Harvard is in trouble, but I’m finding it hard to have any sympathy. In the aftermath of October 7th, Jewish students at what is supposedly the United States’s most prestigious university were intimidated, vilified and silenced. It was an intolerable double punch after the trauma of Hamas’s brutal massacre in Israel. The ugly scenes at Harvard became a blueprint for campus protests throughout the US, especially at Columbia, UCLA and the University of Michigan. These all-campus jamborees of Israel-loathing were looked on benignly, and sometimes even joined, by faculty that are otherwise easily angered by crimes such as using the wrong gender pronoun.
Now, as threatened, Donald Trump is taking revenge. There is much that is grotesque about the president’s moral and political universe, and that of his cabinet, but on the matter of the anti-Israel ‘protest’ cultures fostered at America’s most elite universities, I couldn’t agree more with his tough approach.
Trump has already frozen $2.2 billion (£2 billion) in government grants to Harvard and is threatening to cut its tax exemption which could cost it millions of dollars a year. Harvard is also being threatened by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem with a ban on enrolling foreign students (27 per cent of its total) if it refuses to hand over records on the anti-Israel activities of those from overseas who are studying there.
Naturally, Harvard is squealing with rage and defiance, apparently willing to lose billions in order to protect the right to admit students and their “free speech” about Palestine and Israel. The anti-Israel progressive elite is also, unsurprisingly, indignant on Harvard’s behalf.
Shocking as the events have been since October 7th, there is nothing new about Harvard’s tawdry refusal to make Jewish students feel welcome. Harvard has never been the paradisal bastion of American values that its image as the country’s oldest and best university suggests. To be sure, with its vast endowment and rich history it is a magnet for the very best. It is studded with Nobel Prize-winners and world-changing medical research and science, and is a breeding ground of US presidents and economists and tech giants.
I grew up in the Boston area and lived in Harvard’s intimidating ambit. But while its starry professoriate always had many wonderful, interesting and even kind people, the overall impression of the university was one of great arrogance. I encountered all too many strutting, overly moneyed undergraduates jostling to belong to its fleet of dining clubs, some of which are known as Final Clubs.
Harvard’s Jewish problem did not come from nowhere: it is deeply rooted in its history. In the early 20th century, as Jewish immigration to the East Coast produced a surge of Jewish applicants, the university took action. Having always been intended to be for the sons of white Christians, the Jewish influx was far from welcome. In 1921, president Lowell, after whom an undergraduate dormitory is still named (the slew of “racist” building name changes that followed the explosion of Black Lives Matter has never included anti-Semitic associations), convened the Committee on Methods for Sifting Candidates for Admission, whose purpose was to limit the number of Jews admitted.
In the 1930s, Harvard introduced the legacy system, which also had the effect of discriminating against Jews, whose parents were very unlikely, by then, to have attended Harvard. The rest of the Ivy League adopted similar policies, maintaining quotas on Jews right up until the 1960s. During the years of the Nazi regime, some Harvard students vociferously agitated for “friendly” relations with Germany. Hitler’s former press chief and Harvard graduate, Ernst Hanfstaengl, arrived at Harvard in June 1934 for his 25th year anniversary reunion. He received the red carpet treatment of dinners and receptions.
‘What today’s Harvard administration has in common with its predecessor in the 1930s is its reluctance to reject an evil regime and its supporters,’ notes Rafael Medoff, director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. If Harvard’s Jewish problem used to come from a conservative white elite, it is now, as everywhere, taken up by the progressive left and a more diverse crowd who have clung on to the Palestinian cause with a mix of intentions, some good, many very bad indeed. The university’s high-ups, people who, with all their elegance and learning, really ought to know better. At least Donald Trump, for all his faults, is not allowing Harvard’s arrogance and refusal to combat its culture of anti-Semitism go unchecked.
Comments