Harvard’s January 2025 legal settlement
Contact: Executive Committee, AAUP-HFC, contact@aaup-hfc.org
AAUP-Harvard Faculty Chapter is troubled by the University’s agreement to a legal settlement mandating the use of the IHRA definition of antisemitism in regulating matters of expression on the Harvard campus and by Harvard affiliates. AAUP-Harvard Faculty Chapter condemns antisemitism in all its forms. It also disagrees with the notion that the top-down adoption of a polarizing, contested definition of antisemitism is an appropriate means of combating anti-Jewish discrimination or bigotry in a university setting.
As a matter of governance, determining the boundaries of academic freedom and acceptable speech is properly the province of the faculty, not of the Office of the General Counsel. No consultative process informed this decision, despite its various ramifications for faculty work, classroom instruction, lawful protest, and campus climate. The University’s own Task Force on Antisemitism, led by Harvard’s own scholarly experts, did not advocate the adoption of the IHRA definition (or any other definition) in its preliminary recommendations. How all this comports with Harvard’s position of institutional neutrality has yet to be explained.
As a matter of academic freedom, this move risks having a chilling effect on classroom discussions, legitimate protest, and faculty and staff working conditions. The content of the IHRA definition renders topics of live academic dispute unsayable. And the context in which the definition was adopted, namely as the result of a lawsuit filed in a climate of tremendous external pressure on our university, establishes an alarming precedent. Despite devoting considerable time, energy, and resources to promoting “civil discourse,” “reasoned discussion,” and “intellectual vitality” on our campus over the past year, the administration has now quietly picked a side, under legal duress, on a subject that has been intensely debated among top scholars in the interdisciplinary study of Israel and the Middle East. The IHRA definition’s wording is sufficiently vague as to allow for broad application to forms of expression, investigation, and contestation that should be the essence of university life; even the lawyer Ken Stern, who led the original drafting of the IHRA definition two decades ago, has critiqued its subsequent use as a “blunt instrument to suppress pro-Palestinian speech.” We fear its deployment in bad-faith attacks on instructional faculty and other community members.
With the concessions made in the legal settlement, and in making such a consequential decision outside the purview of usual consultative procedures, Harvard administrators, who have yet to provide an accounting of their reasoning, have compromised the University’s core mission of free inquiry and the open-ended pursuit of the truth. The faculty must stand together to defend that mission. The stakes are high, and not just within our own institution.