This academic year, campus protests focused on Israel, Gaza, and the continuing Middle East war have been smaller and less prominent than last year’s wave of protests that culminated in the spring 2024 encampment. The most significant protests of this past fall were intentionally quiet: library demonstrations that tested the University’s definition of what constitutes a protest and its rules on the time, place, and manner of such actions. A pair of pro-Palestine protests last week provided further insight into how the University—its administration, professors, and stakeholders—will respond to such demonstrations.
On Monday, March 3, a Harvard employee tore down posters depicting infant Israeli hostage Kfir Bibas, whose body was returned to Israel by Hamas on February 20. The incident occurred during an approximately 40-person rally against Israeli military action in the West Bank, hosted by student groups including the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) and Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine (HOOP), the unrecognized student organization that coordinated the spring 2024 encampment. The Harvard Crimson identified the protester who tore down the Bibas posters was Jonathan S. Tuttle, a cataloguer of published materials at the Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library. Tuttle wore his Harvard ID badge while removing the posters. (In November, Tuttle co-authored a Crimson op-ed supporting the student library protests.)
The posters of Bibas, who was abducted by Hamas as a nine-month-old, were put up by the recognized student group Harvard Chabad in accordance with Harvard rules, a University spokesperson said. Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi said “It was shocking that a Harvard librarian would act so heartless and tear the photo of babies taken hostage and murdered by terrorists. The fact that he did so when Harvard students pleaded with him to stop, and that his actions were in violation not only of his humanity, but of University policy and government law, only compounds and highlights the degree of hatred that has, sadly, become so pervasive.” Zarchi praised the University response, saying that Harvard demonstrated its “seriousness about its commitment to enforce the law and its policies to ensure that Harvard will have zero tolerance for Jew-hate and violators of the University’s code of conduct.”
Two days later, on March 5, Harvard’s chief diversity and inclusion officer Sherri Ann Charleston sent a University-wide email with the subject line “Upholding Our Community Values in Challenging Times.” She wrote that the poster-tearing, which occurred “despite the objections of those present,” violated “the University and community values that unite us, as well as the Campus Use Rules that govern shared spaces.” She added that “the University condemns this action in the strongest possible terms” and emphasized that “vandalism and violations of our Campus Use Rules not only damage property but are also an affront to the principles of open and constructive expression and dialogue that undergird our community.” In a separate email to the Radcliffe community on the same day, Radcliffe Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin, who co-chairs the Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group, also condemned the poster-tearing. “Radcliffe—an institution founded to educate the talented women whom Harvard excluded—stands for inclusion. And it stands against discrimination of all kinds, including hateful or harassing behaviors directed at Israelis and Jews,” she wrote. “An attack on any one of us divides the University community and degrades all of us.” After initially declining to comment, a University spokesperson confirmed that “the Harvard employee involved in an incident during a protest last week is no longer affiliated with the University.”
On Thursday, March 6, at least 100 people mounted a pro-Palestine rally to protest former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s lecture at the Harvard Business School (HBS). A non-Harvard group, the Palestinian Youth Movement, publicized photos from the protest in Instagram posts co-signed with student groups PSC, HOOP, and Harvard African and African American Resistance Organization. The protesters chanted “Shut it down!” as they marched from Cambridge’s John F. Kennedy Memorial Park to the business school.
Tarek Masoud, a professor working to showcase a wide range of perspectives on Middle Eastern affairs through a series of public panels, condemned the protest. The Ford Foundation professor of democracy and governance wrote on LinkedIn that he was “disappointed in the student protesters trying to shut down Naftali Bennett’s speech at the Harvard Business School.” He continued, “Have we learned nothing from the last year? We must never allow ourselves to be prevented from hearing alternative perspectives, whether they are Israeli, Palestinian, or Martian. This behavior has no place in a university. Enough.”
the reemergence of these scattered, smaller protests come at a time of heightened national conversation about campus antisemitism. Last week, the Trump administration announced the cancellation of approximately $400 million in federal grants and contracts awarded to Columbia University “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” The recently established Federal Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, responsible for imposing the announced cut, will visit and investigate Harvard (one of 10 institutions, which include Columbia, subject to such scrutiny).
Prominent Harvard stakeholders are again voicing concern about the University’s handling of antisemitism. Last Monday, Eliot University Professor and former Harvard president Lawrence S. Summers took to social media to criticize the University administration. His posts on X were published shortly after the poster-ripping but did not appear to be a direct response. (The incident had not yet been widely publicized). “Harvard continues its failure to effectively address antisemitism. Despite President Garber’s clear and strong personal moral commitment, he has lacked the will and/or leverage to effect the necessary large scale change, and the Corporation has been ineffectual,” Summers wrote. He went on to repeat his past criticisms of Frost professor of Jewish history Derek Penslar, who co-chairs Harvard’s antisemitism task force, and of Harvard Divinity School Dean Marla Frederick. He further criticized the antisemitism task force for not having published its findings. Days later, in the wake of the Trump administration’s action to halt funding at Columbia and to detain (and perhaps deport) a recent Columbia graduate who participated in pro-Palestine protests on that campus, Summers appeared to soften his stance. In an interview with The Boston Globe, he condemned the government’s action in both cases, arguing that “this kind of heavy-handed indiscriminate sanction will slow scientific progress, deny opportunity, chill legitimate discourse, and undermine the rule of law.”
Although the magnitude and intensity of protests have clearly diminished since the Hamas terrorist attack, recent events echo the campus environment of that time. Summers’s posts in the days following October 7, 2023, helped spark the backlash against then-President Claudine Gay, who resigned on January 2, 2024. The continuing domestic fallout from the war in the Middle East, amplified by the Trump administration’s broad agenda of challenging higher education policies and practices, has heightened the uncertainties facing Harvard and other universities.
