A Palestine Exception to Commencement

We thought we were done talking about Harvard’s pro-Palestine encampment, but a deceptive, disastrous, and downright draconian administrative response has foisted it back into the spotlight.

On Friday, the Harvard College Administrative Board suspended five students, placed another 20 on probation, and forbade 15 seniors from graduating at Commencement over their involvement in Harvard’s peaceful pro-Palestine encampment. Yesterday, in a stunning rebuke of that decision, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to confer degrees to 13 seniors who had previously been barred from graduating.

The University is well within its rights to enforce time, place, and manner restrictions on protest, and the participating students understood they were risking punishment in service of their cause — Harvard’s barrage of email reminders made sure of that.

But the equal application of the rules is just as important as their enforcement. On that front, Harvard’s leaders failed to uphold their end of the bargain.

In communication with encampment organizers, interim President Alan M. Garber ’76 explicitly wrote that he would promote the consideration of precedent and the protesters’ ultimate willingness to dismantle the encampment when evaluating disciplinary cases.

The sanctions handed down on Friday, however, are unprecedented in recent history. Participants in similarly, if not more, disruptive demonstrations faced far less severe disciplinary consequences — if any at all.

In 1986, students protesting South African apartheid erected and lived out of a “shantytown” in the middle of Harvard Yard. The structures persisted through Commencement, prompting an apology from A. Michael Spence, then dean of the FAS. Students were reportedly hit with so-called “suspended suspensions,” effectively a slap on the wrist.

In 2001, students protesting for higher wages for Harvard workers erected 100 tents in Harvard Yard — far more than the number in the recent Palestine encampment — and occupied Massachusetts Hall for several weeks. College students were handed a mere few weeks of disciplinary probation, a far cry from multi-semester suspensions.

As recently as 2015, student protesters demanding fossil fuel divestment occupied Massachusetts Hall for a week but seemingly did not receive suspensions.

The cruelness of last week’s punishments speak for themselves: Students who peacefully and willingly packed up the encampment have been suspended for multiple semesters. Others will face probation. Some are at risk of losing their postgraduate scholarships — so much for Garber’s hollow invocation of “precedent.”

Typically, the phrase “Palestine exception to free speech” references a lack of protection for pro-Palestinian speech. Here, that exception is manifest in the stark severity in punishment doled out by the College relative to past protests.

Regardless of what went wrong, be it Garber’s reneging on his initial commitments or the Ad Board’s blatant disregard of his urgings, the effect remains the same: Disproportionate and harsh punishment has been meted out to students over their advocacy for a particular cause.

The swift and unilateral reaction from the student body only highlights the punitive and unbalanced nature of the Ad Board’s decisions.

At least a dozen student organizations have released statements decrying the Ad Board’s decisions, specifically noting the unequal treatment pro-Palestinian protestors have received. A petition demanding the reversal of the punishments has garnered over 1,100 signatories.

Faculty have taken note too, taking steps to ensure that seniors will be allowed to graduate at Commencement alongside their peers.

As when the encampment first disbanded, we continue to call for amnesty for protestors. Such an outcome wouldn’t be some sort of departure from the norm — it would be precisely the same treatment afforded to protestors of the past.

History should not be written over to justify unequal and arbitrary application of the rules in punishing students.

Reverse the extreme punishments. Let our peers graduate.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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