As a Crimson Key campus tour guide – back when I was proud of attending Harvard – I enjoyed deciphering the inscription on the John Harvard statue dominating Harvard Yard: “John Harvard, Founder, 1638.”
It’s “the Statue of the Three Lies”: there’s no actual portrait of him to know what he looked like; he was not Harvard’s “founder,” just its first big donor; and “1638” is the year he died, not the year Harvard was founded, which was two years earlier.
Similarly, Harvard’s antisemitism report sits on three lies. Its distortions illustrate how essential it is that universities tackle their educational failures and moral misfires by themselves for their own sakes, transcending the polarizing polemics surrounding US President Donald Trump.
Victimizers clumped with victims
First, a Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias paralleled the Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Bias. Although not the Task Force’s fault, that’s United Nations-level false equivalence – clumping victimizers with victims.
Predictably, while uncovering some harassment of Muslims, Arabs, and anti-Zionist Jews – and none is acceptable – much of the competing “anti-Muslim bias” report feels like a "Woke University" satire.
Pro-Palestinian students feel “unsafe” because Harvard won’t divest from Israel or because the university operated normally while Gaza was bombed. One rampaging snowflake complains: “Do you think that someone whose family members were just bombed in Gaza has the mental capacity to submit a form?”
Ignoring the crimes of anti-Israel protesters, the report deems any pushback “retributive” for “participation in protests” and an assault on free speech “to save face and protect donor interests.”
By contrast, the antisemitism task force details how Jews, Israelis, and even Israeli-Arabs “faced bias, suspicion, intimidation, alienation, shunning, contempt, and sometimes effective exclusion from various curricular and co-curricular parts of the university and its community – clear examples of antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias.”
The intimidation was – using woke-speak – systemic: widespread, mainstreamed, and harsh, coming from administrators, professors, students, departments, and programs.
Noting how anti-Zionist bullies claim they’re “just” criticizing Israel, the report proclaims: “It is disingenuous to use a mild word like “criticism” to describe raucous, aggressive, and inflammatory protest.”
Mysterious 'binary' remains undefined
The report offers a long, fascinating, but not-fully-relevant historical overview of Harvard’s Jew-hatred.
It is useful in tracking how relations between Zionists and Palestinians soured since 2005 as “a new politics of some pro-Palestinian organizing appear[ed] to view bridge-building activities as a form of betrayal, and a new generation of student activists” perceived “Israel as a symbol and vehicle of the evils of the United States and the rest of the Western world.”
That’s a delicate description of Palestinians’ belligerent “anti-normalization” BDS boycott strategy, demonizing Israel while cold-shouldering anyone who deals with Israelis, Zionists, or Jews – unless they’re the “good” Jews who bash Israel.
Then, alas, the task force failed. After detailing this deterioration and, predictably, adding some sharp what-about-ist elbows blaming Israeli politics, the report says “many Jewish and Israeli students at Harvard” found themselves “on the wrong side of a political binary that provided no room for the complexity of history or current politics.”
The report should have provided an equally detailed history of how this oppressed-oppressor “binary” overtook and corrupted Harvard – along with academia. That would have been pathbreaking. Instead, this mysterious “binary” remains undefined in 100,000 words.
By contrast, in January 2024, Harvard’s legendary dean, Harry Lewis, diagnosed the problem devastatingly in 865 words. His article “Reaping What We Have Taught,” published only in The Harvard Crimson, found words like “decolonize,” “oppression,” “liberation,” “social justice,” “white supremacy,” and “intersectionality” appearing in the course catalog over 100 times.
This crude experiment, Lewis sadly but courageously concluded, “supports the suspicion that the Harvard curriculum has become heavily slanted toward recent fashions of the progressive Left.” He added, using words far bolder than the Task Force, that “merchants of hate are repurposing these intellectual goods that universities are producing.”
Lewis showed how this old, ever-adaptable, historic parasite called “Jew-hatred” bonded with a new host – what some call “woke”– creating what I call my new book, The Academic Intifada.
Clearly, wary of offending too many colleagues, Task Force members detailed some of the implications of this toxic bonding, such as biased professors polemicizing in class, bullying students, and imposing one-sided curricula. But the report spinelessly sidestepped the cause.
You cannot solve a problem without diagnosing it clearly.
Report champions 'pluralism'
The final falsehood was ideological. The report champions “pluralism,” mentioning it 173 times. The authors offer Alain Locke’s “vision of cultural pluralism” to save Harvard, endorsing his “insistence that diversity enriches the human experience and that cultural exchange can deepen our understanding of ourselves and others.”
They’re betting on the wrong Locke. Alain Locke (1885-1954), class of 1907 and the first African American Rhodes Scholar, was correct in embracing an openness essential to learning. But this report neglects the real ideology that made Harvard Harvard and America America: the liberalism of John Locke (1632-1704), among others.
Liberalism wanted to “preserve and enlarge freedom” by protecting individual rights. Building on that leap forward, pluralism functions more as a foreign policy, urging even more openness to groups and cultures.
Liberalism remains the defining, most successful, democratic, and academic vision. Ultimately, it unleashed professors seeking truth – or truths. “Cultural pluralism,” the later, alumnus Locke admitted, “presupposed cultural relativism.”
Both Lockes rhyme more than they clash. But liberal universities traditionally kept politics out of the classroom to pursue truth. Today’s pluralistic palaces are so open they’re morally confused – although genuine pluralists would at least resist woke orthodoxy.
As a Harvard tour guide, I finished the standard three-lie riff by pointing to Harvard’s motto, “Veritas,” emblazoned on the statue. “That makes it the statue of four lies,” I insisted. “Veritas means ‘truth’ and you can’t have truth amid three other lies.”
Alas, truth today is not only missing from John Harvard’s statue, but from the university named for him.
The writer, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian. His latest books, To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream and The Essential Guide to October 7th and its Aftermath, were just published.