Illuminating, disturbing, and deeply important.
— Molly
Graduating students hold Palestinian flags and chant as they walk out in protest over the 13 students who have been barred from graduating due to protest activities, during commencement in Harvard Yard, at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Mass., Thursday, May 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis, File)
By Corey Robin
04.29.25
Harvard today released two reports about the state of life on campus. One is on Islamophobia and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias at Harvard. The other is about what has come to be called antisemitism, but which often includes or is nothing more than pro-Palestine or anti-Zionist sentiment and action.
Before I say anything else, and because I might lose you as I get into this more, I want to highlight two critical paragraphs from the New York Times article on the two reports. (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/us/harvard-antisemitism-islamophobia-reports.html) The paragraphs get buried almost two-thirds of the way into the piece:
"The two task forces worked together to create a campuswide survey that received nearly 2,300 responses from faculty, staff and students. It found that 6 percent of Christian respondents reported feeling physically unsafe on campus, while 15 percent of Jewish respondents and 47 percent of Muslim respondents reported the same. (The university does not track the total population of these groups on campus.)
"In addition to the 92 percent of Muslim respondents who worried about expressing their views, 51 percent of Christian respondents and 61 percent of Jewish respondents said they felt the same way."
Got that?
For all the articles and claims and reports and think pieces and opeds and statements and speeches from elected politicians and other worthies about the rise of rampant antisemitism on campus, these two massive reports discover that the one group on campus—whether we are talking about faculty, students, or staff—that most consistently feels nervous about expressing its views and most consistently feels physically unsafe on campus are...Muslims.
According to the self-reported experiences and perceptions of Jewish students, faculty, and staff—whose feelings and perceptions of antisemitism we are consistently asked to take as accurate proxies for the objective safety and security and sense of welcome that Jewish people do or do not feel on college and university campuses across the country—Jewish students, faculty, and staff at Harvard consistently feel more welcome, safer, and freer, to be Jews, including being Zionist Jews, than do Muslim people at Harvard.
Let's keep that in mind as we go forward, and look a little more at this New York Times piece in detail.
The Times leads with these two paragraphs:
"A Harvard task force released a scathing account of the university on Tuesday, finding that antisemitism had infiltrated coursework, social life, the hiring of some faculty members and the worldview of certain academic programs.
"A separate report on anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian bias on campus, also released on Tuesday, found widespread discomfort and alienation among those students as well, with 92 percent of Muslim survey respondents saying they believed they would face an academic or professional penalty for expressing their political opinions."
Notice a few things.
First, the Times leads with the report on antisemitism, giving second billing to the report on anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian sentiment. Given the statistics the Times itself reports deep into the piece, it seems like an odd choice of order.
Second, notice the terminology. On the one hand, we have "antisemitism," which has two advantages. It's an "ism," in the family of racism, so it instantly calls to mind the utmost social evil. There's nothing comparable when it comes to the triptych of anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian sentiment.
What's more, the syntax of the paragraphs claims that the ism of antisemitism is the actor and the agent; it is capable of infiltrating and influencing and pervading the entire campus. It is an objective thing, what Durkheim called a social fact. When it comes to anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian bias, the objective reality of the thing of racism dissolves into the feelings of students. It becomes a subjective perception or belief of the alleged victims, who may or may not be victims at all.
Additionally, and along the same lines, antisemitism conjoins a range of issues, including the multiple shades of criticism of Israel, into one unifying thread: hatred of the Jews. On the other side, there's no such unity of terms, so we have an uncertain and floating array of different "biases": against a religion, against an ethnicity, against a group that many of Israel's supporters don't even acknowledge are a people, much less a nation.
I bring this issue up not to contest the reality of antisemitism; that would absurd. Nor am I making the by now familiar—though increasingly obscured—point that people conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. (In six months to a year, I suspect virtually everyone who is not hardcore committed to the Palestinian cause will no longer even notice the conflation and just assume that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.)
Instead, I want to point out that while society has a unifying term for a variety of varying phenomena—ranging from criticism of the policies of a state, criticism of the way that state has organized and defined itself, to animus against a religion, an ethnicity, a people, and so on—our common language and media coverage have no such term for what may be as unified a form of animus as antisemitism, in its original definition, is supposed to be, even if that animus is directed at different groups—Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims—and expressed in different ways. That immediately gives the advantage in the conversation and the debate over Israel to one side of the debate.
Third, in the opening paragraph on the report on antisemitism, the Times uses words like "scathing," "infiltrated," "social life," and "worldview" to describe the state of the Jews on campus. Not only are the words alarming and scary, but they collectively are meant to indict all levels of the institution, from its hiring practices to its curricular decisions to everyday life of students, faculty, and staff. But when it comes to the report on Islamophobia, anti-Arabism, and anti-Palestinianism, the issue is reduced to the "discomfort and alienation" of "students" only.
Again, I want to remind us of this critical fact, buried in the mess of words that is this piece: the one group on campus, whether among the faculty, students, or staff, that most consistently feels nervous about expressing its views and most consistently feels physically unsafe on campus are...Muslims. Not Jews.
One would think that should give our larger conversation about antisemitism on campus some pause. Judging by this article, it won't. Readers and writers and politicians and editors and campus leaders and cultural elites will just fly by the fact of the matter.
Please go here for the original article: https://coreyrobin.com/2025/04/29/whos-scared-and-unwelcome-at-harvard/
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