A Year of Hostility—and Harvard Still Refuses to See It

The latest Harvard Crimson Faculty of Arts and Sciences survey should be read not as a snapshot of opinion, but as a damning portrait of moral failure. For the second year in a row, most respondents to the survey said they did not observe “systemic antisemitism” at Harvard.

In the wake of a year of anti-Semitic incidents on campus—culminating in a federal civil rights violation and a public reckoning that touched nearly every part of Harvard University—just 21 percent of faculty surveyed believe that systemic anti-Semitism exists at Harvard. That number is virtually unchanged from last year’s 23 percent, despite an avalanche of evidence, legal consequences, internal reports, and national scrutiny.

The numbers are worse than disappointing—they are revealing. By contrast, 46 percent of faculty say systemic discrimination exists against Muslims, Arabs, or Palestinians. That figure has grown significantly, despite little evidence that such discrimination has reached the scale or legal threshold of a hostile environment. These asymmetries suggest not confusion, but a willful ideological blindness. The faculty of arts and sciences—Harvard’s core of moral and intellectual life—has absorbed every headline, every hearing, every complaint, and every tear shed by Jewish students over the past ten months and reached a troubling verdict: this suffering doesn’t register to them.

The evidence, however, tells a starkly different story.

In June 2025, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights issued a formal Notice of Violation to Harvard University, concluding that it had violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by failing to protect Jewish students from harassment, intimidation, and discrimination. The ruling was sweeping and unambiguous. It included evidence of “vandalism, online doxing, physical assaults,” and a university culture that was “deliberately indifferent” to Jewish concerns. In plain legal language, Harvard enabled a hostile environment for Jews.

The faculty’s refusal to acknowledge systemic anti-Semitism becomes even more damning when viewed against their own record of complicity.

Consider the contrast in faculty responses to different global crises. When Russia invaded Ukraine, former Harvard President Lawrence Bacow flew the Ukrainian flag over Harvard Yard. When Hamas launched its October 7 massacre—the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust—faculty response ranged from silence to active enablement of campus hostility. Within hours of the attack,  more than 100 Harvard faculty members signed an open letter criticizing the university’s eventual condemnation of the pro-Palestinian phrase “from the river to the sea” as anti-Semitic. The letter defended what they called freedom of expression while simultaneously working to silence Jewish voices that didn’t conform to progressive orthodoxy. This wasn’t an accident—it was a choice.

The pattern extends to faculty-sponsored programming. Harvard’s Kennedy School hosted Professor Dalal Iriqat, who had previously called Hamas’s October 7 massacre “just a normal human struggle for freedom” and posted images celebrating the taking of “Jewish children and elderly as hostages.” During her Harvard appearance, Iriqat expressed no regrets about these comments, defending them as legitimate resistance.

This isn’t isolated. Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies became so systematically biased that Harvard dismissed its faculty leaders in March 2025 over what the university reports called “an alleged imbalance in its programming about Palestine.” The Religion and Public Life program at Harvard Divinity School was shuttered in April 2025 after the university’s own anti-Semitism task force found it fostered “an environment hostile to pro-Israel perspectives.”

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Academic Capture and Intellectual Dishonesty

Harvard’s internal anti-Semitism task force, spanning over 500 pages of findings, documented systematic faculty bias in curriculum and hiring. The report identified
“politicized instruction” as a source of campus intolerance, singling out courses that presented one-sided views of the Israel-Palestine conflict and specific texts that falsely characterized Israeli actions in Gaza or “described Jewish opposition to California’s K-12 ethnic studies curriculum in anti-Semitic terms.”

Faculty concerns about ideological hiring were telling. As the task force noted, faculty in some departments worried that “their colleagues would not approve the hiring of a Zionist faculty member.” This isn’t paranoia—it’s recognition of institutional capture. When Harvard finally created a Professor of Modern Jewish Studies position to combat anti-Semitism, they hired Shaul Magid, a self-described “counter-Zionist” who argues in his book, The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance (Political Imagination)

that Zionism should be “set aside, along with Manifest Destiny, colonialism, and any number of other chauvinistic and ethnocentric ideologies.”

The faculty’s selective concern for academic freedom is equally revealing. While Harvard’s own task force found Jewish students reporting they had to “condemn Israel to prove they were ‘one of the good ones’” and faced social consequences for any expression of Jewish identity or Israel connection, faculty continue to deny the reality of systematic suppression of Jewish voices. One Jewish student was told to modify a story about her grandfather fleeing the Nazis because mentioning that he settled in British-mandate Palestine was “not tasteful.”

The real-world consequences of faculty denial extend far beyond campus politics. Faculty shape institutional culture for generations. They write syllabi, design curricula, select speakers, and mentor graduate students who become tomorrow’s academic and professional elite. Harvard’s reputation—and American higher education’s credibility—flows from the norms faculty uphold.

