The Wasted Privilege of the Harvard Faculty
The work of Isabel Wilkerson is a favorite in Harvard faculty circles, yet many have forgotten or ignored a key lesson of her book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. In her seminal work, Wilkerson declares, “Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction. Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see.”
Over the past two years, the depths of anti-Semitic hate have been on full display on college campuses nationwide, with Harvard being a national leader in trafficking intolerance, moral rot, and hatred toward Jews. Despite public statements that the university would meaningfully address these concerns, the school paid lip service to the ideas of diversity, and almost nothing substantive happened to address the rampant anti-Semitic climate. Notably, aside from pro-terror faculty supporting campus disruptions and unending calls for violence and harm, the core of the university—the Harvard faculty—has remained silent, absent, or retreated into tepid statements of procedural neutrality.
Harvard faculty showed little courage or morality over the past two years; many failed to speak and take action to protect Jewish students and exemplify the school’s mission of “advanc[ing] new ideas and promot[ing] knowledge.” Harvard’s mission can only be realized when ideas and merit are respected and people are not threatened based on religious or other immutable characteristics.
Faculty and administrators across Harvard must have been aware of what was playing out on campus; the faculty-led protests and disruptions in Widener Library made national news. Flags and keffiyehs were omnipresent, as were the principles of DEI, from Harvard Yard to the Medical Quad, which fixated on identity and harm and managed to politicize every facet of the education and discovery process. However, members of the faculty ignored the suffering of the Jewish community and the shared responsibility for their own institution’s behavior.
At a time when clarity and courage are desperately needed, the faculty of Harvard University has too often chosen silence and equivocation. By not condemning antisemitism, the university implicitly endorses anti-Semitic rhetoric and behavior. This failure to protect Jewish students—not only from discrimination but from the moral rot of ideological extremism—is a profound institutional betrayal. The university’s most privileged voices, its tenured faculty, have abdicated their responsibilities, not only as educators but as stewards of liberal democracy and Harvard’s very own motto, “Veritas.”
There is no excuse for the faculty’s unwillingness to condemn anti-Semitic slogans, symbols, or threats. When swastikas appear, when Jewish speakers are shouted down, or when anti-Israel rhetoric veers into Holocaust inversion and dehumanization, the faculty’s failure to speak sends an unmistakable message: Jewish students are on their own.
The hypocrisy of the Harvard faculty is utterly staggering. Faculty who rightly demand institutional responses to racism, homophobia, and other forms of hatred suddenly adopt a hands-off approach when it comes to attacks on Judaism. The school—led by then-former President Claudine Gay—bent over backward to “contextualize” anti-Semitism in terms of colonialism or resistance, as if hate speech somehow becomes acceptable when directed at a historically persecuted people with a national homeland. In the name of “decolonization,” the most fundamental principles of pluralism and decency are being trampled.
This isn’t merely a failure of moral leadership—it’s a failure of intellectual honesty. Universities exist to pursue truth, not to cater to ideological orthodoxies. Yet the growing anti-Israel obsession in academic circles has created an environment where falsehoods and double standards flourish. Jewish students are vilified for their identities. Zionism, a legitimate expression of Jewish self-determination, is recast as inherently racist or imperialist. Faculty who know better say nothing.
What is needed is not performative diversity statements, but genuine moral clarity. Faculty must stop hiding behind abstractions and speak out forcefully against antisemitism in all its forms—including those that masquerade as social justice. They must defend their Jewish students as vigorously as they would any other group under threat, and they must remember that the role of a scholar is not to coddle ideological conformity, but to champion rigorous, principled thinking and viewpoint diversity—especially when it’s unpopular.
Harvard can either remain an elite institution that preserves liberal norms and promotes values of open inquiry based on merit, or it can become a hollowed-out shell of politicized groupthink. The faculty’s reaction to antisemitism has been disgraceful, and they are facing the painful and necessary consequences of their inaction. The Trump administration has understandably intervened by using its funding and contracting powers to compel Harvard to change. While canceling grants and pulling funding certainly harms research and students, Harvard was either unwilling or incapable of reform, and these drastic cuts may compel real change.
As of today, even with these cuts, instead of soul-searching, admitting that Harvard has engaged in some truly disgusting and dangerous behavior, and demanding that Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, and Penny Pritzker, the chair of the Harvard Corporation, settle with the government and make needed changes to the school to restore their funding, faculty are blaming the Trump administration and other units of Harvard, and pleading ignorance.
One Medical School professor, for instance, noted that Harvard is large and diffuse and, therefore, is outside of his focus and moral responsibility: Harvard “is 13 loosely affiliated schools, some geographically separated, with all the good and bad that come from being real schools.” Another professor in the Medical School—who has posted on X that she is “one of the world’s best scientists”—shared on social media after complaining about the federal cuts that “I have not met the Jews at Harvard who are suffering—and I don’t trust the media as an unbiased source. I have giant empathy for people.” This professor also shared her views that she is sorry about the hate in the law school, but “there is no need to punish the scientists now because of it,” and she continues, “I don’t know anything about Harvard Law School. It could be all rotten for all I know. I am at the Medical School. The campus is so far away.” Notably, this same professor posts plenty of her personal opinions online and has no trouble showing expensive travel; she is not living in a bubble, she just opted to remain ignorant and silent about the state of Harvard University while holding a privileged position there. She is now only speaking because her work is threatened by the funding cuts.
Being a faculty member at any college or university is a privilege and an honor that comes with rights and responsibilities that align with the core values of the school and higher education generally—merit, viewpoint diversity, and the competition of ideas. When there is clear evidence that one’s school is failing in its mission and telos, faculty must speak, demand change, and take whatever steps are needed to correct the faults, even if only a minority of professors are directly shaping and thus impacting the larger institution. Everyone’s fate is linked.
But at Harvard, the faculty are seemingly missing, having retreated into their offices and ignored the student suffering and chaos, only emerging when their funding is under threat. Isabel Wilkerson wrote about the power of engagement, too; she noted that “the price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly. And the least that a person in the dominant caste can do is not make the pain any worse.” Wilkerson’s lessons have been lost on the Harvard faculty, who could have avoided the Trump administration’s oversight had they spoken up and taken morally correct action. There is still time to change, admit mistakes, and move forward; I hope that the Harvard faculty take immediate and principled action, but I won’t be holding my breath.
