Holding Harvard accountable for mistreating Jews

Jews should support our government’s belated efforts to hold Harvard accountable for a decades-long descent into antisemitism and its abject failure to protect Jews. While our applause can be sprinkled with cautious caveats, we should not sit on our hands — yet far too many Jews have loudly protested. Do they prefer to retreat to a world where our elected officials did little if anything while Jews were attacked and ostracized?

We have a choice: idly watch as Harvard continues to devolve into an increasingly unsafe environment for Jews or support the use of taxpayer dollars to protect our people. Admittedly, President Trump can follow a more measured path to get the job done, but I prefer this course over the unchecked campus chaos that ensued under the Biden administration. I respectfully urge those of you who disdain Trump to avoid letting your hatred for the man eclipse common sense. We can support the goal of forcing Harvard to make amends while urging the government to be careful in its methods.

What’s not in dispute

Harvard occupies a unique place in our academic pantheon. It chose to accept billions of taxpayer dollars in exchange for subjecting itself to certain regulations, including the obligation to protect Jewish and all other students from discriminatory hostilities.

In the wake of October 7, Harvard failed to discharge this most basic duty. Harvard’s descent did not occur overnight; it is the product of decades of deliberate decisions to permit academic departments to be coopted by antisemitic professors, fall under the influence of dubious foreign donors, and cater to the dangerous rise of critical race theory and intersectionality. During this time, the percentage of Jews attending Harvard dropped precipitously. This was not an accident. Harvard’s comeuppance is long overdue.

In late April, Harvard released its much-anticipated internal report on campus antisemitism. The report spans over 300 pages and predictably chronicles a hostile atmosphere toward Jews, both before and after October 7. It got so bad at Harvard that many Jews felt compelled to hide their identities, feared for their physical safety, and withdrew from campus life.

Sadly, this comes as no surprise considering the blind eye of Harvard’s lackluster leadership. After Harvard’s campus erupted with antisemitism, then President Claudine Gay was called to testify before Congress. Unless you were living in a cave, you know that she failed miserably and resigned in disgrace. Most egregiously, Gay could not summon the decency to unequivocally declare that calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard’s code of conduct.

Here are a few highlights from Harvard’s own report:

• Jewish students “faced bias, suspicion, intimidation, alienation, shunning, contempt, and sometimes effective exclusion from various curricular and co-curricular parts of the University and its community — clear examples of antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias.”

• Jewish students were told by faculty and peers that they had to denounce Israel to be considered “one of the good ones”

• Jewish students faced a deluge of hate via social media, including being told that they shared guilt for Israel’s “atrocities” and that Judaism had become a “settler-colonial project.”

• Jewish students were removed from events for safety reasons while protesters essentially were permitted to roam free around campus, repeatedly chanting “Globalize the intifada” (i.e., kill Jews) and calling for the destruction of Israel.

In sum, the report is a searing indictment of Harvard and evinces an utter disdain for Jews. One cannot imagine Harvard systematically treating any other minority as poorly as it treated Jews.

As Harvard goes, so go others

Harvard proudly sets an example for other institutions of higher education. Unfortunately, Harvard has set a bad example through its embrace of grievance politics, including oppressor-versus-oppressed paradigms. Its behavior contributed to the conditions ripe for the concretizing of a fallacious anti-Israel narrative, which ultimately provided the kindling and spark for detonating college protests. Harvard is smart enough to know what it was doing but chose not to course-correct.

Because Harvard plays such a symbolic role, our government’s prior failure to punish Harvard had significant downstream impact — i.e., antisemitism on Harvard’s (and Columbia’s) campus served as a roadmap and others cut-and-paste from the same playbook to create hostile conditions for Jews. Failing to hold Harvard truly accountable provided kosher certification to its treyf actions.

By contrast, the Trump administration’s hardline moves against Harvard send a chilling message — namely, that universities’ failures to protect Jews will not be tolerated. Our federal government’s actions often are performative — presidents proclaim a particular policy initiative to set a tone or chart a new direction. Given the choice, I would rather our leadership brashly emphasize the fight against antisemitism than do too little.

