After Oct. 7 attack, Harvard leaders debated how to respond publicly. Read the emails

Harvard’s response to Oct. 7 would have significant ramifications for the Cambridge- and Boston-based institution. In January, Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first Black president, resigned after her brief term was derailed by controversies stemming from the Israel-Hamas war, campus antisemitism, and allegations of plagiarism in her scholarly works. Months later, Harvard said its administration will no longer issue official statements about public matters unless they directly affect “the university’s core function.”

And a pair of Harvard reports released in the summer found that antisemitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Palestinian bias had surged on campus since the war began.

The new report, released by the Republican-led House Education and the Workforce Committee, was part of a year-long inquiry by House Republicans investigating antisemitism on university campuses.

It offers a rare glimpse of the inner workings of the administration of the elite Ivy League school, as academics jousted over how the school should respond to the recent events of the Middle East.

Here are five takeaways from the report:

What to denounce?

In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks, Harvard officials questioned whether the school should denounce the Hamas rampage, according to the report.

Early drafts of an Oct. 9 statement from the school contained language that explicitly condemned Hamas, documents obtained by the committee show. But that phrasing was ultimately rejected by a group of Harvard officials who crafted the school’s response in this instance.

At one point, Gay’s Chief of Staff Katie O’Dair asked, “Can we have a letter and not say unequivocally that we denounce this?”

Marc Goodheart, the chief administrative officer of Harvard’s governing boards, called the matter of whether to condemn the Hamas killings the “key unresolved question” facing the group, according to the report. He noted that failure to condemn Hamas would likely be criticized, given former president Lawrence Bacow’s vocal condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

O’Dair, meanwhile, thought any statement denouncing Hamas “would need to be coupled with one addressing what she viewed as the ‘complex and ‘deeply divided’ nature of the issue,” according to the report.

Debate over ‘violent’

There was also hand-wringing among Harvard deans over whether to include the word “violent” in Harvard’s statement following Oct. 7, according to the report. Harvard Medical School Dean George Q. Daley asked for a characterization of Hamas’ attack as “violent” to be removed, since that phrase “singl(ed) out Hamas’ violence” and assigned “blame.”

Harvard Graduate School of Design Dean Sarah M. Whiting called Daley’s suggestion a “very good catch,” the report said. Other deans disagreed, including Harvard Kennedy School Dean Doug Elmendorf. In an e-mail to Harvard administrators, he wrote, “I think Hamas’s violence deserves singling out, and I think this word is a pretty small way to do that, considering the nature of the attack.”

Ultimately, Gay decided to remove the language, with the agreement of then-provost Alan Garber, who would go on to succeed Gay as Harvard president. In a text message, Gay asked Garber if “he could live with removing the word ‘violent,’ saying she was fine with doing so for the sake of ‘getting to yes,'” according to the report.

Garber replied, “Yes I don’t love it but can live with the change. Frankly I’m more disturbed by his logic than the wording change.”

The implications of ‘From the river to the sea’

The report also claims that Gay and Garber asked Harvard Corporation Senior Fellow Penny Pritzker not to label the slogan “From the river to the sea,” a phrase often chanted at pro-Palestinian rallies, as antisemitic. According to the report, Gay feared doing so would create expectations that Harvard would have to impose discipline for its use.

On Oct. 22, Prizker asked Gay for Harvard’s response to the display of the phrase at an Oct. 18 “die in.”

In an email to Gay and O’Dair, Pritzker called it “clearly an anti Semitic sign which calls for the annihilation of the Jewish state and Jews” and asked for Gay to help her “understand and explain how we handled the situation and our posture towards such signage on campus.” In the e-mail, Prizker said she had been asked by alumni “why we would tolerate that and not signage calling for Lynchings by the KKK.”

Gay replied by saying she had limited bandwidth and that she could not do the question justice, passing the matter to Garber and Goodheart for the time being. Garber, for his part, Garber cautioned Pritzker against labeling “from the river to the sea” as antisemitic because it was “not as simple as some of our friends would have it.”

The report stated that Garber acknowledged that the “genocidal implication when used by Hamas supporters seems clear enough to me” but argued “that’s not the same as saying there is a consensus that the phrase itself is always antisemitic.”

Pritzker pushed back: “I must confess that it feels very anti-Semitic to me, especially since it is used by the anti-Israel terrorist groups Hamas and PFLP. SO I am struggling with why it isn’t hate speech and why that is acceptable on our campus and why we don’t condemn it.”

Another objection

According to the report, then-Harvard Law School dean John Manning, who is now provost, objected to language in a draft of an Oct. 9 statement from the school that referenced the impact of Hamas hostage-taking on the school’s community.

The earlier draft had included the language: “The violence hits all too close to home for many at Harvard. Some members of our community have lost family members and friends; some have been unable to reach loved ones, and others fear that their loved ones may have been taken hostage.”

In an email to Harvard officials, Manning said, “I would omit the phrase about hostages from the second sentence of the second paragraph, as it risks creating the impression in that entire sentence that we’re not also addressing those who are worried about loved those who may be hurt in the escalation of the conflict.”

Others agreed, according to the report. For instance, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, wrote, “I agree that the phrase referencing hostage taking should be deleted: it’s important to focus on the broad impact of the attack on Israel and Gaza, and on distress in the Harvard community.”

The language was ultimately removed.

Heartbreak, but for whom?

The school’s Oct. 9 statement expressed heartbreak for “the war in Israel and Gaza now under way.” That phrase, too, was disputed.

In an email, Harvard Business School Dean Srikant Datar recommended removing that language, citing discussions that day with “colleagues, students, and alumni,” but Gay and multiple Harvard deans rejected his suggestion, according to the report.

Gay supported leaving it in: “We will retain, in the first sentence, the reference to the ongoing war. It will be significant that we identify unequivocally the catalyst (ie the Hamas attack) but I agree with others who have weighed in that it’s important to also acknowledge how the conflict has evolved over the last 72 hours.”

Material from The New York Times was used in this report.

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Danny McDonald can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @Danny__McDonald.