A Harvard University task force released a scathing account of the university on Tuesday, finding that antisemitism had infiltrated coursework, social life, the hiring of some faculty members and the worldview of certain academic programs.

A separate report on anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian bias on campus, also released on Tuesday, found widespread discomfort and alienation among those students as well, with 92% of Muslim survey respondents saying they believed they would face an academic or professional penalty for expressing their political opinions.

The findings, conveyed in densely packed reports that are hundreds of pages long, come at a delicate time for the university. Harvard is being scrutinized by the Trump administration over accusations of antisemitism, and is fighting the administration’s withdrawal of billions of dollars in federal funding.

Harvard has sued the administration in hopes of restoring the funding, the first university to do so. Other schools that have been targeted by the administration are watching the litigation closely.

In a letter accompanying the two reports, Dr. Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, apologized for the problems that the task forces revealed. He said the Hamas attack on Israel in 2023 and the war that followed had brought long simmering tensions to the surface, and he promised to address them.

“The 2023-24 academic year was disappointing and painful,” Garber, who took office in January 2024, wrote in the letter. “I am sorry for the moments when we failed to meet the high expectations we rightfully set for our community.”

He continued: “Harvard cannot — and will not — abide bigotry.”

Behind the reports

The antisemitism report was produced by a task force made up mainly of faculty, but also included students, a former Hillel director and Harvard’s chief community and campus life officer, whose title was changed from chief diversity and inclusion officer on Tuesday. Hillel is a worldwide Jewish campus organization.

The report said that bias incidents had been occurring before the Hamas attack and were intensified by the war in the Gaza Strip. It found that antisemitism seemed to be more pronounced in branches of the university with a social justice bent, including the graduate school of education, the divinity school and the school of public health.

A similar task force held hundreds of conversations with Muslim, Arab and Palestinian students, staff and faculty members about anti-Muslim bias. That task force summed up the feelings expressed by many of those people in two words: “abandoned and silenced.”

The university commissioned the two reports, which were not meant to be investigative. The authors did not seek to verify the experiences described by people who were surveyed.

Student experiences

The antisemitism report recounted an episode in which a student asked not to work with an Israeli partner, and an instructor granted the request because “in their view, a student who supported the cause of an oppressed group should not be forced to work with a student identified as a member of an ‘oppressor group.’”

In another episode in the report, a recently admitted medical student recounted arriving for a visitation day and encountering students yelling “Free Palestine” from a walkway, apparently to discourage Zionists from attending the school.

The report said that some courses on Israel and the Palestinian territories were partisan and politicized. These courses were disproportionately taught by nontenure track faculty members, who were not as carefully vetted as more senior faculty are, the report said.

After Oct. 7, the report said, there was an “avalanche” of posts by members of the Harvard community trafficking in antisemitic tropes. Some Jewish students told stories of university-run training sessions about privilege in which they said they were told that being Jewish and white made them more privileged than only being white.

The university recently adopted a contested definition of antisemitism, put forward by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, that counts some criticism of Israel as antisemitic. The definition is disputed, and critics say that it silences speech.

The anecdotes — gathered from listening sessions with some 500 participants — could expose Harvard to more attacks from the Trump administration.

“The more time we spent on this problem, the more we learned about how demonization of Israel has impacted a much wider swath of campus life than we would have imagined,” the report said. It added: “The bullying and attempts to intimidate Jewish students were in some places successful.”

Some findings

The two task forces worked together to create a campuswide survey that received nearly 2,300 responses from faculty, staff and students. It found that 6% of Christian respondents reported feeling physically unsafe on campus, while 15% of Jewish respondents and 47% of Muslim respondents reported the same. (The university does not track the total population of these groups on campus.)

In addition to the 92% of Muslim respondents who worried about expressing their views, 51% of Christian respondents and 61% of Jewish respondents said they felt the same way.

“Freedom of expression is one of the most critical issues facing the entire Harvard campus community,” the anti-Muslim bias task force said.

Victims on both sides

The results of the survey underscored a dilemma that Harvard and other universities have faced as protests and counterprotests over the war in Gaza intensified. Some Jewish students and alumni have expressed worries about activism and programming veering into anti-Israel bigotry, for example, while supporters of the Palestinian cause say that categorizing their opposition to the war and Israel as antisemitism silences their speech.

Indeed, the report received markedly different responses from groups that represent those different perspectives.

Roni Brunn, a spokesperson for the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance, said she appreciated that the university had called out what she saw as “academically unsound” ideas that undergird antisemitic views, like the concept of settler colonialism. But she said it would take more than adding a diversity of viewpoints to move forward.

But Lindsie Rank, director of campus rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, argued that the findings confirmed that “free expression on campus has been stifled.”

“All students deserve to know they are free to express their beliefs without facing punishment,” she added.

Some of the students interviewed expressed a constant fear of having their pro-Palestinian views revealed along with their identities, which they worried would lead to revoked job offers. They reported being called slurs like “terrorist” and “towelhead” for wearing kaffiyehs.

“There was a palpable sense,” the report stated, “that free speech and academic freedom are under grave threat and that many forms of student activism may effectively be dead.”

In his letter, Garber listed a series of actions the university would take to curb bigotry that closely paralleled a list of demands by the Trump administration’s own antisemitism task force.

Those demands deeply shook Harvard when they were delivered to the university on April 11, because they were viewed as an unconstitutional government infringement on academic freedom.