Widener library, the center of Harvard Yard and the location of numerous pro-Palestinian protests. Courtesy of Getty Images
By Mira Fox
April 15, 2025
Harvard is making headlines this week for defying a series of sweeping demands from the Trump administration, which responded by suspending $2.2 billion in federal funding.
“No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Harvard’s president Alan Garber said in a statement Monday.
Garber was responding to a letter from three federal agencies demanding that Harvard report foreign students who commit conduct violations to the government, reduce the power of students and faculty, ban masks and bring in an outside party to audit the university “such that each department, field or teaching unit must be viewpoint-diverse.” The letter specifically called out a handful of Harvard departments that they say “most fuel antisemitic harassment or ideological capture,” including the divinity school, the school of education, the department of Middle Eastern studies and even Harvard Medical School.
But if Harvard is now taking a stand — and receiving plaudits for its bravery, after Ivy League peer Columbia University quickly agreed to Trump’s demands — it initially cracked down on some of the very departments the administration’s letter accused of antisemitism, specifically the divinity school and the Middle Eastern studies department. (In full disclosure, I received a Master’s in Theology from Harvard Divinity School in 2019.)
At the end of March, the divinity school suspended its Religion, Conflict, Peace Initiative amid accusations that the program, which had for the past several years — since before Oct. 7 — focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was biased against Israel.
The accusations were tied, in part, to a lawsuit from former divinity school student Shabbos Kestenbaum — a self-described progressive who spoke at the Republican National Convention and endorsed Donald Trump — accusing Harvard of violating the rights of Jewish students. The Harvard Jewish Alumni Association also said in a report last spring that the peace initiative “appears to focus entirely on the Palestinians.”
Dianne Moore, the program’s founding director, retired abruptly in January, a semester earlier than planned. The program’s assistant director, Hussein Rashid, also said he would retire at the end of the year in a statement sharply criticizing Harvard for condoning hate against Arabs and Muslims, and accusing the university of interfering with the department’s programming.
Divinity school students were center stage in pro-Palestinian campus activism at Harvard in the wake of Oct. 7; in one high-profile incident, caught on camera and cited in the Trump administration’s letter of demands to Harvard, a Jewish business school student was confronted by a divinity school student when he walked through a “die-in” protest in support of Gaza.
Harvard also suspended its public health school’s research partnership with Birzeit University, the largest university in the West Bank, and disbanded the undergraduate activist Palestinian Solidarity Committee for violating campus-use rules. Additionally, the university imposed a requirement for all arts and sciences centers on campus to meet guidelines on intellectual diversity, with each center’s director required to submit its programming for approval.
Also at the end of March, Harvard forced two faculty leaders at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies from their posts. Center director Cemal Kafadar, a professor of Turkish studies, along with the center’s associate director, history professor Rosie Bsheer, were asked to step down; both remain employed by the university.
Harvard’s student newspaper connected the turnover at the Center for Middle Eastern studies and the divinity school to Harvard’s efforts to distance itself from accusations of antisemitism after the Trump administration announced the university was under scrutiny.
These efforts, however, clearly failed to placate the Trump administration.
There’s no indication that the stand Garber, Harvard’s Jewish president, is taking against pressure from the Trump administration will cause the school to roll back any of these previous efforts to dispel accusations of antisemitism. Harvard may have rejected the government’s demands in the name of “freedom of thought and inquiry,” but it’s willing to crack down on certain ideas itself.
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