Faculty at Harvard College vote overwhelmingly to confer degrees to student protestors

 Faculty at Harvard College vote overwhelmingly to confer degrees to student protestors

Cambridge MA - Members of the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences voted yesterday to allow 13 graduating seniors to receive their degrees at Harvard’s Commencement this Thursday, May 23. The meeting, which is usually only a formality, was attended by scores of faculty distraught by what over 350 Harvard faculty have called “unprecedented, disproportionate, and arbitrary sanctions” levied against peaceful student protestors, who had participated in the Palestine solidarity encampment in Harvard. 

Yesterday, Monday, May 20 at 4:30PM, scores of faculty members joined a meeting which is normally only a formality. Harvard professors overwhelmingly voted to include the names of 13 peaceful student protestors who had been informed they would have to wait as many as 3 semesters to receive their degrees, in a striking rebuke to administrators who had pushed for more severe sanctions. Two other students were not discussed, as they were slated to graduate after the 2024 fall semester. The Harvard Board of Overseers and the Harvard Corporation, the universities top governing boards, may need to approve the final list. Although this process is typically a rubber stamp, it is unclear whether the boards would attempt to override the faculty decision. 20 students remain on probation, whose cases were not eligible for evaluation during the degree conferral meeting. 

In the previous 24 hours, over 350 Harvard professors and over 130 staff signed a letter urging the University to allow “students, who engaged in peaceful protest, be allowed to graduate with the degrees they have earned.” 

The open letter expressed alarm that, “Harvard undergraduate students who engaged in peaceful protest are being sanctioned in an unprecedented, disproportionate, and arbitrary manner compared to students engaging in similar acts of civil disobedience in Harvard’s history,” underscoring that the “sanctions undermine trust,” and would “unduly harm these students’ future employment and current livelihood” and “create further division on campus at a time when we should come together to honor our graduates.”

The normally celebratory days leading up to graduation have been marked by controversy, amid conflicting messages uncovered by the Boston Globe yesterday, and as the Harvard College disciplinary board, called the Administrative or “Ad Board” had threatened to withhold the degrees of 15 graduating seniors, including multiple Rhodes Scholars, breaking with over 50 years of precedent and a written proposal from President Alan Garber to students, based upon which students chose to end their encampment on May 14. 

In the May 14 email, President Garber had agreed to “encourage” the “schools to address cases expeditiously under existing precedent and practice (including taking into account where relevant the voluntary decision to leave the encampment), for all students, including those students eligible thereafter to graduate so that they may do so.”