Date: 2025-08-22 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00028533
ACADEMICS
ANTISEMITISM AND ISLAMOPHOBIA
AMERICAN LEADERSHIP HAS STONE AGE THINKING!
Harvard Promises Changes After Reports on Antisemitism and Islamophobia
ANTISEMITISM AND ISLAMOPHOBIA
AMERICAN LEADERSHIP HAS STONE AGE THINKING!
Harvard Promises Changes After Reports on Antisemitism and Islamophobia
The reports were hundreds of pages long, and could complicate the
difficult balance Harvard faces as it grapples with reports of bias.
Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times
Original article: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/us/harvard-antisemitism-islamophobia-reports.html
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
I was a student at Cambridge University in the late 1950s. I remember it well.
Students were passionate about nuclear disarmament
I participated in the Aldermaston marches where around 100.000 demonstators walked from Aldermaston to Trafalgar Square during the Easter Weekend! This happened several years in a row.
No violence!
Also massive police pretection to make sure that our rights for free speech were protected ... and t0 make sure the demonstrators remained peaceful!
So much better than what I observe in the USA some 65 years later!
MORE
I have been an interested observer of student activism over a long time. During my student days, I participated in a variety of actions to draw atttention to issues that were bothering me. Oxfam, War-on-Want are two organizations that I recall being active in my college!
When I was first a legal resident in the United States, I was required to 'register for the draft'. I was 28 years old ... about 10 years older than most of the people actually getting draft calls at the time. It was the middle of the Vietnam War which had become very unpopular with the general public. My calculus was that if I did get a draft call I would most likely be put to work doing payroll or inventory control or some sort of admin rather than actual fighting. As it turned out I did not get a draft call!
My work as a very young manager in the business world turned out to be very interesting. I had a much broader education than most of my contemporaries which was invaluableand it enabled me to have a lot of success with practical profit improvement initiatives. This worked to my advantage until I started looking at the organization that was at the 'top' of the company.
Over a period of time ... several different employers ... I was 'let go' when it was clear that my analysis was heading towards cost cutting at the 'top' of the company rather than within the lower ranks! Eventually, I decided that I would establish a consulting practice to do this type of work independently ... maybe not the best decision I ever made ... but it did open my eyes to a very big, complex and fascinating world!
As an independent consultant I did assignments for the World Bank as well as IFC, an affiliate of the World Bank. Initially I was impressed by the World Bank staff, but over time I became more critical. This was due in part to a decision made by MacNamara when he was the World Bank President. The decision was to expand the reecruitment of well educated economists directly from elite universities, a decision that denied the World Bank the real world experience that was vital to good planning and decision making. I believe, this was a big reason why World Bank projects became less and less successful over time.
I also did consulting assignments for the United Nations (UN), mainly with UNDP (the United Nations Development Programme). Much of this work was quite consequential, but in most cases the financial budget for the work was a fraction of what was needed for success.
On several occasions the UNDP assignment involved some sort of collaboration with other units of the UN system. Several were in connection with UNHCR, the main refugee agency of the UN system. While most of the UN system had a very burdensome bureaucracy, UNHCR had almost no bureaucracy to slow down its emergency response, but did have effective way to generate ex-post accountability.
I have not worked inside the World Bank or the UN system since the very early 2000s and do not know how the management systems of these huge organizations have changed since then. I do not get the impression that management systems in these organizations are more effective now than they were more the 25 years ago.
I thought the progress of development and humanitarian relief in the 1980s and 1990s was quite impressive. In contrast, I get the impressiion that much of this progress has disappeared in the subsequent years.
One of the big issues that has emerged in the last 45 years is the concentration of wealth at the 'top' of society and the broad decline inf wealth for most of the population. Inequality is now (2025) bigger than at any time in history and still increasing. A lot of the people in power have massively increasing wealth and no incentive to change this behavior.
When I was studying economics at Cambridge in 1960, rapidly improving productivity was happeming in industry and the economy, and a shorter work-week of just 30 hours was being discussed as a solution. 65 tears later, there have been even bigger improvements in productivity but working level people are now expected to work up to 80 hours a week to support a family. This is wrong, but top decision makers have done little in decades to address the issue. Shame on them!
Modern 'thought' seems incapable of handling anything beyond the most simple problem. Sad ... but it does explain a lot!
Peter Burgess
The two reports, which run hundreds of pages, come at a difficult time for the university, which is suing the Trump administration over federal funding cuts.
Written by Anemona Hartocollis and Vimal Patel
April 29, 2025
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.
A separate report on anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian bias on campus, also released on Tuesday, found widespread discomfort and alienation among those students as well, with 92 percent of Muslim survey respondents saying they believed they would face an academic or professional penalty for expressing their political opinions.
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.
Harvard has sued the Trump administration in hopes of restoring the funding, the first university to do so. Other schools that have been targeted by the administration are watching the litigation closely.
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.
“The 2023-24 academic year was disappointing and painful,” Dr. Garber, who took office in January 2024, wrote in the letter. “I am sorry for the moments when we failed to meet the high expectations we rightfully set for our community.”
He continued: “Harvard cannot — and will not — abide bigotry.”
The antisemitism report was produced by a task force made up mainly of faculty, but that also included students, a former Hillel director and Harvard’s chief community and campus life officer, whose title was changed from chief diversity and inclusion officer on Tuesday. The report said that bias incidents had been occurring before the Hamas attack and were intensified by the war in Gaza. It found that antisemitism seemed to be more pronounced in branches of the university with a social justice bent, including the graduate school of education, the divinity school and the school of public health.
