Harvard has fashioned itself as a free-speech warrior on the national stage for refusing to negotiate with the Trump administration on its sweeping demands for the university to drop its diversity, equity and inclusion measures and punish student protesters.
However, inside Harvard’s campus walls, we have seen President Alan Garber oversee a systematic erasure of teaching, research and scholarship about Palestine, at a time when more than 51,000 Palestinians have been killed, and hundreds of thousands more have been forcefully displaced and are facing starvation under a relentless Israeli siege. Long before Harvard evaded a hostile takeover from our billionaire president, it capitulated to the demands of its billionaire donors in matters of student discipline, campus speech and academic freedom.
To please its right-wing donors, Harvard adopted a one-sided conceptualisation of campus safety, in which speaking up against Israeli state violence towards Palestinians is considered threatening. As a result, university administrators rush to address anti-Semitism on campus, as they should, but they also censor and eliminate speech and scholarship which is critical of Israel in the name of fighting antisemitism. Meanwhile, anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab racism, and Islamophobia are less than an afterthought. University administrators remain silent as students, faculty and staff experience doxxing, harassment and death threats for speaking up about Palestinian human rights. They have shared international students’ information with the Department of Homeland Security, as students on nearby campuses have been abducted by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, detained and deported for objecting to Israel’s international law violations.
Beyond turning a blind eye to intimidation and abuse, the university’s leaders also routinely take action to erase Palestinian speech, scholarship, advocacy and views.
Why does it feel like everyone is falling in line for this genocide? History will not look back kindly on the way the world watched as this happened. At least (and this isn’t much of an excuse) other genocides werent on the news every day as our leaders and institutions sat by and silenced any dissent.
Because the billionaires funding these institutions are all Zionists.
Because vast majority of voters do not care what happens in Gaza.
This has more visibility than Sudan, Myanmar, Congo, etc. But its a problem in a far away land.
So few people (in th US) can wag the dog.
If they just wouldn’t care, they would leave the people who speak up alone. But they are actively repressing and attacking them
This is their Colonizer pet project. Of course, they’re going to silence everyone
This is more what I mean. This is beyond people not caring and not voting. This is normally liberal institutions supporting genocide and silencing dissent. It’s just a whole other level.
Majority of people do not care, but certain very vocal and very rich people do care. AIPAC, wacky evangelical leaders who believe in end times, national security types who see Israel as paramount to US security in MidEast, etc. They get to influence policy because majority will not push back on their policy because Gaza is an afterthought.