The resignation of Claudine Gay, the first black president and woman at the head of the elitist Harvard, is not enough of a trophy.
This is what six Jewish students from this university integrated into the select Ivy League consider. This group filed a lawsuit against Harvard this week in which they accuse this institution of being “a bastion of rampant hatred and harassment of Jews,” exacerbated by Hamas's attack on Israel.
They even stressed that teachers have promulgated anti-Semitism and intimidated students who oppose it.
The case was handed over in Massachusetts court. The documentation alleges that this institution violated the civil rights of Jewish students, turned a blind eye and stopped punishing acts of anti-Semitism (the others deny this and speak of anti-Zionism) and the spread of hatred.
The plaintiffs maintained that “anti-Semitism is particularly severe and pervasive” since Hamas attacked inside Israeli territory on October 7. This represented a brutal retaliation by the Government of Beniamin Netanyahu against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, an action that has provoked general protests in US universities.
“Mobs of pro-Hamas students and professors demonstrated by the hundreds on the Harvard campus shouting vile anti-Semitic slogans and calling for the death of Jews and Israel,” they noted.
Among the threats of extinction is the slogan chanted by pro-Palestinians, “from the river to the sea,” a territorial claim that Jews interpret as returning to the status of 1947, when the State of Israel did not yet exist.
“These mobs have occupied buildings, classrooms, libraries, student bars, squares and residences, often for days or weeks, promoting violence against Jews, advising and assaulting them,” the plaintiffs stated.
The signatories of the complaint allege that Jewish students have been targeted on social media with the approval of faculty members. “The most surprising thing in all of this is the abject failure of Harvard and its refusal to lift a finger to stop and deter this scandalous anti-Semitic behavior and punish the students and professors who perpetrated it,” they insisted in their writing.
This vision, at least, forgets one relevant factor. Yes there has been a punishment. Gay, the president, had to leave office earlier this month.
Gay, along with his colleagues at MIT in Massachusetts and the University of Pennsylvania, appeared before a Republican-controlled congressional committee and did not respond forcefully to the trick question about responding to anti-Semitism on their campuses. The failure to strongly condemn anti-Semitism has meant that only Sally Kornbluth, the president of MIT, survives in office. UPenn's Liz Magill resigned almost immediately. Gay was confirmed after making a public apology and acknowledging her mistake.
But the issue around her went far beyond alleged anti-Semitism and the pressure continued. Gay was among the targets of the far right. The color of her skin was not liked by white conservatives, who saw in this controversy the opportunity to take aim against the policies of racial diversity and inclusion when accessing elite universities, which are those of power.
