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Harvard University knowingly enabled antisemitism on its campus and now faces the potential loss of federal funding if it fails to redress the issue, the U.S. federal government’s Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism wrote this week in a letter to Harvard President Alan Garber.
“Harvard has been in some cases deliberately indifferent, and in others has been a willful participant in antisemitic harassment of Jewish students, faculty, and staff,” the letter — which can be read in full HERE — noted.
“Harvard University is in violent violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin,” it said.
The task force went on to warn, “Failure to institute adequate changes immediately will result in the loss of all federal financial resources and continue to affect Harvard’s relationship with the federal government.”
The letter to Harvard underscored a growing recognition that elite U.S. academic institutions have become hostile environments for Jewish students — with clear manifestations of antisemitism often excused or masked as political expression — in the aftermath of the October 7th massacre in Israel, which triggered a global surge of Jew-hatred.
Harvard, in particular, has faced months of scrutiny — from congressional hearings to donor backlash — over its handling of on-campus antisemitism.
In January 2024, then-Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned, almost a month after her widely-panned congressional testimony in which she refused to explicitly say that calls for the genocide of the Jewish people violated campus anti-harassment rules.
