Harvard’s Report on Campus Antisemitism Shows Why Trump is Right to Go After Higher Ed

It looks like the Trump administration had a very good reason to go after Harvard.

Harvard University released a lengthy and damning report Tuesday on campus antisemitism following the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. The report paints a picture of extreme antisemitic behavior taking place not only on campus but in classrooms.

The Washington Free Beacon covered the report extensively.

In one example, a “Pyramid of White Supremacy” graphic used in a required School of Education class claimed that those who oppose the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement that targets Israel are engaged in “coded genocide.”

Here you see the beginning of a theme. Antisemitism at Harvard and on other college campuses isn’t just based on ignorance and bigotry toward Jews. It’s wedded to an ideology that already aims to categorize some people as inherently good and others as inherently bad.

In another incident at the School of Public Health, Jewish students were asked in a webinar “Who is more marginalized, Jews or Palestinians?”

Jews are simply being lumped in with the evil whites, the “settler colonialists.”

At the Divinity School, the Free Beacon reported, Jewish students were subjected to “the embrace of a pedagogy of ‘de-zionization'” in which instructors “attribute to Jews two great sins: first, in the Levant, the establishment of the State of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba; and second, in the United States, participation in White supremacy.’”

Did it matter if the students were the descendants of people who were actually oppressed? Not really. The Left often viciously enforces who qualifies as worthy of celebration and worthy of scorn. That pyramid of oppression is subject to change.

One Jewish student recounted being tasked with giving a speech at a forum the university hosts. The student spoke about a grandfather who survived the Holocaust and found refuge in what became the modern state of Israel.

“The [student] directors of the conference pulled me aside and said that I cannot mention my grandfather’s rescue missions in my speech, because his rescue missions involve Israel,” the student recounted in the report. The student said that the speech had nothing to do with the modern conflict in Gaza, but was told it wasn’t “tasteful.”

“They told me that my family history is inherently one-sided because it does not acknowledge the displacements of Palestinian populations,” the student said.

This is all too common in institutions commandeered by the Left. Any information not being used to advance their cherished narratives are considered illegitimate and threatening.

Apparently, the campus culture at Harvard became so poisoned that students were afraid to even appear Jewish. One student recounted:

Antisemitic culture on campus has increased since Oct 7th. Friends who are more outwardly Jewish and Israelis, the things they are experiencing are horrible. I feel lucky I don’t look Jewish. I know if I do the “wrong thing” I might get the antisemitism. So, put your headphones in, make sure you’re not outwardly Jewish, and just walk to class.

Again, this is at an institution that pretends to be the most tolerant and enlightened.

The examples of antisemitism went on and on. It’s clear that not only has antisemitism been common at Harvard but that the school’s administration did little to address it.

I guess good on Harvard for releasing the report. Though I imagine it would have been hard to keep something like this under wraps. The question is, how did this happen in one of the world’s bastions of progressivism, where tolerance itself has become the unifying near-religious creed?

I’d argue that it’s the creed that led to antisemitism burning out of control in the Ivy Leagues. Sure, hating Jews seems to be a ubiquitous phenomenon around the globe. But Harvard’s antisemitism has a distinct flavor. It’s directly plugged into the same ethos that drove DEI efforts.

Antisemitism isn’t the primary issue on college campuses. The problem is leftism. It’s the ideology that classifies everyone as oppressor or oppressed.

The most valuable currency in America’s elite circles isn’t wealth, or talent, or even intelligence. It’s evidence of being “marginalized,” being the victim of real or imagined oppression.

This is why higher education is having so much trouble rooting out its antisemitism problem right now. To the activist campus Left, Jews are now the villains of their narrative. And as the activist Left goes, so goes the institution. At least, that’s how it’s worked since the 1960s.

The difference now is that there is a president in the White House who isn’t afraid to go after the Ivy League. The Trump administration has a just cause for not just pulling funding from these universities that let antisemitism fester but may even have a larger legal case to end their tax-exempt status based on very serious civil rights violations.

If the Trump administration does continue to go after Harvard, and I think they will, this report will be Exhibit A to be used against them. I can see why they delayed its release.

But this story is about much more than Harvard. It’s about a pervasive and toxic ideology that has entirely taken over the most elite college institutions that now have a laughable claim to moral and intellectual authority and an even weaker claim to taxpayer support.

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