Nearly 500 Harvard faculty and staff urge Harvard President to stand by his word, allow peaceful protestors to graduate

 Nearly 500 Harvard faculty and staff urge Harvard President to stand by his word, allow peaceful protestors to graduate

Cambridge MA - As Harvard Commencement approaches, over 350 Harvard professors and over 100 staff have signed a letter urging the University to allow “students, who engaged in peaceful protest, be allowed to graduate with the degrees they have earned,” on Thursday, May 23. Harvard has threatened to withhold the degrees of at least 12 graduating seniors, including multiple Rhodes Scholars, breaking with over 50 years of precedent and a written agreement proposed by President Alan Garber to students via email, based upon which students chose to end their encampment on May 14. 

The letter was sponsored by a rapidly forming coalition of faculty and staff and garnered nearly 500 signatures in 24 hours. Signatories endorsed 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,” and expressed that the “sanctions undermine trust,” 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.”

Harvard History Professor Alison F. Johnson and Latin American Studies Professor Steven Levitsky, interviewed alumni and reviewed Harvard student newspaper archives, concluding in a recent Crimson article that, “Such disproportionate penalties for relatively minor rule violations break sharply with more than 50 years of Harvard practice. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is an instance of “the Palestine exception”— a markedly lower tolerance for pro-Palestinian speech than for other speech.”

“The students in the encampment—many of them Jewish—were upholding the biblical principle that we cannot stand by while our neighbor’s blood is shed, and Harvard‘s disproportionate and unprecedented punishment of them not only violates its own rules, but our own Jewish values,” said Harvard Medical School Lecturer and Harvard Jewish alumnus Aaron Shakow. "Protesting genocide--anywhere and everywhere-- is not antisemitic. Suggesting that all Jews support Israel, regardless of its actions, is. Buoyed by thousands of years of Jewish ethical tradition, we join the students calling for peace, dignity, and self-determination for Palestinians. As alums, we are appalled by the university's suppression of free speech on campus, and demand that all sanctions against protesters be lifted."

Signatories hailed from departments and faculties throughout the university and included notable figures such as: 

Tracy K. Smith, Professor of English & African and African American Studies, FAS

Elaine Scarry, Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, English Department, FAS

Diana Eck, Former faculty dean of Lowell House and Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies at Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Harvard Divinity School, 

David R. Williams, Norman Professor & Chair of Dept of Soc & Behav Sci, Chan School of Public Health

Vincent Brown, Charles Warren Professor of American History, History/Harvard University

Laurence Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor Emeritus, Harvard Law School

Jacqueline Bhabha, Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights, GHP/HSPH/FAS

Lizabeth Cohen, former Dean of the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study and Howard Mumford Jones, Professor of History, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Mary T. Bassett, Former Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and Professor at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health

Nancy Krieger, Professor of Social Epidemiology, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public health