Harvard Is Not the Hero

What better time to celebrate Harvard University than today at Commencement? For months now, the University has been at the forefront of the fight against President Donald Trump’s attacks on higher education. In doing so, Harvard has stood up for all that makes it Harvard — academic freedom, international students, vital research — despite immense financial and political retaliation from Washington.

Yet Harvard has twisted its definition of academic freedom to exclude Palestine; refused to tangibly protect its international students from federal agents; and, until earlier this month, routinely fired some of its best educators on a two-, three-, and eight-year basis.

Indeed, what has been largely framed as a showdown between the Trump and Harvard administrations is nothing more than thinly veiled collusion. Contrary to what its grand statements and multi-billion-dollar lawsuits may lead you to believe, the University has quietly but decisively been doing the work for Trump. Our administration has renamed the Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging to “Community and Campus Life;” gutted the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES); and pulled funding for affinity group celebrations. It has tightened restrictions on protest and speech, severed ties with Birzeit University in the West Bank, and suspended academic programming around Palestine.

In short, everything that Trump has willed for the University, the University has actualized for Trump, largely before he formally asked.

The slew of administrative decisions is not mere face-saving taken amidst the United States’ descent into fascism; these decisions must not be read as anything other than further evidence of Harvard’s own tendencies towards repressive politics. Just because Harvard masks these behind a crumbling veneer of liberal values — just because Harvard’s repression has a better marketing team than Trump’s — does not make it any less pernicious.

These moves come on top of those taken earlier this semester, on Trump’s second day in office, to settle two antisemitism lawsuits for undisclosed amounts. At the semester’s outset, Harvard adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism — which conflates certain criticisms of Israel with antisemitism — promised a partnership with an undisclosed Israeli university, and effectively established “Zionist” as a protected identity. That same month, Harvard Medical School canceled a panel with patients from Gaza — one, six, and 14 years old — on the grounds that it was too divisive.

No number of strongly worded statements about “independence” and “constitutional rights” will mask Harvard’s vested interest in preserving a Zionist status quo.

The damage has already been done. We cannot possibly celebrate Harvard’s “fight” against the federal government as the University stands knee-deep in an actual fight — this one against its own students, faculty, and staff.

Harvard did make the right choice in refusing to agree to the Trump administration’s punitive and discriminatory demands — but this does not make the University itself any less punitive or discriminatory. In fact, just one day ago, Garber defended the firing of the CMES directors and commented that the Trump administration has a “kernel of truth” about the prevalence of campus antisemitism. In both his words to the media and his repeated repression of pro-Palestine advocacy, Garber has made it glaringly clear that, in many cases, the University’s agenda converges with that of the government it ostensibly rejects.

Today, our Commencement celebrations are backward; the language we use is wrong. Harvard cannot possibly “acquiesce to” or “resist” Trump when the two administrations operate in lock-step. While Garber claims to champion truth and guard academic freedom from the threats of an ever-encroaching federal government, in reality, the most urgent threats to truth and academic freedom come from inside Harvard’s gates. They come from Garber himself.

This Commencement, hold your applause.