What The Hell America!

Harvard’s anti-Semitism report has landed: elaborately footnoted, abundant in statistics as well as anecdotes, earnest and troubled in tone. It was composed entirely by current insiders at the university—no alumni or, heaven forfend, faculty or deans from other universities. And it offers more than 300 pages of dismal reading.

The report spends time—an inordinate amount of time, according to some Harvard critics—parsing the definition of anti-Semitism and its relationship to exterminationist hatred of Israel. By its very length and carefully modulated tone, it sometimes seems to reflect an academic wringing of hands rather than shocked wonder and volcanic fury at the Jew hatred that has infected this great university.

The report nonetheless carefully documents a series of appalling incidents, and the failure of university leadership to address chronic and worsening Jew-baiting. It notes that the university leaders remained mute when a commencement speaker resorted to anti-Jewish tropes. It describes the silencing of Jewish students by their classmates, egregious faculty support of anti-Israel protests at the expense of classroom neutrality or even attendance, and sheer thuggishness aimed at Jewish students. It also documents the collapse of a once-demanding disciplinary system, as various penalties for misbehavior were reduced or rescinded wholesale in July 2024. It has a long list of recommendations, including special training for students involved in DEI efforts, more courses on Judaism and the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and setting clearer expectations about civil discourse for new students.

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Harvard President Alan Garber came to his position suddenly, being appointed first as interim president, then to his current role following the self-immolation of his predecessor, Claudine Gay. That his presidency was accidental has not stopped Garber from undertaking a number of sensible reforms, including standardizing and centralizing disciplinary procedures at the university, canceling identity-driven graduation events, ending Harvard’s political pronouncements, and attempting to rescue the diversity piece of DEI by focusing on community experience. He has been more than a safe pair of hands, which is all to the good.

The fundamental problem, however, is that the roots of Harvard’s Jew-baiting problem go far deeper than either the earnest recommendations of the task force or the more robust actions of Harvard’s president can address.

The widespread harassment of Jews reported at Harvard reflects the attitudes of hundreds if not thousands of students, faculty, and staff—that last group is an often underappreciated element in indulging or even encouraging this behavior. It reflects the development of identity-driven politics, for which responsibility lies outside the university as well as within it. It has been fed by witch-hunting for “white privilege” (no matter that there are plenty of Jews of color, as a walk down the streets of Tel Aviv will show you). It flourishes in the bogus specializations that have hived off from more traditional and all-embracing disciplines such as history, literature, and anthropology. It has been nurtured in research centers whose very existence is premised not on the quest for truth but on the pursuit of a political or ideological agenda.

And it has been compounded by craven behavior at the top. When the Harvard Corporation restored the degrees of 11 of the 13 students who had been bounced for violating the university’s rules, it was cowardly. Neither has the corporation acknowledged any culpability for its disastrous appointment of Gay and the subsequent damage that did to the university’s reputation. With the best will in the world, Garber can only begin to tackle problems that are both deep-seated and not fully acknowledged in the task-force report. Still, as Rabbi Tarfon said some 1,800 years ago, “You are not compelled to finish the work, but neither are you permitted to desist from it.”

And the work will not be done by the Trump administration either, which, as Charles Lane has put it, is framing a guilty man. The administration’s five-page letter of demands to the university not only requires unconditional surrender but also promises the equivalent of the occupation and MAGA-led reconstruction of a defeated country. It insists on meritocracy—but then proposes to supervise faculty hiring and teaching on the basis of ideological criteria. It would eliminate academic freedom and put the university in a kind of receivership from which it would be released only at the White House’s discretion. And in orderto soften the university up with a bit of backroom third degree, it is canceling contracts, slashing indirect cost-recovery rates, and (if Donald Trump is to be believed) trying to eliminate Harvard’s tax-exempt status.

One may be forgiven for thinking that the administration’s avowedly radical concern about anti-Semitism is impure. An administration that listens to the likes of Tucker Carlson is, at least, inconsistent on this point. Rather, the Trump administration appears to have seized on this issue in large part to batter universities, particularly the prominent ones.

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The administration likes to talk about terror—whether as a state to induce in bureaucrats or the “existential terror” that Christopher Rufo, an admired voice, hopes to instill in universities. When you talk terror, you are talking destruction, not reform; you are promoting large-scale vandalism, not a better model. The administration has no vision for universities beyond platitudes, and no realization that an attempt to impose one will simply fail—or breed outward submission that will turn into vengefulness when its moment passes. Hillsdale College and Liberty University, beware.

The deeper maladies behind Harvard’s Jew-baiting problem will take many years to fix. Still, with some humility, some things can be done now. Harvard might even learn from others: Vanderbilt in its intolerance for physical obstruction, for example, or Chicago for its unabashedly firm rules on speech.

Or consider admissions policy. In the 1920s, the notoriously Jew-antipathetic president of Harvard, Lawrence Lowell, wanted to reduce the percentage of Jewish students from the roughly 20 or 25 percent then attending. He advocated a 15 percent quota, which was shot down by the faculty. As of 2023, Jews made up about 10 percent of Harvard’s undergraduates. The anti-Semitism report alludes delicately to “changing admissions practices” that have perhaps privileged students looking for a platform, a network, and a credential, and rewarded their jejune, self-reported high-school activism. Harvard might consider looking instead for students keen on a genuine education, rewarding open-minded curiosity rather than belligerent self-righteousness.

There is much more work to be done. Harvard might, for example, pare down its plethora of concentrations and centers that are driven by political activism more than scholarly inquiry. It might make its disciplinary system stick. Its leaders might give lots of short, unequivocal, and ironclad declarations of what its principles are. It will be a long haul, and one for serious people, of whom President Garber is plausibly one.

In the meantime, what should those who deplore both the Jew-baiting and the Trumpian vandalism do? The answer lies in another Jewish experience. In 1939, the Jewish community in Palestine, some half a million in total, confronted both the British government’s white paper that restricted the immigration of Jews trapped in the slaughterhouse of Europe and the war with Nazi Germany. David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Jewish community, had a simple response: “We must support the [British] army as though there were no White Paper, and fight the White Paper as though there were no war.” A courageous response, and one worth emulating.