BY HANK REICHMAN
This week the AAUP released a statement, “Against Anticipatory Obedience,” prepared by a joint subcommittee of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure and the Committee on College and University Government. I also served on this subcommittee. The statement noted with concern how “recent events suggest that some administrations are not only acquiescing to attacks on fundamental principles but engaging in what scholars of authoritarianism call anticipatory obedience—that is, they are acting to comply in advance of any pressure to do so.” The statement declared, “While university administrators and faculty members may be compelled to comply with legislation and court orders, even where these run counter to professional and constitutional principles, they remain free to register their disagreement. And under no circumstances should an institution go further than the law demands.” Citing some recent examples, however, the statement warns against an apparent “eagerness to obey on the part of administrative officers, portending a bleak future for higher education.”
Sadly, such eagerness was on ugly display this week at what is arguably the country’s most prestigious private university. As Michelle Goldberg reports in the New York Times, this week Harvard University
announced that, as part of a lawsuit settlement, it would adopt a definition of antisemitism that includes some harsh criticisms of Israel and Zionism, such as holding Israel to a “double standard” and likening its policies to Nazism. Though Harvard claims that it still adheres to the First Amendment, under this definition a student or professor who accuses Israel of genocidal action in Gaza — as the Israeli American Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov has — might be subject to disciplinary action.
In a further act of capitulation, the Harvard Medical School canceled a lecture and panel on wartime health care that was to feature patients from Gaza because of objections that it was one-sided . . .
The settlement, announced just one day after Trump’s inauguration, was subjected to insightful criticism by a Crimson columnist:
That the University settled the cases is unremarkable. It did not acknowledge any wrongdoing, and, like many large institutions, it routinely settles civil suits to avoid the headaches that come with a public trial. What’s concerning is that the settlement makes a major, possibly unprecedented change in University policy that will repress criticism of Israel and invites further legal challenges that would erode the status of free speech and academic freedom at Harvard.
As part of the settlement, Harvard will adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definition of antisemitism, which categorizes a wide swath of criticisms levied against Israel as ipso facto antisemitic. Under the IHRA definition, non-exhaustively, criticisms of Israel construed to “[deny] the Jewish people their right to self-determination” or judge it by a standard other than that “expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” represent antisemitism.
These provisions leave much up to interpretation, but there’s reason to believe Harvard will interpret them expansively. For one thing, the settlement stipulates that the University will also embrace the IHRA’s examples of antisemitism, which include calling Israel’s existence a “racist endeavor.” Anyone who’s paid attention to recent Israel-Palestine discourse at Harvard could tell you that Israel’s stauncher defenders on campus and beyond believe most criticisms of Israel fall into one of those categories — and will redouble pressure on the University to punish them as such.
Reasonable people can surely disagree over what constitutes antisemitism, and it’s perfectly legitimate for an individual to prefer the IHRA definition. But it’s just as plain to me that it is inappropriate to a pluralistic, liberal institution tolerant of a wide range of viewpoints and dedicated to open engagement. . . .
Most worryingly, with this move, Harvard has signaled that upset constituents — and outside groups backing them — can bring thinly-supported, mostly-anonymous legal complaints against the University to reshape policies at the heart of the academic mission.
A second Crimson columnist, a Jewish student, expressed doubt that “this settlement is actually about antisemitism.”
Instead, it is part of a larger right-wing effort to attack higher education under the auspices of challenging antisemitism. Indeed, the settlement comes on the first full day of the Trump administration, which has already threatened to cut Harvard’s $600 million in federal funding. . . . [T]he settlement indicates Harvard’s worrying willingness to twist its standards under the politicized pressures of just a few affiliates rather than defend its intellectual environment. As someone who studies Middle Eastern politics, I am worried that necessary conversations in the classroom will no longer be possible. Ironic, considering the University is pouring money into intellectual vitality initiatives and even boasted about them the same day the settlement was announced.
The AAUP’s Committee A has also criticized the IHRA definition, noting that its abuse “has led to cancellation of university courses and conferences on the rights of Palestinians and to targeting faculty members in Middle East studies for dismissal and other severe sanctions.” As Committee A pointed out, “Kenneth Stern, one of the authors of the IHRA definition, has stated that it ‘was never intended as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus.’ Stern has objected to what he has called the ‘weaponizing’ of the definition, arguing that its misuse undermines efforts to detect and combat real instances of antisemitism.”
At Harvard Medical School, Tufts University professor Barry S. Levy, who studies the public health effects of war, had been scheduled to speak in an optional evening session of a course on “Essentials of the Profession,” which is required for all first-year students at the Medical School and the Harvard School of Dental Medicine. The optional session was part of the course’s original spring semester curriculum and was approved by medical school administrators. Students had organized a moderated discussion with patients from Gaza receiving care in Boston and their families as a follow-up to Levy’s lecture, which was not focused specifically on Gaza. The cancellation came just hours before the event was scheduled after complaints that students would hear from Gazans impacted by the war and not also Israelis.
According to the Crimson, “Arabic-speaking Medical School students who had served as interpreters for patients from Gaza in Boston asked course staff to arrange the session with Levy and patients’ families. . . . After the initial cancellation, the organizers briefly received conditional approval to host the event as a student group, separately from the Essentials course. Less than an hour later, at roughly 11:30 a.m., they were told they could not host the event at all.”
These and earlier actions by Harvard’s administration were too much for Jay Ufelder, director of the Nonviolent Action Lab at Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, who submitted his resignation in an open letter that he posted on social media:
I help lead a program that studies civil resistance at a research center committed to advancing democracy; and my employer, an internationally renowned institution ostensibly committed to academic freedom, will not allow me or my colleagues or its own students to speak freely about these things, lest we offend people who support them, or who misunderstand or intentionally misconstrue principled criticism of Israeli apartheid and genocide and the ideology underpinning them as antisemitic. . . . [T]he chief asset associated with my role as program director of the Nonviolent Action Lab was the opportunity to speak frankly and authoritatively about mobilization in the U.S. and elsewhere against authoritarianism and other catastrophes, and the university administration’s deepening repression of activism against the genocide in Palestine has now devalued and degraded that asset to an extent that I personally can no longer tolerate.
The AAUP statement declares, ” It is the higher education community’s responsibility not to surrender to such attacks—and not to surrender in anticipation of them. Instead, we must vigorously and loudly oppose them.” If only Harvard’s rulers had half the sense of principle and courage of Ufelder, one of its (now former) staff employees.
Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and chair of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019. His Understanding Academic Freedom was published in October, 2021; a second edition will be published in March 2025.
