Who Runs Student Discipline at Harvard College?

A public critic of Israel’s ’apartheid wall’ plays a key role

A Palestinian flag flies from a Harvard window.

One of the darkly comical lines in the note from Harvard’s interim president, Alan Garber, about the negotiated end to Harvard’s anti-Israel encampment was the one about how, “I will also ask disciplinary boards within each School to evaluate expeditiously, according to their existing practices and precedents, the cases of those who participated in the encampment.”

The “existing practices and precedents” are that if you’re falsely accusing Israel of genocide and apartheid, you can go into a class with a megaphone and disrupt a pro-Israel professor, protest in the Widener Library reading room during reading period, occupy University Hall, and still remain a student enrolled at Harvard rather than getting suspended or kicked out.

Who has set that precedent and practice? One of the reasons Harvard has been having a hard time reining in the anti-Israel mob may be that the people running the discipline are largely not tenured faculty members at Harvard or rule-of-law types, but are rather an assortment of lecturers, preceptors, and professional higher-education administrators.

One member of the Disciplinary Committee of the Administrative Board of Harvard College, Qussay Al-Attabi, who is assistant dean and secretary of the honor council, while an assistant professor of Arabic at Kenyon College wrote an article for the Kenyon Collegian describing the security fence between Israel and parts of the West Bank as an “apartheid wall” that is “illegal and immoral.”

It called Israeli settlements in the West Bank “colonies.” It prompted a rebuttal from a professor of political science. Harvard hired Al-Attabi in 2022.

Another darkly comical line from Garber’s note is the decentralization reference: “At Harvard, our Schools have responsibility for our involuntary leave and disciplinary processes. With the disruption to the educational environment caused by the encampment now abated, I will ask that the Schools promptly initiate applicable reinstatement proceedings for all individuals who have been placed on involuntary leaves of absence.”

Decentralization can have advantages over centralized command and control, but in a dysfunctional institution it can also winds up being a way of buck-passing, of avoiding accountability. Garber can say, hey, I’m not responsible for discipline, it’s up to the schools, all I can do is “ask” them, not order them. The faculty are saying, hey, we don’t have power, it’s all with the administrators, and they just listen to the donors and alumni. The donors and alumni say we don’t have any power, it’s all with the faculty. Everyone blames someone else, and nothing gets fixed. Before you know it, their term is over, or they’ve retired, and it becomes someone else’s problem.

It sent me back to Adam Ulam’s book, “The Fall of the American University.” Ulam, a Polish-born Jew who escaped in Europe in 1939 and wound up at Brown and then at Harvard, where he taught from 1949 to 1992, writes:

The old model of the man in authority, kind but firm, never at a loss for a light joke or a tough-minded decision, now faded from the campus and (naturally in view of the now symbiotic relationship between the world of the university and that of politics) began to recede on the national scene. He was succeeded by the negotiator. The latter was sure that if they only all sat down together and discussed the whole problem, they would arrive at a mutually acceptable solution.

Ulam also criticizes what he described as the “catastrophism” afflicting politics, though he discerned “some heartening evidence of a budding counter-revolution of common-sense. Neither society as a whole nor its younger component has lost entirely that sense of humor and proportion which has been one of the strongest influences in the achievement and maintaining of the American democratic process.”

A budding counter-revolution of common-sense is needed now as it was in 1972.

Recent work: “New York Times Pushed Biden to Refuse Arms to Israel” is the headline over my latest column in the Algemeiner. Please check out the full column over at the Algemeiner if you are interested in that topic.

“Harvard’s Capitulation to Anti-Israel Mob Is Latest Sign Its Interim President Must Go” is the headline over my latest column in the New York Sun. Please check out the full column over at the New York Sun if you are interested in that topic. Senator Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, has also weighed in, declaring, “As an alumnus, I’m dismayed by Harvard’s pandering to the fringe and its willingness to tolerate the pervasive antisemitism. This is a moral and institutional failure.”

Speaking of catastrophism: The Wall Street Journal has a front-page story on the birth dearth. “Many government leaders see this as a matter of national urgency. They worry about shrinking workforces, slowing economic growth and underfunded pensions; and the vitality of a society with ever-fewer children. Smaller populations come with diminished global clout, raising questions in the U.S., China and Russia about their long-term standings as superpowers,” the story says.

Nowhere in the article is there any discussion of how there might also be an upside to revised world population estimates—for example, how 2 billion fewer people might affect energy use and its projected effect on climate change.

I tend to think larger families, up to a point, are a sign of confidence in the future, and more people, up to a point, is pro-growth and pro-prosperity. But just as a media framing issue, the “worry” frame rather than the “some positives, some negatives” or “unexpected good news” frame is the one that research shows attracts more readers to an individual story.

Thank you!: Here at The Editors our long-term bet is against catastrophism, for a sense of humor and proportion, and very much in favor of a counter-revolution of common sense. If you are in general agreement and want to help support trustworthy information to defend and expand freedom and prosperity, please become a paying subscriber (if you aren’t already one).

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