The Lauder Business School in Vienna announced it would be cutting ties with Harvard University amid the elite college’s failure to tackle growing concerns about antisemitism on campus.
The Austrian institution decided to sever its relationship with Harvard as an expression of “solidarity with the Jewish student community at Harvard,” an official statement, first obtained by the Jerusalem Post, reads. “Our university is proud to create partnerships, but these must consistently align with our moral standards and criteria,” a spokesperson for the Lauder Business School told the Post in a comment about the development.
The English-language program was created in 2003 with the financial support of Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, and heir of cosmetics company, Estée Lauder. The philanthropist, also a University of Pennsylvania alumni, threatened in mid October to pull money from the Ivy League school, pointing to its handling of antisemitism on campus. “You are forcing me to reexamine my financial support absent satisfactory measures to address antisemitism at the university,” the Wharton Business School grad wrote in a letter to then-president Liz Magill prior to her resignation.
Harvard has seen donors pull money from the school following the Hamas invasion of Israel in early October that led to the deaths of over a thousand people. Immediately following the atrocities, student groups issued statements supportive of the Palestinian terror group’s massacre. “Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” a joint letter signed by dozens of Harvard student groups argued. “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”
The statement was widely condemned by leaders across the political spectrum, including Harvard alumni. “Israel is the victim of a terrorist attack. Hamas is the perpetrator. It’s as simple as that. There are no ‘both sides,’” Representative Ritchie Torres (D., N.Y.) wrote following the Harvard statement.
“Yet here you have 30+ student organizations from Harvard University, blaming the victims, Israelis, for their own murder, rape, and abduction, rather than blaming the perpetrator, Hamas, for murdering, raping, and abducting them. Demonizing Israel — to the point of denying the humanity of Israeli victims and the inhumanity of their perpetrators — is moral confusion masquerading as moral clarity.”
In late October, Harvard announced the creation of a task force aimed to “disrupt and dismantle” antisemitism at the Ivy League school. “Antisemitism has a very long and shameful history at Harvard,” President Claudine Gay said during a Hillel Shabbat dinner announcing the body’s creation. “For years, this University has done too little to confront its continuing presence. No longer.”
“They will help us to identify all the places — from our orientations and trainings to how we teach — where we can intervene to disrupt and dismantle this ideology, and where we can educate our community so that they can recognize and confront antisemitism wherever they see it.”
The eight-member panel includes journalist Dara Horn as well as Rabbi David Wolpe, the Harvard Crimson reported at the time. However, the distinguished conservative religious figure stepped away in early December, citing Gay’s poor performance before Congress and her waffling responses to Harvard’s position on the genocide of Jews. “The system at Harvard along with the ideology that grips far too many of the students and faculty, the ideology that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil,” Wolpe explained on X announcing his decision.