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Trump administration: Harvard is willfully violating the civil rights of Jewish students

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An extensive investigation shows that America’s oldest and most elite university is fostering an environment of “pervasive” antisemitism and discrimination in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and now they are being told to comply with the law — or lose all federal funding.


On Monday, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that Harvard University has violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by allowing a hostile environment for Jews and Israeli students to grow and persist.

Harmeet Dhillon, the Department of Justice’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, recently sent a letter to Harvard President Alan Garber, notifying him of the results of an investigation by the HHS Office of Civil Rights.

“The enclosed Notice of Violation details the findings of fact supporting a conclusion that Harvard has been in some cases deliberately indifferent, and in others has been a willful participant in anti-Semitic harassment of Jewish students, faculty, and staff,” Dhillon wrote.

The letter mentioned some of the findings of the investigation released in a 57-page report, including numerous examples of antisemitism on campus where students and faculty created and continue to foster a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students, usually with little to no punishment from the university.

The investigation was based upon 50 listening sessions with 500 Harvard students and internal documents, along with findings by Harvard’s own Task Force on Combatting Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Bias, the findings of a congressional task force that investigated antisemitism on college campuses, and media reports.

HHS found that there is rampant discrimination on Harvard’s campus through direct student-on-student harassment, exclusion from campus spaces, and institutional acceptance of antisemitism.

For example, Jewish students reported being spat upon for wearing a yarmulke, being stalked on campus, and jeered by students yelling “Heil Hitler!”

One student, the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor, was told by student organizers not to share the account of her grandfather helping tens of thousands of Jews find safety in Israel because her grandfather’s missions involved Israel and her family’s Holocaust narrative was inherently one-sided and not tasteful.

Another Jewish student was stopped from accessing a campus space and assaulted for attempting to video a pro-Palestine rally. Harvard police refused to cooperate with local prosecutors, and it wasn’t until 18 months later that two students were arrested for assault. Following the arrests, Harvard made one of the criminals a class marshal for its 2025 graduation ceremony and gave the other a $65,000 Harvard Law School fellowship.

Students and student groups also expressed violent and antisemitic threats such as “gas all the Jews”; “let ‘em cook”; “The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist”; and other antisemitic expressions.

The investigation found that pro-Palestine protesters routinely broke campus rules by blocking access to buildings, libraries, and classrooms and establishing a 20-day encampment in Harvard Yard, which disrupted students’ ability to sleep, study, and walk around campus.

Infamously, 34 Harvard student groups signed a published letter placing all blame on Israel for Hamas’s attack on civilians on October 7, 2023.

Meanwhile, antisemitism has been absent from trainings on prejudice conducted by Harvard. Rather, Jewish students reported being subject to privilege trainings, where, according to the report, they were told that they are privileged for “being identified as White but also because of their Jewishness, which allegedly endowed them with an even higher level of privilege.”

Investigators wrote,

“Some Jewish students were informed by peers, teaching fellows, and in some cases, faculty, that they were associated with something offensive, and, in some cases, that their very presence was an offense.

In one case, Harvard faculty reportedly took Jewish American students on study abroad trips to bear witness to alleged ‘atrocities’ the students were told they shared responsibility for and were informed that the Jewish tradition has become indistinct from a settler colonial nation-state project.’

In the classroom, Harvard faculty engaged in ‘[p]oliticization of instruction [which] … effectively made a specific view on the Israel-Hamas conflict a litmus test for full classroom participation’ and ‘mainstreamed and normalized what many Jewish and Israeli students experience as antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias.’”

The HHS report stated that Harvard only began to respond to antisemitism on its campus after the agency launched a compliance review into the university. However, its actions have been weak.

Paula M. Stannard, director of the Office for Civil Rights at HHS, stated in a press release, that “Harvard’s public pledges to improve its disciplinary framework for harassment and misconduct are inadequate to meaningfully address these serious findings. HHS stands ready to reengage in productive discussions with Harvard to reach resolution on the corrective action that Harvard can take to remedy the violations and come into compliance with its Title VI obligations.”

In her letter, Dhillon referenced Harvard’s already tainted legacy with racism in the Supreme Court decision Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard, in which the Court found that Harvard had discriminated against Asian and white students in favor of black and Hispanic students, effectively making race, and not merit, a key factor in admission decisions. She wrote,

“Harvard’s inaction in the face of these civil rights violations is a clear example of the demographic hierarchy that has taken hold of the University. Equal defense of the law demands that all groups, regardless of race or national origin, are protected. Harvard’s commitment to racial hierarchies—where individuals are sorted and judged according to their membership in an oppressed group identity and not individual merit—has enabled anti-Semitism to fester on Harvard’s campus and has led a once great institution to humiliation, offering remedial math and forcing Jewish students to hide their identities and ancestral stories.”

Dhillon went on to tell Harvard officials that if they do not institute adequate changes immediately, the school will lose all federal financial resources.

Why is antisemitism so rampant on elite college campuses? And why is there so much vitriol among American college students towards not just the Israeli government but all Jews?

One reason, as Dhillon correctly pointed out, is that elite schools have been infiltrated by a Marxist ideology that divides people into classes based on race, sex, or religion. The individual, with his or her unique talents, skills, backgrounds, beliefs, and personality traits, no longer matters. Individuals are only viewed as part of the group. Jews, by dint of their ethnicity and skin color, are part of the “oppressor group,” and therefore, according to Marxist thinking, they are “complicit” in oppressing marginalized groups, in this case Palestinians and Hamas.

Marxist thinking isn’t just another ideology, however — it is relentless, and once it takes hold, it is very hard to contain. That’s why it has spread so rapidly on college campuses to the point that administrators not only can’t control it but they’re afraid to even try. Thus, Columbia University officials not only allowed pro-Hamas rioters to take over buildings, assault staffers, and block Jewish students in libraries, they refused to punish anyone involved — until the Trump administration threatened to take away their funding.

By using tough measures, the Trump administration is finally getting the attention of Harvard and other elite colleges and helping them recognize that they can no longer ride the fence. They have to make a choice between coddling Marxist professors and antisemitic mobs or taking hard steps to try to restore its academic mission and an environment that tolerates dissent and free speech and insists on basic morality.

Whether the threat of financial repercussions, or even a true desire on the part of university leaders to combat antisemitism on campus, will be enough remains to be seen.

The poison of identity politics and intersectionality has flooded America’s once great universities and is rapidly destroying them. Unless that poison is removed, their descent will continue.


PHOTO: (Right) Protest signs displayed at a student-led anti-Israel demonstration on Harvard’s campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts; (Left) The statue of John Harvard, founder of America’s first college, dressed up with a kefiyah, a symbol of Palestinian resistance. CREDIT: Shutterstock



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