It’s been an annus horribilis for Harvard. A long-awaited internal antisemitism and anti-Israel report, released in late April after intense pressure from the Trump administration, showed the extent to which America’s wealthiest university struggled to contain the world’s oldest hatred on its campus.
The findings showed that almost 60 percent of Jewish students at Harvard had experienced “discrimination, stereotyping, or negative bias on campus due to [their] views on current events.”
On October 8, 2023, less than 24 hours after more than 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals were slaughtered by Hamas and 250 more were brutally kidnapped to Gaza, the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee issued a joint statement with more than 30 other student organisations, where they “held Israel responsible for all unfolding violence…The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”
311 pages long and a product of 50 “listening sessions” with around 500 Jewish students, the damning report, released more than 18 months later goes into encyclopaedic detail about how Harvard fell short of combating antisemitism in the wake of the October 7 atrocities.
It enumerates grotesque examples of Jew hatred going unchecked, ranging from isolated incidents like a recently admitted medical student being told by a classmate that “Zionists are not welcome at HMS” [Harvard Medical School], to more institutional infractions, including Jewish students being placed in Harvard-run “privilege trainings,” where “they were told that they were deemed to be too privileged not only by dint of being identified as White but also because of their Jewishness, which allegedly endowed them with an even higher level of privilege.”
The report added that this “discourse created absurd situations in which Jewish students from working class backgrounds are told by authority figures that they are oppressing classmates from much wealthier backgrounds and with stronger preparation for academic and social life at Harvard.
The report’s length also suggests that such antisemitism did not spontaneously emerge out of a vacuum, pointing to a longer, under-explored yet equally disturbing history at the Ivy League stretching back to the 1920s.
As a postgraduate student at Harvard almost a decade ago, I elected to enroll in an undergraduate journalism class where I began researching some of the university’s past presidents from the twentieth century.
Among the most notorious was Abbott Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s 22nd president serving from 1909 to 1933. For weeks, I combed through around 240 boxes of his private correspondence and personal records.
The debilitating quotas Lowell had imposed on Jewish students were hardly a secret, having quite publicly proposed an annual cap of 15 percent to preserve the university's Waspy, Brahmin character. Lowell went so far as to suggest that fewer Jewish students on campus would help eliminate antisemitism.
“If every college in the country would take a limited proportion of Jews,” Lowell ventured in one letter during his presidency, “I suspect we should go a long way toward eliminating race feeling amongst the students.”
In another letter to an acquaintance dated December 22, 1922, Lowell blamed Jewish people for the antisemitism they were experiencing, lamenting that, “The Jews are coming to this country in larger numbers, and are not being assimilated as rapidly as one would hope.”
“We had hoped that the Jews themselves,” Lowell went on, “would cooperate with us in breaking down the barriers of race prejudice by limiting the proportion of Hebrews to an amount that could be brought into more direct contact with the Gentile students; some sifting process will doubtless be adopted to prevent the college from having too many students of any kind or race whom we cannot effectively influence.”
Lowell’s questionable attitudes toward minorities did not end with Jews. In 1922, he expelled all African American students from living in Harvard Yard, the central part of campus where all other freshmen resided.
And two years prior, in 1920, he convened a clandestine, five-person court to convict 14 students and faculty members of homosexual activity – a secret not publicised until 2002, at which point then-president Larry Summers described the scandal as an “extremely disturbing…part of a past that we have rightly left behind.”
As I got closer to publishing the 2,000-word investigation for Boston’s now-defunct Jewish Advocate, I made a startling discovery: a direct descendant of Abbott Lawrence Lowell had been an undergraduate student at Harvard at the same time as me. More startling was that Jennifer Lowell, whom I ended up interviewing for the report, was not just the first female Harvard student bearing the prominent Lowell name, but she was also Jewish.
A century on from Abbott Lawrence Lowell’s sordid presidency, the world’s most famous university is now embroiled in another antisemitism scandal. The 311-page report is a damning indictment on the university’s failure to keep Jewish students safe. Publishing the report is not the solution – far from it. It’s just the start. Its legacy will be determined by how it acted to prevent – and punish – instances of Jew-hatred, not by how diligently its anti-semitism task force documented such cases years later once the damage was already done.
My hope is that the university’s administrators draw on these ignominious lessons of history — from Lowell in the 1920s to the post October 7 anti-semitism explosion — to urgently rehabilitate Harvard’s reputation as the world’s greatest university for students of all backgrounds. Otherwise, the university might never have to worry about imposing Jewish quotas to manage the student population again. They will simply study elsewhere.
Jonathan Harounoff, Israel’s international spokesperson to the United Nations, is an alum of the Universities of Cambridge, Columbia and Harvard.
