Harvard’s Own Survey Data Shows Jewish Students Get Inferior Experience

Faculty speaker at Black commencement in 2024 denounced “Zionist overlords”

Harvard’s public-relations operation is pretty clumsy, but it isn’t totally helpless. Today it tried one of the oldest tricks in the spin handbook, which is attempting to bury a release of bad news behind a release of even more bad news.

We didn’t set out here at The Editors to write a Harvard newsletter any more than we set out to write a Federal Reserve newsletter, but there aren’t many other outlets out there with the ability and inclination to pierce through the Harvard spin. It’s a significant institution, and there is a lot going on this week. So here, for readers of The Editors, is the bad news that Harvard seemed to be trying to bury. It’s the results of the student portion of a community survey conducted by four Harvard officials: chief community and campus life officer Sheri Ann Charleston; associate provost for Institutional Research and Analytics Drew Allen; Charles William Eliot Professor of Education Andrew Ho, and Associate Director of Research and Assessment in the Office for Community and Campus Life, Tim Harrigan. The data is buried in the tables of the appendix of the survey report, but it is pretty dramatic. The data was collected September 24, 2024 through October 30, 2024, meaning this academic year, not the 2023-2024 academic year for which Harvard President Garber now belatedly apologizes and acknowledges “was disappointing and painful.” The Editors has generated some charts that make the story visible: According to Harvard’s own internal survey research, Jewish students are substantially worse off at Harvard than other students, when it comes to matters that are pretty central to a university educational experience.

As for the “even more bad news,” that was the long-awaited report of the Harvard Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias.

It’s a 311-page report and, while largely constructive, it is of uneven quality. The most useful thing, from my point of view, is the warning about how the antisemitism at Harvard is hurting the university: “The hostility about which we heard has had significant consequences that are degrading to the University. Some Jewish students told us they turned down offers of admission at Harvard Schools. Some Jewish students completing PhDs said they decided to leave for private industry because of the perception and experience of academia being unfriendly to Jews. Some non-Jewish faculty told us that Jewish candidates turned down post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard. We also heard from Jewish medical school students that they shied away from residencies at Harvard’s hospitals because of the deep politicization of the climate.” This, from the Task Force on April 29, 2025, is precisely the point I made back on December 4, 2022, when I said publicly, “All of us who care about the University really need to work urgently to improve the situation or else face a real risk of Harvard losing Jewish talent and excellence to other, less hostile institutions.”

The second most positive thing, from my point of view, is the bracing warning about how parts of Harvard—the Religion and Public Life Program at the Divinity School, the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health—have gone off the rails because of poor governance. “We were surprised to encounter significant academic programs that lacked any involvement from the ladder faculty, and we think as a nearly hard rule that the University should avoid creating programs like these in the future….we think in general it is best to have oversight from ladder faculty with relevant expertise, and to the extent an activity is outside the scope of the expertise that exists at Harvard, it is an opportunity to think about adding skills and expertise to the faculty or, alternatively, admitting that we are not well-positioned to run a particular program, which is a healthy response, as we cannot do everything…We believe the activities we identified…present urgent brand and reputation concerns that imperil the University’s pre-eminence and require immediate action.”

The report goes into a lot of detail about an annual trip the Divinity School’s Religion and Public Life Program organized to Israel and the West Bank that the school’s own staff described publicly in writing as having the purpose of “denoting the urgent need to dezionize Jewish consciousness.” The report says, “Setting out in an instructional program to ‘dezionize’ the ‘consciousness’ of Jewish students is to craft instruction to target students based on their religious identity.”

The third most positive thing is the account the report offers of the Affinity Celebration Honoring Black Graduates at Harvard on May 21, 2024. It is, in journalistic terms, a scoop.:

Sunn M’Cheaux, a Gullah instructor in Harvard’s African Language Program, delivered the “faculty keynote” at the Affinity Celebration Honoring Black Graduates. Affinity celebrations, held on campus in recent years for various affinity groups at Harvard throughout Commencement week, are “student-led, staff-supported events that recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of graduates from historically marginalized communities. They are described as “in addition to” the University’s main Commencement and School-based graduation ceremonies. In his address, M’Cheaux expressed explicit support of the Palestinian cause, criticizing Israel as an “apartheid state” backed by US dollars and weapons…. M’Cheaux criticized tech and social media companies for stifling online activism and free speech. M’Cheaux further accused Israel and the United States of backing “atrocities and genocide” against the Congolese people and condemned the Harvard Corporation’s decision to withhold degree from sanctioned student protestors. Reflecting on the personal costs of activism, he questioned, “Do we get to struggle with despondency, depression, childhood trauma, self-doubt, self-harm, bereavement, social anxieties, eating disorders and so forth when Zionist overlords starve Falastini infants to death?” He then affirmed, “Yes. Yes, we do.” Despite employing the phrase “Zionist overlords,” M’Cheaux’s speech attracted virtually no media attention or apparent concern from the audiences.

