Harvard has more problems than Donald Trump
A Programme at Harvard Divinity School aspired to “deZionize Jewish consciousness”. During “privilege trainings”, working-class Harvard students were instructed that, by being Jewish, they were oppressing wealthier, better prepared classmates. A course in Harvard’s graduate school of public health, “The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health”, sought to “interrogate the relationships between settler colonialism, Zionism, antisemitism, and other forms of racism”: Will these findings by Harvard’s task-force on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias, released on April 29th, shock anyone? Maybe not. Americans may be numb by now to bulletins about the excesses, not to say inanities, of some leftist academics.
If so, one might hope that as Americans consider whether antisemitism is a problem at Harvard, they would imagine how it might feel to be a certain sophomore encountering this social-media post about herself, by a peer: “She looks just as dumb as her nose is crooked.” The report, a door-stopping 311 pages, describes a campus culture so toxic that another undergraduate confided to members of the task-force, “I feel lucky I don’t look Jewish.”
No doubt a task-force on racism or sexism on any Ivy League campus would find evidence of both. And, in fact, a separate Harvard task-force found that Muslim, Arab and Palestinian students have felt “abandoned” and even “actively suppressed and repressed”. None of that diminishes the seriousness of the problem of antisemitism on elite campuses as documented by Harvard’s task-force and by one at Columbia University, or the particular, institutionalised quality this bigotry has acquired. “We are not aware of any other group on campus,” the Harvard report on antisemitism reads, “that is subject to social exclusion as part of an intentional campaign by political organisers.”
The Harvard task-force was formed following the campus convulsions after Hamas attacked Israel in 2023 and the war in Gaza began. But it tells the long story of Jews’ relationship with the school, from grudging admission, constrained by quotas, to “a golden age” of inclusion from the 1960s to about 2010. After that, according to the report, the pro-Palestine movement hardened, increasingly regarding Israel as a pariah and at times ascribing “a form of hereditary and collective guilt” to American Jews over its actions, even its existence. “The slippage between ‘Israel’ and ‘Jews’ is widespread,” the report notes. On campus and beyond, out of ignorance or malice, a trope is catching hold on the left that equates racism with Zionism, and thence with Judaism.
Donald Trump has cancelled billions in combined grants to Harvard, Columbia and other universities. His pressure campaign is ostensibly rooted in alarm about antisemitism, but other concerns keep sprouting. On May 5th Linda McMahon, the education secretary, told Harvard it was barred from future grants, in a letter in the signature smashmouth style of this administration and the professional-wrestling league she ran. In more than two pages of insults and criticism about everything from plagiarism to hiring former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, Ms McMahon referred only elliptically to antisemitism. Mr Trump’s indignation about campus antisemitism was always hard to take at face value. He has contributed to the “slippage” by condemning Jews who vote Democratic as “very disloyal to Israel”. He has failed to deplore antisemitism among his supporters. Those he pardoned for attacking the Capitol on January 6th included Nazi sympathisers, one of whom sported a “Camp Auschwitz” hoodie that day.
Mr Trump’s approach is a poor match for the schools’ troubles. Some Jewish officials, on campus and beyond, fear that Jews will bear the brunt of blame for Mr Trump’s campus crusade, and that faculty and administrators will minimise the problem of antisemitism in reaction. His pressure will probably also make it harder for universities to make even common-sense changes. Columbia’s trustees insisted that measures put in place after demands from Mr Trump were steps the school wanted to take, but the appearance of capitulation intensified the backlash.
What is saddest, or maybe most laughable, is the implication that America’s national politics (let alone the guiding light of Trump University himself) has anything to teach its undergraduates about grappling with complexity, nuance or the views of an adversary. Ms McMahon’s letter, a model of hyperbole and animosity, is a masterclass in turning problems into political opportunities rather than helping solve them. In early May, a bill to define antisemitism for purposes of combating it on campus stalled in committee, as senators bickered over language they feared would make it a cudgel for one party or the other.
Muddle East
By contrast, the self-scrutiny on campus is substantive. The task-forces at Harvard and Columbia have been thorough, and their recommendations are specific and far-reaching. Finding a need for “profound repair”, Harvard’s task-force made dozens of proposals, for everything from governance to discipline, to strengthen a “culture of pluralism”. Students, it reported, “too often feel they are carrying the weight of their identities, since they say that is how they sold themselves to Harvard in the application process”. Instead, applicants should be told to expect a “genuine community with people with whom one may disagree”. When it came to the Middle East, the report acidly noted a “shortage” of courses “meeting Harvard’s standard for intellectual excellence”.
It is ridiculous that Harvard has to relearn lessons about the value of rigour in the classroom and the folly of reducing individuals to group identities. But at least the university is showing signs of buckling down. Mr Trump would be wise to do what he does well, and claim credit for this happy development, rather than try to teach the lessons himself. ■
Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence.