Unlike MIT, Harvard may have to stand trial in lawsuit alleging it let antisemitism run amok
A federal judge today refused to dismiss a lawsuit against Harvard by a group of Jewish students that the school allowed the campus to become a hotbed of antisemitism where Jewish students came under attack by pro-Palestinian demonstrators from Harvard Yard to a Harvard Law School lounge.
US District Court Judge Richard Stearns's ruling comes one week after he dismissed a similar suit against MIT.
In his Harvard ruling today, Stearns wrote that while the Harvard students failed to prove Harvard, as an institution, discriminated against Jews, they had shown enough evidence that Harvard showed "deliberate indifference" to what was happening to Jews on campus over the past few months to warrant their case continuing. And that could include judicial inquiry into possibly antisemitic acts and statements by individual Harvard administrators, professors and police officers:
[A]s pled, Harvard's reaction was, at best, indecisive, vacillating, and at times internally contradictory. For example, the day after Dean Ball emailed all Harvard Law students that Caspersen lounge was limited to "personal or small group study and conversation," demonstrators hosted a "vigil for martyrs" in the lounge without any pushback from law school administrators. Rather than call a halt to the vigil, Dean Ball attended it. In another venue, while Harvard police officers were on scene at the encampment, when a Jewish student was openly "charged" and "push[ed]," the officers failed to react. And while Harvard, on April 22, 2024, suspended the [Palestinian Solidarity Committee] until the end of the semester, the short-term suspension proved to be in name alone, as the PSC spearheaded the creation of the encampment in Harvard Yard just two days later.
He also cited another allegation from the complaint, by Harvard Divinity School graduate student Alexander Kestenbaum, the lead plaintiff, who Stearns said could continue as a plaintiff even though he has since graduated:
Antisemitic episodes persisted and, if anything, intensified into the spring 2024 semester. On January 2, 2024, Harvard students posted a flurry of antisemitic messages on a University-wide group app called Sidechat. When Kestenbaum reported the messages to Harvard administrators, the official response was to terminate his access to Sidechat and restrict Sidechat membership to current undergraduate students. In late January, posters memorializing Israeli citizens taken hostage by Hamas were vandalized with messages such as "ISRAEL DID 9/11." Soon after, a Harvard employee emailed Kestenbaum inviting him to debate Israel’s "role in 9/11."
Harvard's indifference to Jews even went so far as to order the campus Chabad chapter to remove a Hannukah menorah at night to keep it from being vandalized while at the same time providing 24/7 Harvard Police protection for a Palestinian Support Committee "Wall of Resistance," at least according to the lawsuit, Stearns wrote.
And so:
The protests were, at times, confrontational and physically violent, and plaintiffs legitimately fear their repetition. The harassment also impacted plaintiffs' life experience at Harvard; they dreaded walking through the campus, missed classes, and stopped participating in extracurricular events.
He concluded by comparing what happened at MIT - where actions by well meaning administrators might be viewed as inadequate only in hindsight, with what was going on down at the other end of Massachusetts Avenue:
Despite MIT's failure of clairvoyance, it did respond with a perhaps overly measured but nonetheless consistent sense of purpose in returning civil order and discourse to its campus. As the court pointed out, the law expects reasonable and proportionate acts by university officials – the standard is not faultless perfection or ultimate success. Liability attaches when only when a school's response is "so lax, so misdirected, or so poorly executed as to be clearly unreasonable under the known circumstances." Fitzgerald, 504 F.3d at 175. The facts as alleged in the [Harvard student complaint] plausibly establish that Harvard's response failed [the federal anti-discrimination law]'s commands.
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Comments
One can make absolutely no
One can make absolutely no conclusions from these two opposite decisions by the same judge.
"One"
"One" is doing a lot of work here.
Of course one can
One fairly obvious conclusion that comes to mind is that the judge decided each case based on the specifics of the case and the arguments made before the court, and not based on the headline.
the Harvard case was gutted
Stearns cut the discrimination claim and left a breach of contract and implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing claim.
The discrimination claim would have been the one which could have brought the damages and fees if successful. The breach of contract claim is going to look ridiculous at trial if it gets past the next gate - summary judgment motions.
These legal complaints are part of a lawfare and propaganda campaign to suppress campus protests and academic freedom. Remember, the anonymous person or group who hired a plane to drag a "Harvard hates Jews" banner across the Boston sky?
Since then, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court have weighed in on the real issue - mass indiscriminate killing in Gaza.
Supporting the propaganda campaign by calling for the U Penn protests to be shut down and joining in the calls for the Penn president to be fired was probably one of the reasons Penn Governor Josh Shapiro didn't get the nod today.
Why did Harvard do such a bad
Why did Harvard do such a bad job? Why did President Gay receive such bad council? Why didn’t President Biden proclaim flags be lowered to half staff for the American citizens murdered on 10/7? I believe it was a salient signal to appease progressive voters specifically the antisemites from among them leveraging the antisemitic BDS energy. I believe the flag should be unifying symbol above and apart from politics and we should return to the proper flag code of not lowering it for anybody but high Constitutional officers, but since we do now lower the flag for notable persons and victims of gun violence as noble and tragic as that is lowering the flag can be seen to be in service to wedge issues such as gun control and is divisive and debases the flag. So, when The President proclaims the flag be lowered for a relatively small number of people murdered by gun violence and doesn’t lower the flag for 33-50 Americans murdered by the terrorist organization, Hamas, well I can see how that may spark some empowerment of wonton behavior and veritable celebrations at Harvard. Hamas’s goal is to drive Jews back out of Israel and their means are Palestinian deaths. The responsibility for Israel’s defensive actions lie at the feet of Hamas, The Iranian terror state, Qatar, Russia, increasingly China and every individual who donated one red cent to Hamas. Was the catastrophe a result of the return of Israel, or an equal, or greater part a result of the Arab Legion and mercenaries presaging Hamas, by melting into settlements and villages conducting atrocities and falling back to be shielded in those settlements? Every life lost is a tragedy beyond words and is a product of those who don’t want Jews to occupy the homeland they were ethnically cleansed from.
Wow
You are completely out to lunch on this.
I meant not in aggregate, but
I meant not in aggregate, but in average size of massacre.
Careful
You're going to do yourself a harm if you keep backpedaling like that. Suggestion: next time look where you're going first, and you'll have less need to reverse.
It’s not so much
It’s not so much backpedalling, my meaning didn’t change; I took the comment too earnestly and moderated. Anyhoo, Jill Stein is in the news. Hoooboy.
how that may spark some
Is that supposed to be some kind of anti-Chinese slur?
Oh. Phew. You scared me for a
Oh, crap! Wanton! Thx. Phew. You scared me for a sec. I thought I committed a slur.
OT: not so Fun Fact
Harvard began limiting the number of Jewish enrollees back in 1922. The Jewish student population had reached over 21 percent of undergraduates even though the entire ratio of Jews in America at the time was 3 percent. They didn't call Harvard "The White Man's College" back then for nothing .
source: The Harvard Crimson"
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/11/9/legacy-admissions-scrut/
Is that a function of Judaism
Is that a function of Judaism being an deeply interrogatory religion of the written word??
That was a hundred years ago
A. Lawrence Lowell was Harvard's president, and he was an anti-Semite. Anti-Semitism was very common in America in the 1920s. For that matter, so was prejudice against Irish-Americans.
Lowell's been dead a very long time. Claudine Gay's predecessor as president, Lawrence Bacow, is Jewish, and Jews have been prominent among Harvard faculty and administrators for decades. The notion that Harvard is anti-Semitic today is just plain silly.
Just pointing out how it all began, not what's in the now...
Harvard has traditions going back to colonial times (1600's) that supersede whatever administrators are in power at any given time. Harvard was founded in anticipation of the need for training clergy for the new commonwealth, a "church in the wilderness".
We are surely in the
We are surely in the wilderness now more than ever.
https://m.jpost.com/jerusalem
https://m.jpost.com/jerusalem-report/are-jews-white-and-why-it-matters-6...