Harvard University on Tuesday reversed suspensions for five students who participated in the anti-Israel encampment on the school’s campus after the Harvard College Faculty Council took issue with the punishment of those students.
The Harvard College Administrative Board reduced the suspensions to probations, the Harvard Crimson reported late Tuesday night. The longest probation given will last for one semester — a sharp downgrade from the initial punishments, one of which required a student to withdraw from the university for three consecutive semesters.
Three Harvard student groups — the African and African American Resistance Organization, Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine, and the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee — welcomed the decision in a celebratory joint Instagram post.
“In the face of ongoing repression — marked by forced suspensions, evictions, and loss of degrees and funding — we affirm that it is our duty to remain steadfast in our solidarity with the people of Palestine,” the organizations wrote. “This reversal speaks to the power of our movement — both on our campus and worldwide. Between the over 1,000 Commencement attendees who walked out in solidarity with their sanctioned peers, the 45+ College organizations that took a stand against repression, and the hundreds of faculty members who amplified our calls and spoke truth to power, we pushed the administration to walk back on their unprecedented sanctions.”
In response to a National Review request for comment, Harvard spokesman Jonathan Palumbo said in an email that the university does not comment on individual disciplinary cases.
The Tuesday decision is not the first time Harvard has gone back on its punishments for students involved in the encampment. Soon after the university cleared the lawn on which the encampment stood, Harvard began reinstating students it had “placed on involuntary leaves of absence” and entered discussions with encampment organizers about the university’s endowment.
The university’s decision to retract its suspensions for students has raised questions about how seriously Harvard takes its own code of conduct, especially when taken in conjunction with the recommendations from the university’s antisemitism task force released in June.
While those who drafted the task force’s report acknowledged that “many Jewish students (and especially Israeli students) have been subject to shunning, harassment, and intimidation,” the recommendations the task force provided were effectively suggestions that the university enforce its existing policies.
“Its most concrete policy change would be to label pork products as such,” Shabbos Kestenbaum — a recent graduate from Harvard Divinity School who is involved in a lawsuit against the university — told NR. “Even if all its recommendations were implemented, the report would not fundamentally alter the pervasive and systemic nature of antisemitism at Harvard. The task force does not, for example, address the role DEI has played in fanning the flames of antisemitism, or the behavior of professors in the classroom, or physical threats Jewish students have faced.”