Harvard Delenda Est

The official anti-Semitism report is out, and it's worse than you think.

I’ll give a half-kudo to Harvard for its report, released Tuesday, about its anti-Semitism crisis. I say “crisis” rather than “problem,” because even the college administrator-speak of the report that tries to soften and mitigate the rot at Cambridge cannot disguise that Harvard is a sewer of anti-Semitism, and that half-measures such as “free expression” and “tolerance” group-gropes will not fix the crisis.

Let’s start with the opening sentence of the preface, “A Note to Our Readers”:

We recognize that we are releasing this report at a particularly challenging time, and we have significant concerns that the important work that was entrusted to us will be undermined.

Translation: We know that Trump will use this against us, but we have to tell the truth. Hence the “half-kudo” of the first sentence.

The full report is 311 pages, but I couldn’t get past the very first page of the main text without wanting to call in a B-52 strike to drop bunker busters to level Harvard into a 100-foot hole in the ground. Here are the opening two paragraphs:

Each year, a program at Harvard University hosts a forum in which student fellowship recipients share their stories in short speeches. In the 2023-24 academic year, one of these recipients, a Jewish Harvard student, planned to describe how their experiences as a grandchild of Holocaust survivors inspired their career goals. In prepared remarks shared with the forum’s student organizers, the student speaker described how their grandfather survived the Holocaust by migrating to the then-British Mandate of Palestine, and ultimately helped tens of thousands of others find refuge in territory that is now part of the modern State of Israel. The student recounted what happened next:

“The [student] directors of the conference pulled me aside and said that I cannot mention my grandfather’s rescue missions in my speech, because his rescue missions involve Israel. Nowhere does my speech mention the current war or Zionism. It is strictly about the Holocaust. [The two student organizers] told me that my family’s Holocaust narrative is not “tasteful” and … I asked “what is not tasteful?” [One of the students] laughed in my face and said, “oh my God.” This response was incredibly hurtful and inappropriate. They told me that my family history is inherently one-sided because it does not acknowledge the displacements of Palestinian populations, and I believe this accusation is an antisemitic double standard.”

I have previously mooted here the thought experiment about how Harvard (or any other university) would react if a KKK chapter came to campus and shouted “Go back to Africa” at black students (Princeton students three weeks ago yelled at Jewish student to “go back to Europe”), or blocked black students trying to cross campus. (Come to think of it, Democrats blocking minorities—especially Jews and blacks—from accessing college campuses is very on-brand.) If that scenario occurred, it would be front-page news for weeks, like President Trump’s mis-reported and distorted comments at Charlottesville back in 2017, and a Democratic president would not hesitate to cut off federal funding and strip Harvard of its tax exempt status.

Just where and how did Harvard students learn their anti-Semitism? From Harvard. The report admits this, starting with this bland acknowledgment:

In considering curriculum and instruction within Harvard College, our Task Force recognized that students are not currently offered a sufficiently robust set of courses on Israel, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the wider Middle East, and conflict resolution. As a result, student views and debates on these topics often do not seem grounded in established facts, rigorous scholarship, and adequately considered perspectives.

But then the report gets into specific examples, which even administrator-speak cannot sugar coat:

The second category of concern observed in numerous Schools across campus, involved the introduction of what effectively amounts to a political litmus test regarding the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, even in courses seemingly unrelated to the subject. . .

The Task Force heard accounts of what some described as political litmus tests being present at Harvard prior to 2023. One notable example involved the “Settler Colonial Determinants of Health” course, taught annually at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. . . The first instructor of the first class mentioned in this email, “Decolonizing Global Health,” described their vision for the topic on social media in a post that students shared with us:

Nailing Harvard for its tolerance of anti-Semitism is just the first count of the indictment. We learn this week that the Harvard Law Review flagrantly discriminates on the basis of race, both in selecting editors and articles for publication. Sounds like yet another civil rights violation. The HLR should be suspended.

And finally (for now), there should be a close audit of the federal grants that Harvard receives. As it well known, universities skim off a ton of “overhead” to “manage” grants (sometimes close to 50% of the total grant amount), but it is more likely this skimming is used to cross-subsidize administrative bloat and wokery. All those “science research” grants that everyone is rending their garments about? Our friends at Open the Books have uncovered what some of those federal grants went for between 2017 and 2025:

• $2,497,617 for improving “diversity in biomedical sciences via personalized research and education programs”

• $669,028 for a project called “Effects of Advance in the STEM Disciplines: Faculty Diversity, Women in Leadership, and Institutional Transformation”

• $201,124 to study avenues to “societal transformations” that make “profound and enduring systemic changes that typically involve social, cultural, technological, political, economic, and environmental processes.”

• $99,216 for “The Amendments Project: Rewriting the U.S. Constitution” which aims to “present to the public the text of proposed amendments to the U.S. Constitution from 1787 to 2020, in the form of a digital archive and a narrative podcast...to advance civic education and support emerging proposals for constitutional reform.”

• $85,000 to “support studies assessing the feasibility and fidelity of a digital music-based mindfulness intervention developed for black American adults experiencing race-based anxiety”

I repeat the headline: Harvard delenda est.