Harvard talks free speech but silences Palestine
It stands up to the Trump administration, but bows to its own billionaire donors. At Harvard, Palestine remains unspeakable.
My sister was standing with a few other students under the dim glow of Harvard Yard’s old lampposts, casually smoking and chatting. “Oh, you’re Palestinian?” one of them asked as he leaned in to light his cigarette from hers. “My cousin is in the IDF [Israeli army].”
Then he placed the cigarette in his mouth backwards, the lit end burning between his teeth. “This is how my cousin smoked while shooting Palestinians at the border,” he said. “So those idiots couldn’t see the flame.”
That evening, shaken, my sister called our parents and later reported the incident to her resident tutor. She searched for a way to file a formal complaint but found none. Arabs weren’t considered a “protected class”. In the charged political climate of late 2001, hate speech like this wasn’t just tolerated – it was invisible.
More than two decades later, little has changed. A report released in April 2025 by the Harvard Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias described a “deep-seated sense of fear” among Muslim and Arab students, faculty and staff. The campus climate, the report noted, was marked by “uncertainty, abandonment, threat, and isolation”. Nearly half of Muslim students surveyed said they felt physically unsafe at Harvard while an overwhelming 92 percent of all Muslim students, faculty and staff revealed that they feared professional or academic consequences for expressing their personal or political views.
Harvard has fashioned itself as a free-speech warrior on the national stage for refusing to negotiate with the Trump administration on its sweeping demands for the university to drop its diversity, equity and inclusion measures and punish student protesters.
However, inside Harvard’s campus walls, we have seen President Alan Garber oversee a systematic erasure of teaching, research and scholarship about Palestine, at a time when more than 51,000 Palestinians have been killed, and hundreds of thousands more have been forcefully displaced and are facing starvation under a relentless Israeli siege. Long before Harvard evaded a hostile takeover from our billionaire president, it capitulated to the demands of its billionaire donors in matters of student discipline, campus speech and academic freedom.
To please its right-wing donors, Harvard adopted a one-sided conceptualisation of campus safety, in which speaking up against Israeli state violence towards Palestinians is considered threatening. As a result, university administrators rush to address anti-Semitism on campus, as they should, but they also censor and eliminate speech and scholarship which is critical of Israel in the name of fighting antisemitism. Meanwhile, anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab racism, and Islamophobia are less than an afterthought. University administrators remain silent as students, faculty and staff experience doxxing, harassment and death threats for speaking up about Palestinian human rights. They have shared international students’ information with the Department of Homeland Security, as students on nearby campuses have been abducted by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, detained and deported for objecting to Israel’s international law violations.
Beyond turning a blind eye to intimidation and abuse, the university’s leaders also routinely take action to erase Palestinian speech, scholarship, advocacy and views.
Last year, the Harvard Corporation, the university’s unelected governing body, overruled the faculty and barred 13 seniors from graduating for protesting the genocide in Gaza, breaking with decades of disciplinary precedent. The university has banned the only undergraduate Palestine advocacy group twice, through inconsistent enforcement of the university’s ambiguous and “ever-evolving” event co-sponsorship policy, which, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) warned, “raise[s] the specter of viewpoint discrimination”. In a little-publicised Title VI settlement from January, the US Department of Education found that Harvard failed to meaningfully investigate or sufficiently respond to 125 cases of discrimination and harassment reported through its anonymous reporting hotline, particularly those “based on Palestinian, Arab, and/or Muslim shared ancestry”. Although President Garber has said Harvard should condemn “hateful speech” under the institutional voice policy, this did not apply to the gruesome “jokes” former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett made about giving students exploding pagers for interrupting his speech at Harvard Business School in March 2025.
The handful of teaching and research programs where faculty study Palestine at Harvard have been censored, eliminated, or are under threat of elimination. In a matter of months, Harvard cancelled a panel featuring Palestinian children from Gaza at Harvard Medical School, ended its only partnership with a Palestinian university, and eliminated the Religion and Public Life program at the Harvard Divinity School, which addressed Israel/Palestine as a case study. Harvard also dismissed the leadership of the Center for Middle East Studies, as an “offering of sorts to its critics”, according to The New York Times.
By Lara Jirmanus
Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School
7 May 2025
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*The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of chillicomment Weekly