Harvard’s New Both-Sides Moment

Harvard University’s Coat of Arms. WikiCommons.

Why releasing two bias reports on the same day amounts to institutional gaslighting of Jewish students

Harvard just dropped a matched set of 200-plus-page doorstops — one cataloguing antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias, the other lamenting anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias. Releasing them in a single breath looks, at first glance, like managerial efficiency. In truth it is sleight of hand, a PR card-trick that stuffs two utterly different stories into the same deck and invites the audience to call the show “balanced”.

A gulf disguised as symmetry

Open the Jewish/Zionist report and the smoke immediately stings the eyes: students hiding kippot after 7 Oct., Israeli classmates ducking social-media mobbing, survey numbers that clock Jewish anxiety higher than every other faith group — physical safety, mental health, and freedom to speak all blinking red. The narrative is crowded with actual episodes of harassment, vandalism, and classroom bias.

Now flip to the Arab/Muslim/Palestinian volume. The dominant note is frustration: feeling “abandoned”, “silenced”, and thwarted in pushing BDS or divestment campaigns. The five headline “themes” include calls for more Palestinian-studies faculty and clearer protest rules, but no catalogue of students chased across the Yard by Zionist gangs, no professors brandishing Star-of-David pitchforks. The pain is real, but the facts on the ground are different: one community faces harassment; the other faces headwinds. Conflating the two is like equating a fire alarm with a fire drill.

Gaslighting in crimson robes

By packaging the reports as twins, Harvard suggests moral equivalence. That move quietly downsizes antisemitism from a crisis to just another item on the University’s long inclusivity to-do list. For Jewish students the message is disorienting: your worry about anti-Jewish hatred is no more urgent than someone else’s disappointment that Faculty Council stalled another divestment vote. That is textbook gaslighting — insisting the victim’s smoke and scorch marks are no worse than the neighbor’s irritation at a smoky odor.

A campus hot enough for federal heat

Ironically, the reports will bolster the Trump administration’s charge that Harvard has become a hotbed of antisemitism and drags its feet on reform. Washington’s latest blitz of Title VI investigations — and a $2 billion funding freeze — cites precisely Harvard’s failure to protect Jewish students. The University is suing, but the antisemitism report itself reads like an unsolicited affidavit for the prosecution. Harvard pleads, “We’ve issued matching reports!” The administration replies, “Thank you for the evidence.”

The way out

Harvard has two honest options. One: treat antisemitism as the emergency its own task-force describes — visible, measurable, and violent — and act accordingly. Two: keep playing symmetry games and watch federal lawyers, donors, and parents decide the price. There is room on campus for every identity and every debate; there is no room for rhetorical bookkeeping that equalizes harassment with disappointment.

Harvard prides itself on asking hard questions. Here is one it must now answer: When the evidence shows one house on fire, why issue matching smoke reports for the whole neighborhood?