Garber Says Harvard Can and Should Condemn Hateful Speech Under Institutional Voice Policy

Updated December 11, 2024, at 11:20 a.m.

Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 said the University should condemn speech that is antisemitic, racist, or otherwise hateful, calling such actions acceptable under the University’s institutional voice policy.

“We would strongly discourage certain kinds of speech, particularly if a reasonable person might feel that the language is antisemitic or racist or comprises other kinds of hate,” Garber said in an interview with The Crimson on Tuesday.

“I do believe that we need to continue to condemn the use of speech that is widely viewed as antisemitic or as hate speech in other forms, even if not everybody agrees,” he added.

Garber specifically denounced a recent protest by Harvard Jews 4 Palestine outside Harvard Hillel, the University’s largest Jewish center, where students chanted “Zionists not welcome here” in response to former Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Ronen Manelis’s appearance at a Hillel event.

“The reported incident I don’t know enough facts about, but I do believe that saying ‘Zionists are not welcome here’ is deeply offensive when it refers to a University space,” Garber said. “And it certainly would violate our policy if it was used in any way to deny access to a University space.”

Though J4P members held posters on the sidewalk outside Hillel, they were not blocking access to the building.

Garber’s comments come two months after he faced blowback from some faculty for criticizing a controversial statement by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee.

The PSC statement, released on the anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack against Israel, called for an escalation of campus protests and described the attack as the day “Gaza broke through Israel’s blockade, showing the world that the ongoing Nakba and apartheid cannot stand.”

“Although I don’t agree with the statement — in fact, there are aspects of it that I personally find offensive — I am not about to make University statements about matters of public affairs that are not part of the core of the University,” Garber said in October.

At the time, former University President Lawerence H. Summers criticized Garber’s comments as inconsistent with repeated statements by spokespeople that Harvard does not tolerate antisemitism. Harvard Kennedy School professor Mathias Risse also took aim at Garber, arguing that his comments created confusion as to what statements could be made under the University’s modified institutional neutrality statement.

Garber defended his approach during the interview on Tuesday, arguing that the student group’s statement was directly related to campus issues.

“The current protests have mixed together elements of statements about what’s going on in the world, particularly the Palestine-Israel conflict and related conflicts, with those that are local to our campus,” Garber said.

Though Garber said he will not make statements on geopolitical issues “if it implies that I am taking a stand as president of the University,” he noted that student protesters have often done or said things that also touch upon Harvard’s interests.

“But very often, protesters and other groups are making statements that are directly about the campus, and in some cases, this has included threats to escalate protest activities that can be read as implying actual crime, including vandalism, breaking into locked spaces and so on,” Garber said.

“That is something that we do condemn and are actually encouraged to do under the institutional voice policy,” he added.

Harvard’s modified institutional neutrality statement prohibits University leaders — including deans and department heads — from commenting on issues not directly related to the “core function” of the University.

“There will be close cases where reasonable people disagree about whether a given issue is or is not directly related to the core function of the university,” the University’s policy states. “The university’s policy in those situations should be to err on the side of avoiding official statements.”

Still, some senior Harvard faculty members, like Summers, have pushed the University’s leaders to condemn antisemitic statements that they cannot punish under the University’s Statement on Rights and Responsibilities.

Garber, however, said that determining whether a statement violates Harvard policies is a process that involves the University’s anti-discrimination and anti-bullying guidelines.

“We do not tolerate antisemitism, but that does not mean we can issue a statement every time there is an allegation,” Garber said, adding that sometimes the University does not hear about such allegations until later.

“A challenge that we need to deal with is how we determine whether an incident is antisemitic,” he added.

—Staff writer Emma H. Haidar can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on X @HaidarEmma.

—Staff writer Cam E. Kettles can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on X @cam_kettles.