti-Israel bias advanced by some faculty members that had the effect, intended or not, of holding all Jews responsible for Israel’s actions.
The task force recounts how some Harvard educators characterized a trip students took to Israel and the Palestinian territories. Jewish American students on the trip, the educators said, “became overwhelmed with their sorrow at how the Jewish tradition has become indistinct from a settler colonial nation-state project. They aspire to extricate themselves from such a conflation, which implicates them in atrocities.”
The task force made clear the educators unfairly implied a “collective guilt, where American Jews are guilty of alleged crimes committed in some cases generations ago by other people. In this formulation, American Jews are guilty of ‘atrocities’ unless they distance themselves from the State of Israel. This is not simply ‘criticism of Israel.’ ”
Israelis and Israeli Americans faced particular ostracism, including “explicit, deliberate discrimination,” one student told the antisemitism task force.
Conversely, Arab and Muslim students described a widespread sense of not feeling free to speak on issues involving Palestinians and the Palestinian territories, and even feeling subject to surveillance and possible disciplinary action. And some professors feared any such teachings would prevent them from getting tenure, according to the report.
Some accused Harvard leaders of conflating legitimate criticism of Israel with antisemitism in a way that made any expression of pro-Palestinian viewpoints perilous. Pro-Palestinian students and faculty were especially alarmed by Harvard’s adoption in January of a definition of antisemitism that free-speech advocates say can be wielded to suppress criticism of Israel.
The Trump administration has pushed some universities to adopt that definition — known as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism — and use it in disciplinary procedures.
And pro-Palestinian students and faculty said the university selectively enforced rules governing protests against them.
They also said Harvard failed to protect students from “doxxing” incidents in which outside groups post the names and photos of pro-Palestinians online, exposing them to harassment and reprisals such as losing job offers.
One faculty member told the task force a student whose name and photo was displayed on a truck that drove through Harvard Square “received calls with death and rape threats.”
When students appealed to Harvard’s leaders for help, they found the response inadequate or nonexistent. One recalled raising concerns after being “coughed on and yelled at by students for wearing a keffiyeh” — a patterned scarf associated with Palestinian nationalism.
“I received a form response,” the student said.
The task force did not reach a consensus on whether Harvard should cut ties with Israel, despite it being a key theme during its research. The idea of divesting from or boycotting Israel is controversial; some see it as antisemitic, while many who spoke with the task force compared it to Harvard’s decision in the 1980s to cut some ties with the apartheid government of South Africa.
“Students expressed frustration with what they felt were dismissive attitudes from [Harvard] leaders, who argued that divestment from Israel lacked moral clarity,” the report’s authors wrote. “Many students linked divestment to their safety and sense of belonging on campus.”
Overall, the report reflected a sense that Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian students felt expendable at Harvard. Arabs and Muslims, one person testified, “are treated as second-class members of this community, our feelings do not matter at all, we are not reached out to or valued or protected to the same degree as others; we are disposable.”
Among the recommendations from both reports: that Harvard expand academic offerings on antisemitism and Jewish history and train students to more constructively debate and disagree with each other; provide legal support to students facing harassment after being outed online as pro-Palestinian; and define and denounce bias against Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians.
Garber also said Harvard will launch a research project on antisemitism and a historical analysis of Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians at the university. (The antisemitism report includes a lengthy history of Jews at Harvard, including past discrimination.)
Deans of Harvard schools, Garber said, are reviewing recommendations related to admissions, curricula, and orientation and training programs.
Harvard is also taking steps to nurture “viewpoint diversity” on campus to expand the range of ideologies and political views that can be expressed without fear of retaliation or ostracism.
“My goal now is to ensure that we continue to find ways to strengthen the fabric of our community as we meet unprecedented challenges,” Garber wrote in his letter.
Mike Damiano can be reached at mike.damiano@globe.com. Brooke Hauser can be reached at brooke.hauser@globe.com. Follow her @brookehauser.