Smooth Start

After a tumultuous year, fall semester begins benignly.

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Addressing the semester-opening Morning Prayers for the first time as president, Alan M. Garber urged community members to be “slow to judge and quick to renew our commitments to one another.”   |  Photograph by Frank S. Zhou/The Harvard Crimson

Leaders of this and other campuses wracked by turmoil during the 2023-2024 academic year following the Hamas attack on Israel and resulting war naturally approached this fall term warily. Would pro-Palestinian protestors again set up encampments, or rallying students shout each other down with hateful language? And if so, with what consequences among irate alumni and confrontational politicians, amid a heated national election?

Whether because universities cracked down, protestors were biding their time, the intensity of the war briefly declined, or something else changed in the atmosphere, as of late September none of these worries had come to pass. Harvard officials pursued at least three courses of action in their attempt to reduce the temperature, foster more mutually respectful conduct, and restore the conditions conducive to the academic activities of teaching, learning, and research.

Appeals for civil discourse. In an interview with the Harvard Gazette published August 26, President Alan M. Garber acknowledged the divisive, polarized external context and resulting “tensions” on campus. Given that reality, he said, “Our biggest challenge is ensuring that the best aspects of our culture are experienced by everyone on our campus. We need to cultivate empathy, learn how to talk to one another, and understand how to listen to people who differ from us.” A community email on August 29 almost pleaded with everyone to pull together: “We have everything to gain from our commitments to one another—and so much to lose if we falter.” After warning those “who fall short of our expectation that the rights of others be honored” to be “prepared to be held accountable for their actions,” he closed with the “hope that we will choose to be stronger together than we could ever be apart.”

In their convocation remarks on September 2, Garber (Harvardians must be willing “to encounter beliefs that are not our own, to be curious and respectful, to be genuinely attentive”) and College Dean Rakesh Khurana (“Your fate is intertwined with the fate of everyone else in this community”) implored the class of 2028 to open their ears as well as their mouths, and to make the most of their peers (see harvardmag.com/convocation-24). And Amanda Claybaugh, dean of undergraduate education, urged the budding scholars to cultivate what she called the “intellectual virtues” (see The College Pump, this issue. In the spiritual setting of Morning Prayers at Appleton Chapel on September 3, as classes began, Garber tried to close the deal by asking his hearers to “be slow to judge and quick to renew our commitments to one another as we work to make the world a better place” (see harvardmag.com/morning-prayers-24).

Training in productive exchanges. This is of course an educational institution, and so, appropriately, Harvard ramped up its efforts to inculcate a set of skills essential to discussing hard issues effectively—habits that contemporary students, steeped in social media and groomed to get into selective colleges (and therefore risk-averse) often seem not to have developed (see the discussion at harvardmag.com/convocation-24). Atop earlier work to foster “intellectual vitality,” all first-year students took during their pre-orientation a six-part online learning program devised by the Constructive Dialogue Institute, aimed at equipping learners with the intellectual and emotional temperament to engage in fruitful, mutually beneficial exchanges. On campus, they attended a presentation by Bass professor of government Michael J. Sandel on the ethical questions posed by technology—the basis for engaging the audience in debate about challenging issues, and for modeling such discourse together.

Turning to the semester proper, preceptors in half of the students’ required Expository Writing courses have been trained to prompt class discussion about the use of evidence and arguments—an experiment in the value of structuring such exchanges. Similarly, the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning is working with General Education course leaders to incorporate or enhance techniques for more productive classroom debates.

Tightening the rules. For any community members not moved by Garber’s appeal to be “stronger together,” Meredith Weenick, executive vice president, dispatched not one but two messages on campus speech and the rules surrounding protest, on August 1 and August 30. The latter detailed procedures such as the requirement to produce a Harvard ID when asked by administrators or campus police (nonmembers of the community engaged in campus protests are trespassing on private property, so the ID is both a sorting mechanism for identifying such outsiders and a way of beginning discipline against community members who violate rules); digitally recording protests; and, in cases of “substantial disruption of the normal operations of our campus,” resorting to University police to “remove” offenders or “remediate the disruption.” The former broached new rules, including a ban on unapproved chalking of messages on campus sidewalks. (Read more at harvardmag.com/campus-rules-24.)

