“I’m sorry Dean Claybaugh, I am going to finish my remarks,” Says Harvard’s Summers, Denouncing Lie-Filled Anti-Israel Structure

Deans interrupt Jewish campus event, requesting it move to make room for Palestine Solidarity Committee

From left, Harvard dean of undergraduate education Amanda Claybaugh; the dean of students at Harvard College, Thomas Dunne (in tie); former Harvard president and former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers; Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi. The person in jeans on the background is unidentified. To the right is part of the large lie-filled anti-Israel structure. Science Center Plaza, Cambridge, Mass., October 23, 2025. Photo: The Editors.

To the list of unbelievable things that have happened on and around the Harvard campus over the past few years, now add this—a dramatic confrontation between former Harvard president and former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers and the dean of undergraduate education at Harvard, Amanda Claybaugh, against the backdrop of the large lie-filled anti-Israel structure that was erected this week at a crossroads on the Harvard campus.

The interaction happened at noon today, Thursday October 23, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was on the scene.

Harvard Chabad had this morning issued a call to join Summers on the Science Center Plaza. “Larry will be addressing the hateful, slanderous, and antisemitic exhibits and literature being displayed and distributed on campus.…We must not allow antisemitism to be normalized and go unchallenged,” said Rabbi Hirchy Zarchi, the founder and president of Harvard Chabad and the Jackie and Omri Dahan Harvard Chabad Jewish Chaplain.

Zarchi began the event by saying that he had heard, in particular from members of the Harvard Class of 2029 who live in the Yard, “that they increasingly feel that there’s a neutrality when it comes to Jew-hate.” Zarchi directly rebutted some of the false claims on the large lie-filled anti-Israel structure about Israel targeting hospitals and the press. He noted that Hamas had used hospitals as terror bases and had disguised its terrorists with press vests.

Summers said he didn’t think the structure should have been allowed. “I do not think that the likes of this should deface this space,” he said. “I do not believe that if the doctrines of the Ku Klux Klan were proposed for installation in the Science Center, that that would be permitted and that would be enabled by those who lead us in this community. I believe that what we are looking at is the moral equivalent of racism.”

“But I understand how one can have a different view, how one can believe that a broad principle of free speech should permit any installation to be permitted, though that would not be my view about how Harvard in fact acts,” he said. “If one believes in free speech, then one believes that the answer to bad speech is more and alternative speech.”

At that juncture—ironically, because Summers was speaking about free speech—Dean Claybaugh emerged from behind the large lie-filled anti-Israel structure accompanied by the dean of students at Harvard College, Thomas Dunne, and leaders of the Palestine Solidarity Committee.