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.”