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.