The Reports Are Out — Now It’s Our Turn.

Nearly a year and a half ago, University President Alan M. Garber ’76 charged twin task forces with investigating bias against the University’s Jewish, Israeli, Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian affiliates.

Last Tuesday, both task forces released their reports, painting a troubling picture of a campus marred by fear, exclusion, and divisions over the meaning of protests and academic freedom.

The long-awaited reports collectively run over 500 pages, overflow with testimonies and survey results from thousands of community members, and include striking statistics — such as the fact that 56 percent of Muslim and 26 percent of Jewish student respondents feared for their physical safety at Harvard. The reports also proposed serious changes to the University’s academic offerings, protest policies, and approach to discourse.

Harvard, as an institution, cannot single-handedly end discrimination and polarization — systemic concerns like these are not unique to our University. Nonetheless, here on campus, we must protect free speech and foster empathy towards our peers to promote a positive and engaged student culture.

If we can learn anything straightforward from the reports, it’s that Harvard students feel more stifled in their speech and gravely unsafe in their identities than ever before. In this light, it is essential for our University — as an administration, a student body, and a broader community — to recognize and validate this painful reality.

The task force reports, in all their scholarly detail, contribute to acknowledging the bitter reality. But when the University fails to adequately address the grief of all Harvard constituencies — as it did in an email describing the “Hamas assault on Israel” while euphemistically referring to all the ensuing events as the “aftermath” — we’re reminded that Harvard still has a ways to go towards even acknowledging the full range of affiliates’ grief.

Nonetheless, recognition is only a first step in combating the biases that Harvard has identified. To live up to its academic mission — and foster a culture of empathetic inquiry — the University would do well to expand its course offerings and faculty in Jewish and Palestine Studies.

Indeed, the task forces converged on this very imperative, drawing attention to vacant professorships in Jewish studies and alarming attacks on programs studying Israel-Palestine at Harvard Divinity School, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and beyond. Safeguarding spaces where students can learn from experts would set the tone for discourse campus-wide.

Outside the classroom, Harvard would do well to further clarify the rights and obligations that come with membership in the campus community. Both task forces drew attention to uncertainty around seemingly ever-changing protest guidelines and, more recently, Non-Discrimination and Anti-Bullying policies. Without clarity on the bounds of speech, students lack a consistent set of guidelines on how they ought to act, perhaps speaking in ways they shouldn’t — or, because of fear or uncertainty, not speaking at all. And such a chilling effect only intensifies when those met with external threats to speech like doxxing, as pro-Palestine protesters faced last year, can’t count on the University’s support.

There’s much for Harvard to do in shifting campus culture, but the University should not bear that responsibility alone. We, as students, must also take charge, coupling Harvard's moves to combat bias with good-faith efforts on our part to empathize with one another.

Acknowledging one another’s identities against the backdrop of history is necessary to genuinely interact with ideas that differ from our own. After all, engaging with others’ views does not require us to abandon our convictions, just to make space for them to coexist.

We commend the University for taking a first step to address the biases that exist on this campus, but we hold our applause to see what steps it takes next.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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