Right now, those norms are broken. Harvard’s own task force found that 26 percent of Jewish students feared for their physical safety on campus, and 67 percent reported feeling discomfort expressing their opinions with others at Harvard. Some Jewish students declined admission to Harvard; Jewish medical students avoided residencies at Harvard hospitals because of the political climate.

The federal government has responded accordingly. The Trump administration has frozen $2.2 billion in federal funding to Harvard, citing its failure to combat anti-Semitism, and it appears that Harvard is now not looking to settle with the government or pay the large punitive fines proposed by the White House. Major donors have withdrawn support. Alumni networks have fractured. The university that once led American intellectual life—my own alma mater—is now synonymous with moral confusion and discriminatory double standards.

The pattern of faculty denial follows a predictable script. First, they minimize: anti-Semitism isn’t systemic, just isolated incidents blown out of proportion. Then they deflect: the real problem is Islamophobia, or threats to academic freedom, or outside pressure from donors and politicians. Finally, they rationalize: criticism of Israel isn’t anti-Semitism, and Jewish students’ discomfort is evidence of their privilege, not persecution.

This intellectual dishonesty extends to their understanding of anti-Semitism itself. The task force found that many faculty embrace definitions of anti-Semitism that conveniently exclude the forms most prevalent on campus—those targeting Jewish students’ connection to Israel or Zionist identity. As Rabbi David Wolpe observed before resigning from Harvard’s anti-Semitism advisory committee in December 2023, “the ideology that grips far too many of the students and faculty, the ideology that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil.”

This is not Harvard’s first moral test. The university has previously failed Jewish students, most notoriously through quotas that limited Jewish enrollment for decades. What makes the current crisis particularly shameful is that it occurs not from ignorance but from ideology. Faculty know what antisemitism looks like. They understand its history and consequences. They choose to ignore it when it emanates from sources they politically favor.

The comparison to past institutional failures in academia is inescapable. Just as faculty at elite universities once rationalized the exclusion of Jewish students as maintaining academic standards, today’s faculty rationalize the exclusion of Jewish perspectives as protecting marginalized voices. The mechanics differ; the moral failure remains constant.

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The Faculty’s Fundamental Obligation

As someone who has spent decades studying academic culture and political behavior and spent close to a decade at Harvard, I’ve observed that faculty members often invoke their special role as guardians of intellectual inquiry and democratic values. They claim unique authority to speak on matters of public concern precisely because of their position as educators and scholars. Yet when core values—like basic human dignity and protection from harassment—come under direct assault on their own campus, Harvard’s faculty have chosen silence or worse.

These survey data reveal something more troubling than mere disagreement about policy; they expose how shallow and dangerous Harvard’s faculty has become. The same professors who readily condemn discrimination in abstract terms cannot recognize it when it targets Jewish students in their own classrooms. The same intellectuals who pride themselves on critical thinking have abdicated that responsibility when confronted with evidence that challenges their ideological priors. Faculty members have an obligation to speak when fundamental values are under threat, as they are at Harvard. As I’ve documented in my research on the politicization of campus life, faculty silence in the face of bias has become endemic across American higher education. Their failure to do so represents not just personal cowardice but professional malpractice. They have abandoned their duty to create an environment where all students can learn and thrive, regardless of their identity or background.

The Path Forward

Harvard’s faculty should choose differently. They could acknowledge that Jewish students’ experiences of marginalization are real and worthy of concern. They should insist on balanced curricula that present Israeli and Jewish perspectives alongside Palestinian ones. They could invite speakers across the ideological spectrum instead of platforming only those who demonize Israel. They should challenge their own assumptions about privilege, oppression, and justice.

Most importantly, they should recognize that intellectual integrity requires confronting anti-Semitism wherever it appears, including when it comes dressed in the language of social justice and liberation. The test of moral leadership isn’t protecting popular causes but defending unpopular truths.

Until then, the survey stands as more than a statistical snapshot. It’s a moral indictment of an institution whose faculty has chosen ideological comfort over intellectual honesty, political solidarity over Jewish students’ safety, and fashionable narratives over hard truths. In doing so, they haven’t just failed Harvard’s Jewish community—they’ve failed the fundamental mission of higher education itself.

The cost of this failure extends far beyond Cambridge. When America’s most prestigious university normalizes anti-Semitism through faculty indifference, it sends a signal that reverberates through every classroom, every campus, and every conversation about Jewish life in America. Harvard’s faculty may believe they’re standing on the right side of history. History will judge them as they deserve to be judged—harshly, and accurately—as willing accomplices to the very bigotry they claim to oppose.

Image by Xiangkun ZHU on Unsplash