Arguments against Trump’s targeting of Harvard

There have been numerous arguments made against the Trump administration’s strategy concerning Harvard, some more serious than others. At bottom, while it is healthy to grapple with the issues, we clearly are better off when our government holds colleges responsible for failing Jewish students.

Threat to democracy

The most frequent argument against Trump’s initiative is that it is a “threat to democracy.” This refrain rings hollow. Anytime a president does anything that arguably exceeds executive power it can be characterized as a “threat to democracy.” By the same logic, Presidents Obama and Biden were “threats to democracy” because the courts ruled that several of their actions violated the law.

As one example: President Obama’s IRS scandalously targeted pro-Israel groups, threatening them because their missions purportedly were at odds with the administration’s Israel policy. This plainly violated the First Amendment, and the IRS has since apologized. The point is not to debate which president is a greater “threat to Democracy,” but it is fair to note that selectively invoking this nebulous notion does not productively address whether (and how) Harvard should be punished.

Trump is endangering scientific research

Others argue that cutting off Harvard’s access to federal funds endangers lifesaving scientific research. Harvard’s endowment is more than $50 billion; it issues hundreds of millions of dollars in bonds at the snap of a finger. Money is fungible, and Harvard can choose to plug any financial holes. Instead, Harvard’s enablers complain about Jews being used as political pawns while Harvard uses medical research as a human shield. Under this logic, Harvard could never be punished via withholding federal funds because it would purportedly put lives in danger. This too-big-too-fail argument collapses under its own weight.

Notably, Obama threatened to withhold federal funding from religiously conservative colleges that restricted students from using restrooms according to their preferred gender identity. Jews who criticize Trump for being too heavy-handed said nothing when Obama used similar tactics to protect non-Jews’ gender identities. By itself, that does not make either Trump or Obama correct but it reveals selective outrage rather than intellectual honesty.

Trump is using antisemitism for political purposes

Too many Jewish politicians and lay leaders sat on the sidelines while rot undermined Harvard’s foundation and spread across academia. After Trump announced his intentions toward Harvard, these same Jews burst with outrage, almost on cue. Hundreds of rabbis (almost exclusively non-Orthodox) signed petitions (organized by the notoriously anti-Israel J Street and T’ruah) accusing the Trump administration of “weaponizing antisemitism” as a pretext to political ends. Senator Schumer and other Jewish senators — who did nothing to quell campus unrest — published a similar letter. Yet those same Jews remained silent while the Democratic party downplayed antisemitism for its own political purposes — e.g., trying to win Michigan by rejecting Governor Josh Shapiro as vice presidential candidate.

Others invoke the “but he’s a Nazi” argument. This is an offensive trope that misses the mark. It is facially nonsensical to accuse most Americans (including a substantial percentage of Jews) of voting for a Nazi-esque regime. Tragically, our people know what Nazis look like, and the term should not be casually thrown around to denigrate one’s political opponents.

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At bottom, whether one likes, hates, or tolerates Trump is beside the point. This will play out in the courts, subject to intense media scrutiny and political opposition, and Harvard will be defended by an army of able attorneys. To the extent Trump has overreached, his excesses will be trimmed through a transparent legal process. Wherever the chips fall, however, the message will be delivered: colleges cannot curate a culture of antisemitism that discriminates against Jews. The shadowy web of toxic ideology that birthed this moment has been exposed — by itself, that is a positive outcome for the Jewish people.

On balance, I prefer our government go too far to protect Jews than do too little. The previous administration watched as campuses burned and our children were attacked. They held a giant fire hose in the form of the federal government, but did not turn on the water. Now, after the fire spread out of control, the Trump administration has picked up the hose and turned it on full blast to douse the flames. Some water admittedly is getting on the carpet, and some intentionally sprayed in Harvard’s face for political purposes. But the flames are being targeted nonetheless, hopefully causing other colleges to proactively activate their own fire departments.

None of this melodrama would have been necessary if Harvard done the right thing. But it did not — over and over. Accordingly, Jews should not cower in fear that belatedly aggressive efforts to hold Harvard accountable for antisemitism will foster more antisemitism. By that logic we would never fight back — an untenable strategy for our survival.

Ari M. Berman lives in West Caldwell and is a member of that town’s Congregation Agudath Israel. He is an attorney.