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Harvard on Tuesday forced out the director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights — yet another shakeup at a center whose programming on the Israel-Palestine conflict has been a flashpoint within the University and a focus of attacks from the Trump administration.
Harvard School of Public Health Dean Andrea A. Baccarelli announced that professor of the practice of health and human rights Mary T. Bassett ’74 would step down from her role at the FXB Center in a Tuesday afternoon email. Bassett will depart on Jan. 9 after seven years leading the center.
Baccarelli’s email also announced that the center would shift its focus to children’s health, with a focus on early development. HSPH and Harvard Medical School professor Kari C. Nadeau — a pediatrician who researches environmental health, allergies, and immunology — will serve as interim director and “lead a transition initiative at the FXB Center in the coming months,” according to Baccarelli’s email.
According to a person familiar with Bassett’s departure, Baccarelli met with Bassett about two hours before the email was sent. He asked Bassett to step down and told her that she was expected to move out of her office by the end of the year, according to the person.
Bassett confirmed in an email to The Crimson that she was notified by Baccarelli of her termination, adding that Baccarelli subsequently informed her via email that it would instead take effect Jan. 9, not Dec. 31.
Asked for comment, HSPH spokesperson Todd Datz referred The Crimson to lines in Baccarelli’s email to HSPH affiliates that thanked her for her leadership of the FXB Center and said she would remain a professor of the practice at HSPH. Nadeau declined to comment on her selection as the FXB Center’s interim leader or her plans for the center’s transition.
The FXB Center’s work currently focuses on human rights and the health impacts of social and political problems — including migration, anti-Roma racism, and the Israel-Palestine conflict. Datz declined to answer emailed questions on whether its existing research would continue, referring The Crimson to Baccarelli’s message to HSPH affiliates.
“Over the past years, FXB has worked on a wide range of programs within the context of human rights, extending across varied projects, including those related to oppression, poverty, and stigma around the world,” Baccarelli wrote. “We believe we can accomplish more, and have greater impact, if we go deeper in a primary area of focus.”
“Therefore, going forward, FXB will focus on children’s health,” he added.
The FXB Center currently runs six programs, one of which focuses on children.
The center has faced criticism over its Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attacks on Israel. Critics — including former University president Lawrence H. Summers and a group of congressional Republicans led by Rep. Elise M. Stefanik ’06 (R-N.Y.) — condemned the center’s partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank, alleging that the Birzeit partnership represented a link between Harvard and Hamas.
The Trump administration called for an external audit of the FXB Center in a list of detailed demands sent to Harvard in April. Harvard refused the demands, prompting the Trump administration to slap the University with a multibillion dollar federal funding freeze that was reversed by a judge in September.
But the FXB Center is one of several units named in the demands where Harvard has made personnel and programming changes over the past several months. The center was one of the first of the school’s centers to be examined as part of a school-wide review of HSPH’s centers initiated by Baccarelli.
HSPH announced in March that it had suspended its partnership with Birzeit as part of the review, allowing a memorandum of understanding between the two universities to expire.
The FXB Center featured prominently in a report released in April by an internal Harvard task force on antisemitism. The report called for more oversight of the FXB Center and the Palestine Program by tenured or tenure-track faculty, accusing it of sloppy scholarship and “demonization” of Israel.
Several students, who were not named in the report, complained to the task force that the center’s webinars and other programming created a one-sided anti-Israel narrative. One Harvard graduate who spoke to the task force said that a webinar speaker told listeners “all the hospitals in Gaza have been ‘attacked, besieged or ordered to evacuate’ without ever once mentioning why that was the case.”
As of last spring, 94 percent of hospitals in Gaza had been destroyed, according to the World Health Organization. The Israeli military has said the sites are used by Hamas.
Another FXB Center webinar “initially presented the casualty numbers in Gaza as if all deaths were civilian deaths” and overstated the extent of Israel’s historical closure of exits from Gaza, according to the report.
Gaza’s health ministry, which is run by Hamas, has reported 70,000 deaths in the territory from Israel’s military actions after Oct. 7, 2023, but does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The group says more than 20,000 Gazan children have been killed in the conflict.
The antisemitism task force report also criticized several articles by FXB Center affiliates, including one that argued “academic neutrality is morally, intellectually and disciplinarily incoherent” for centers studying humanitarian public health.
Bassett’s departure marks Harvard’s latest leadership removal at centers that have faced scrutiny for their scholarship on the Israel-Palestine conflict. In March, Harvard dismissed the faculty leaders of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies. The same month, Harvard Divinity School told the leader of the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative that her contract would not be renewed — a week before the RCPI was suspended.
The leaders of the Divinity School’s Religion and Public Life program, which houses the RCPI, stepped down abruptly in January.
Baccarelli wrote in his Tuesday email that the FXB Center’s “newly intensified focus on children’s health and rights is consistent with FXB’s distinguished history and foundational values.”
The philanthropist whose gift established the center — Albina du Boisrouvray, whose son François-Xavier Bagnoud died in a 1993 helicopter crash in Mali and became the center’s namesake — did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday night. Boisrouvray’s foundation, FXB Global, could not be reached for comment.
Before joining Harvard, Bassett served for four years as New York City’s health commissioner. She spent 20 years in Zimbabwe, where she led two programs focused on health and child well-being through the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
—Staff writer Akshaya Ravi can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on X @akshayaravi22.
