Bad Ideas Are Escaping the Ivory Tower

When Xavier Bautista, a 32-year-old city employee, was shot in Cambridge this summer, it took about an hour for anyone to notice. He was eventually spotted on the ground by a civilian passerby who notified police, but it was too late to save his life.

While we’ll never know whether Bautista could have been saved, the Cambridge City Council had voted only weeks before to disable ShotSpotter, an acoustic gunshot detection system, at least in part due to concerns it could be weaponized by federal immigration enforcement. A ShotSpotter microphone had been positioned near the site of the shooting and had previously detected gunfire in the neighborhood. Two Cambridge police unions said that had it not been turned off, police would likely have reached Bautista sooner (the Council has now turned ShotSpotter back on, but only temporarily).

Now, the Cambridge City Council is doubling down on ideological activism, except this time, it’s directing its attention to something thousands of miles away: It has just voted in favor of directing the city to divest from certain companies with ties to Israel. Cambridge now has the distinction of being one of the largest cities in America to pass such a measure.

The Council’s decision to devote significant time and resources to needling the Jewish state, despite having zero foreign policy mandate, is particularly strange when considering it faces no shortage of local problems. Gun violence is just the start; unprovoked assaults in the city in 2025 jumped 30 percent from 2024, while assaults on police officers more than doubled. At Harvard, reports of aggravated assault spiked by 31 percent in 2025.

Cambridge also leads the Boston area in office vacancies for life sciences and tech, and Takeda Pharmaceuticals, Massachusetts’s largest biopharma employer, plans to lay off hundreds of employees here this year. Other major biotech firms, including Sanofi, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and Seres Therapeutics have each announced major layoffs in Cambridge, too. Nationally, by comparison, biopharma job postings have been rising throughout 2026.

Yet even as businesses flee, taxes in Cambridge are soaring: Commercial rates will rise over 20 percent in fiscal year 2027, forcing the city manager to warn they are approaching their legal limit. Fiscal year 2027 is projected to see the city budget rise to over $1 billion for the first time ever, with hikes far outpacing the city’s population growth.

Cambridge today is a place where high paying jobs are disappearing, assaults are rising, and taxes are climbing. Instead of offering real solutions to acute local challenges, local leaders are changing the subject and singling out the Jewish state — and the Jewish state alone.

For all its troubles, no major American metropolitan area employs more of its workforce in academia than Boston, and Cambridge, home to multiple major universities, is the epicenter. The success of this resolution, right in the beating heart of American academia, is cause for serious concern about its influence on the world.

While Harvard is not directly responsible for the actions of the Cambridge City Council, there is no denying the role it plays here. Its students and faculty lean overwhelmingly liberal and comprise a sizable proportion of the city’s population, and presumably a decent number of its voters, too. Harvard-affiliated groups have orchestrated significant anti-Israel activity and protests, and The Crimson’s Editorial Board has endorsed both the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement and the outright abolition of the Harvard University Police Department.

Also notable is the fact that a Harvard College alum, Ayah A. Al-Zubi ’23, led both the divestment and ShotSpotter shutdown campaigns on the City Council. Al-Zubi, who studied Sociology and Psychology at Harvard, is endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America. She graduated in 2023, only two years before her election; bad ideas can move from the ivory tower to the real world with warp speed.

Perhaps the council is motivated by sincere concern for human rights. Well, then why did it reject former Mayor E. Denise Simmons’s proposal to divest from companies accused of serious abuses “regardless of the country or government involved”? Arguing against that proposal was Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui, one of just two participants selected in 2025 for a prestigious urban scholars program at the Harvard Kennedy School.

It’s also of note that al-Zubi was born in Jordan, while Siddiqui is originally from Pakistan. It certainly doesn’t help Harvard’s defense of its international student body when politicians linked to the University who immigrated from abroad seem to echo historical grievances against the Jewish state.

This fight is playing out, of course, amidst the broader, fierce battle between Harvard and the Trump administration over federal funding. Harvard seeks to convince the government, and the American people, that it offers taxpayers a strong return on their investment — that it is a force for good in our country. But to emerge victorious, Harvard will need to disprove the administration’s claim that it is an incubator of wokeness and progressive excess. A deteriorating Cambridge, led in part by ideologues trained by the University, will profoundly undermine that effort.

Harvard says that its mission is to “educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society” so that “they can best serve the world.” There’s no better place to test whether it is succeeding than right here in Cambridge.

The success of this resolution, therefore, is more than just a stain on this city. It’s a damning indictment of Harvard, too.

Charles M. Covit ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a double concentrator in Economics and Modern Middle Eastern Studies in Lowell House.