A similar task force held hundreds of conversations with Muslim, Arab and Palestinian students, staff and faculty members about anti-Muslim bias. That task force summed up the feelings expressed by many of those people in two words: “abandoned and silenced.”
The university commissioned the two reports, which were not meant to be investigative. The authors did not seek to verify the experiences described by the people who were surveyed.
The antisemitism report recounted an episode in which a student asked not to work with an Israeli partner, and an instructor granted the request because “in their view, a student who supported the cause of an oppressed group should not be forced to work with a student identified as a member of an ‘oppressor group.’”
In another episode in the report, a recently admitted medical student recounted arriving for a visitation day and encountering students yelling “Free Palestine” from a walkway, apparently to discourage Zionists from attending the school.
The report said that some courses on Israel and Palestine were partisan and politicized. These courses were disproportionately taught by nontenure track faculty members, who were not as carefully vetted as more senior faculty are, the report said.
After Oct. 7, the report said, there was an “avalanche” of posts by members of the Harvard community trafficking in antisemitic tropes. Some Jewish students told stories of university-run training sessions about privilege in which they said they were told that being Jewish and white made them more privileged than only being white.
Israeli students felt shunned. “Some people, upon learning that I’m Israeli, tell me they won’t talk with someone from a ‘genocidal country,’” an undergraduate is quoted saying.
The university recently adopted a contested definition of antisemitism, put forward by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, that counts some criticism of Israel as antisemitic. The definition is disputed, and critics say that it silences speech.
The anecdotes — gathered from listening sessions with some 500 participants — could expose Harvard to more attacks from the Trump administration.
“The more time we spent on this problem, the more we learned about how demonization of Israel has impacted a much wider swath of campus life than we would have imagined,” the report said. It added: “The bullying and attempts to intimidate Jewish students were in some places successful.”
The two task forces worked together to create a campuswide survey that received nearly 2,300 responses from faculty, staff and students. It found that 6 percent of Christian respondents reported feeling physically unsafe on campus, while 15 percent of Jewish respondents and 47 percent of Muslim respondents reported the same. (The university does not track the total population of these groups on campus.)
In addition to the 92 percent of Muslim respondents who worried about expressing their views, 51 percent of Christian respondents and 61 percent of Jewish respondents said they felt the same way.
“Freedom of expression is one of the most critical issues facing the entire Harvard campus community,” the anti-Muslim bias task force said.
The results of the survey underscored a dilemma that Harvard and other universities have faced as protests and counterprotests over the war in Gaza intensified. Some Jewish students and alumni have expressed worries about activism and programming veering into anti-Israel bigotry, for example, while supporters of the Palestinian cause say that categorizing their opposition to the war and Israel as antisemitism silences their speech.
Indeed, the report received markedly different responses from groups that represent those different perspectives.
Roni Brunn, a spokeswoman for the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance, said she appreciated that the university had called out what she saw as “academically unsound” ideas that undergird antisemitic views, like the concept of settler colonialism. But she said it would take more than adding a diversity of viewpoints to move forward.
But Lindsie Rank, the director of campus rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, argued that the findings confirmed that “free expression on campus has been stifled.”
“All students deserve to know they are free to express their beliefs without facing punishment,” she added.
Some of the students interviewed expressed a constant fear of having their pro-Palestinian views revealed along with their identities, which they worried would lead to revoked job offers. They reported being called slurs like “terrorist” and “towelhead” for wearing kaffiyehs.
Palestinian students said they felt unsupported by Harvard administrators as they mourned loved ones who had died in Gaza.
“The feeling over and over again for Palestinians is that their lives don’t matter as much,” one student told the task force.
Pro-Palestinian faculty said they worried that every comment in class and every article in their syllabuses would be dissected and that the administration was seeking to curb speech to placate critics.
“There was a palpable sense,” the report stated, “that free speech and academic freedom are under grave threat and that many forms of student activism may effectively be dead.”
In a counterpoint to many findings in the antisemitism report, the task force found that Jewish students who were critical of Israel sometimes did not feel welcome at major Jewish organizations, like Hillel and Chabad, on campus. It recommended better integrating religious life into campus life.
In his letter, Dr. Garber listed a series of actions the university would take to curb bigotry that closely paralleled a list of demands by the Trump administration’s own antisemitism task force.
Those demands deeply shook Harvard when they were delivered to the university on April 11, because they were viewed as an unconstitutional government infringement on academic freedom.
The Trump administration demanded that Harvard institute “merit-based” hiring and admissions reform, meaning without regard to race, religion, sex and national origin. And it demanded an outside audit of the student body, faculty, staff and leadership, for “viewpoint diversity,” within each department, field or teaching unit.
It also called for an outside audit of programs “that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture,” specifying the divinity, education and public health schools among others as “centers of concern.” And it called for sanctions against faculty members who discriminated against Jewish students or incited protests that broke campus rules.
Dr. Garber said that the university’s deans were “reviewing recommendations concerning admissions, appointments, curriculum and orientation and training programs.”
He also promised a universitywide initiative to “promote and support viewpoint diversity.”
Anemona Hartocollis is a national reporter for The Times, covering higher education.
Vimal Patel writes about higher education with a focus on speech and campus culture.
A version of this article appears in print on April 30, 2025, Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: Task Force at Harvard Finds Widespread Bias. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
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