A further regulation, sadly necessary in light of last fall’s upheavals, was conveyed in a September 5 message from Garber, Provost John F. Manning, Weenick, and the deans: an explicit recognition that doxing or otherwise sharing personal information online with harassing intent or effect violates the University-wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities and constitutes bullying under the non-discrimination and anti-bullying policies in effect as of September 1, 2023. (A related sign of the times: to protect community members’ privacy and security, the University telephone, email, and office directory, previously accessible to anyone online, was placed behind the Harvard Key authentication system, restricted to affiliates, in September.)

In the meantime….With those measures in place, last year’s problems continued to simmer, locally and beyond. On the litigation front, U.S. District Court Judge Richard G. Stearns, J.D. ’76, denied Harvard’s motion to dismiss an antisemitism suit against the University filed by Alexander “Shabbos” Kestenbaum, M.T.S. ’24, and others, but granted MIT’s motion to dismiss a similar lawsuit. He found that Harvard had been “indecisive, vacillating, and at times internally contradictory” in responding to Jewish and Israeli students’ concerns, compared to more consistent and effective reactions by MIT. (Kestenbaum spoke at the Republican National Convention in July, endorsing proposals to expel foreign students who participate in pro-Palestinian protests. A frequent counter-protestor during the academic year, he came under sharp criticism in a Crimson op-ed by Matthew E. Nekritz ’25, one of the paper’s opinion writers, for fighting “hate with hate” and “actively fann[ing] the flames of vitriol on our campus.”)

Separately, Jesse M. Fried ’86, A.M. ’89, J.D. ’92, now Cromwell professor of law, and Matthew L. Meyerson ’85, M.D. ’89, Ph.D. ’94, professor of medicine, who overlapped at the College, took to the Crimson to announce formation of Harvard Faculty for Israel. “We cannot remember anti-Israel hatred or antisemitism at Harvard ever being this profound and widespread,” they wrote. Though finding “the situation of Israelis and Jews…even worse at other universities” in the United States and around the world, they “fondly remember a Harvard where Jews and Israelis were warmly welcomed, just like everyone else. It can be that way again.”

In the wider world of higher education, a court case and federal guidance set out some of the guardrails for campus conduct. In August, U.S. District Court Judge Mark C. Scarsi ruled that the pro-Palestinian protest encampment at UCLA from April 25 to May 2 (when it was removed by police) had illegally refused entry to those “who supported the existence” of Israel, and issued a preliminary injunction ordering that “if any part of UCLA’s ordinarily available programs, activities, and campus areas become unavailable to certain Jewish students,” the school must cease providing them to anyone.

More broadly, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has concluded a half-dozen of the many investigations of complaints, under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, about colleges’ responses to antisemitism, resulting informally in a set of guidelines. A common finding is that institutions failed to address whether a “hostile environment” for Jewish students has arisen on campus—meaning that the schools must determine whether individual incidents aggregate to a broader problem, and if so, address it through handling reports of discriminatory or impermissible behavior more effectively, training personnel more effectively, and responding to the “totality” of the situation. OCR’s decisions have not spelled out exactly how to correct a “hostile environment” without infringing on First Amendment rights, but it has pointed to such steps as issuing communications opposing stereotypical or derogatory speech and offering counseling to students who have been harassed.

And on matters intellectual, the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance last May called for a “third-party investigation” of Harvard schools’ curriculums to determine whether they violate University policies on discrimination and bullying (see harvardmag.com/antisemitic-24)—a step faculty members are likely to regard as intruding on academic freedom. In early August, the State University System of Florida instructed its dozen public universities to screen courses for “antisemitism or anti-Israeli” bias, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education—focusing on classes dealing with terrorism, Middle Eastern studies, religion, and government. And the second report of Columbia’s task force on antisemitism, addressing student experiences (released August 30), indicated that it will be followed by a third on “academic issues related to exclusion in the classroom and bias in curriculum.”

Surely Harvard leaders don’t wish to focus on that. But returning the community’s attention to academic issues would be most welcome.

Click here for the November-December 2024 issue table of contents

Read more articles by John S. Rosenberg

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