United States: Self-correction at Harvard

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 relationships between settler colonialism, Zionism, antisemitism, and other forms of racism”. Will these findings of Harvard’s task-force on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias, released on April 29, 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 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.”

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.

US President 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 5, 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. 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 6 included Nazi sympathisers, one of whom sported a “Camp Auschwitz” hoodie that day.

Meanwhile, 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. 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.

Dartmouth treads gingerly

There are all kinds of perks of being the boss, big and small. To be the boss of an Ivy League institution, with ample salary and cachet, would have seemed a crowning achievement for the aspiring meritocrats of America not long ago. Indeed, in the 20th century, two Ivy League presidents ascended to the White House (Woodrow Wilson led Princeton University and Dwight D. Eisenhower commanded Columbia University after winning the second world war).

These days, it can feel like a hardship posting. Agitation comes from all sides: student-protesters, faculty-activists, rich donors with lacklustre children, congressional inquisitors and, most alarming of all, an ultra-aggressive Trump administration. Since 2023, six of the eight Ivy League universities have seen presidential turnover — three of them under duress. Columbia, now on its third president in two years, apparently had difficulty finding any takers for the post that Eisenhower once held.

America’s top universities are at their most precarious moment in living memory. The Trump administration has accused them of being dens of affirmative action (now illegal after a 2023 Supreme Court decision), antisemitism and anti-American wokery. It has frozen billions of dollars in federal grants in retaliation and demanded unprecedented oversight and sweeping reforms if the spigot is to be turned back on. Reactions have differed. Columbia capitulated to the demands (but has yet to receive its funding), while Harvard University has sued the administration in a federal court. But one Ivy League institution — Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire — has so far avoided the wrath of the Trump administration.

Sian Beilock, president of Dartmouth, who has been in the job since September 2023 (one month before the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel which inflamed campuses), attributes it to superior campus management of the culture wars. When a pro-Palestinian encampment appeared on campus the police were quickly called in.  The university promulgated a policy of “institutional restraint”, preventing editorialising by academic departments. Instead of safe spaces, Ms Beilock suggested “brave spaces” that avoided self-censorship.

“Our goal is to be a place where students feel totally fine expressing their views, but also making sure that there are boundary conditions,” she says. “Your free expression doesn’t rob someone else of their free expression, which means we don’t shout down speakers, and it means we don’t take over parts of our campus in an encampment and declare it for one ideology.” Savvy politicking is also helping. Ms Beilock has made four trips to Washington since January. The university recently hired Matt Raymer, an alumnus and former chief counsel to the Republican National Committee, as its general counsel. “We are all about American competitiveness, whether you’re on the right or the left,” says Ms Beilock.

This has not been without controversy on campus. Although Dartmouth has a reputation as the conservative Ivy — known for its snowy remoteness, rambunctious fraternities and cosy ties with the finance industry — progressivism remains a force. On April 28, a protester doused an administration building in red paint, symbolising the blood of Gazans. “Institutional restraint is not neutrality,” the anonymous vandal told The Dartmouth, the campus newspaper. “May future students know the fascist nature of this institution.”

Less dramatically, several thousand alumni have signed a letter urging Ms Beilock to condemn the Trump administration for its attacks on its peers (she did not join a condemnatory letter signed by 511 university presidents). “I was very clear that I support Harvard in fighting back against the impingements on their academic freedom, but at the same time we can have self-reflection,” she says.

There are three theories for the inaction from administration officials. First, they simply forgot. Second, that they will act, but haven’t yet. Third, that they have actually spared Dartmouth because of its pre-existing policies. Whatever the case, even delay is an advantage because it forestalls a financial crunch and allows pioneers like Harvard to map out legal defences that other institutions can follow.

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