I was disappointed by some other sections of the report. Extensive stretches seemed like just rehashes of old Crimson articles with little added value, perspective, or fact-checking. The Kennedy School’s Carr Center gets a total pass, as does the Kennedy School class where a final project was convincing your classmates to attend a boycott-Israel rally and the instructor posed with the students for pictures in keffiyehs.

In one passage, the report blames Israeli military action for Harvard antisemitism. “The Israeli military response to the October 7th attacks, which would later devastate Gaza with tens of thousands killed and more than a million people displaced, further inflamed passions on campus, and pro-Palestinian protests on campus swiftly became more frequent and vocal,” the report says. Blaming Israel for antisemitism is an example of antisemitism, and describing the protests as “pro-Palestinian” rather than anti-Israel is itself tendentious.

Another passage of the report criticizes the two main Jewish institutions on the Harvard campus. “In several listening sessions, non- and anti-Zionist Jewish students told us that they do not feel welcome at Hillel or Chabad,” the report says. The founder and president of Harvard Chabad, Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi, who is also the Jackie and Omri Dahan Harvard Chabad Jewish Chaplain, called that section of the report “scandalous.” He said absolutely every Jew is welcome regardless of their views, and that views on Israeli policy can run across a very wide spectrum, but he also said antizionism is “a crazy thing” that Harvard is “pretending” is “a normal thing.” The report also recounts Rabbi Zarchi’s use of the term “animalistic” to describe specific behavior by Hamas terrorists without giving the full context or reporting how the comment was taken out of context and used to slander him, a visible Jewish leader at Harvard, in the aftermath of the October 7 attack.

Somewhat strangely, too, the antisemitism report includes an artificial-intelligence-generated summary of Harvard student demands for divestment from Israel. In a section headed, “Respondents’ Suggested Recommendations,” the task force reports, “The survey asked respondents to suggest specific recommendations that would be responsive to the concerns they may have raised in the questionnaire. We first used ChatGPT to help summarize themes in the recommendations suggested by students, faculty, and staff. Among students, one key theme is about divestment and disclosure. A number of students recommend that the University divests financial interests in companies tied to Israel and/or to industries connected to warfare. Along these lines, students also recommended the University disclose investments in these areas.” Later on the report clarifies, “In summarizing the above recommendations, we seek to emphasize that these recommendations have not been endorsed by two task forces nor by the authors of this auxiliary report. They simply reflect viewpoints of respondents to the survey.”

How will the report interact with Harvard’s effort to get its $3 billion in federal grant money un-frozen? The Trump administration will point to it as proof that Harvard is discriminating and shouldn’t get federal funding. The chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Tim Walberg, said, “This report shows what Committee Republicans have highlighted for years: antisemitism is running rampant on Harvard’s campus. Harvard’s president said the school will not abide bigotry, yet that’s exactly what the school’s feckless leadership did. I’m delighted we finally have an ally in the White House who is willing to hold schools accountable for their abject failure to protect students, as required by law.”

Harvard will point to the report and its eventual implementation of some of its recommendations as evidence that it is working hard on improving, and that it should therefore get the federal money. A scenario in which Harvard makes many of the changes the Trump administration wants, Harvard gets the money, Trump claims credit for the changes, and Harvard says it would have made the changes anyway even without Trump’s threats seems the likeliest outcome, though with the Trump administration, as with Harvard, there’s plenty of possible room for unpredictable missteps.

Anyway, it’s a minority view, but of the two reports, the one Harvard isn’t touting as much, the Pulse Survey on Inclusion and Belonging, may be the more significant in some ways, and as troubling in its findings. Give Harvard credit for collecting and publishing the data that will provide the opportunity to track progress, or the lack of it. One can’t blame the university’s public relations team for trying to hide it today. The challenge for the faculty and deans and boards who really run the university will be to improve the situation on the campus so that the next time this survey is conducted the Jewish students feel just as free to say what they think as anyone else at Harvard does.

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