Israel-Palestine Started Harvard’s Mess. Both Sides Must Help End It.

Yesterday was the sort of day where you could be forgiven for seeing meaning in the weather.

After weeks of unseasonably cold conditions, the sun shone on Cambridge. It felt fitting, then, when an email arrived in my inbox from University President Alan M. Garber ’76 announcing that Harvard would risk its federal funding to fight the good fight against the outrageous demands of our authoritarian president.

Much as I find Harvard’s defiance courageous, bold, and probably even strategic, we must not forget that this was the better choice among two horrible options — we lost access to $2.2 billion in research funding yesterday — and that many members of this community helped put us in this position. Unless we learn our lesson and become better citizens and stewards of this university, we will absolutely see it brought lower.

Recall where we were five months ago. When President Donald Trump won in November, his election was heralded as a mandate to implement an agenda far more extreme, and worse for higher education, than the first time. Harvard, meanwhile, was in no position to resist. The University was on the back foot, still recovering from the witch hunt against its last president and seen by much of the nation as a hotbed of progressive lunacy and, more recently, virulent antisemitism.

Nonetheless, as the Trump administration set about making an example of Columbia University, which yielded to its demands only to see its funding remain frozen, many students, faculty, and outside observers positioned principled resistance as the obvious choice. This is why the University bothered to build such a large endowment, the argument goes. Who are we if we don’t use it to defend our values?

The answer, much as I don’t love it, could have been “responsible.” Most of us don’t spend very much time thinking about the practical effects of nine billion dollars of lost research funding or a massive tax on the endowment. It is not our job to think like an administrator. But speak to an administrator in private — and I have, several times, in recent months — and you’ll quickly realize that, $50 billion endowment notwithstanding, Republicans could cripple this university.

Harvard is an immense force for good in this world, and risking its funding merely to make a statement, as many on campus desired, is not noble — it is foolish and gambles with the wellbeing of the millions of people whose lives are touched by its transformative research each year. Indeed, what’s scariest about yesterday’s news is precisely that it wasn’t, until recently, an obvious choice.

Imagine how this might have played out if the Trump administration’s highly unpopular policies did not augur an end to Republican governance in the near future. Imagine, too, if the administration had kept its demands somewhat more limited, and if it had held up its end of the bargain with Columbia. Saving billions in research funding that will help millions worldwide may well have been worth the (still very high) cost.

Unfortunately, these are the decisions universities face when our nation is governed by a party that has declared war on higher education. Still, we have reason to believe that the assault on Harvard would not have been as intense or as popular had the events of the past two years not unfolded as they did.

The University always had it coming from Trump 2.0, but the inflammatory activism of some pro-Palestine protesters created a narrative about antisemitism that, while dramatically overblown, made the assault more severe. Pro-Israel students and professors amplified this pernicious misrepresentation, drowning out the Jewish affiliates, at least as numerous, who feel otherwise.

We couldn’t know at the outset how harmful these events would be to the University. But now we do. It’s a different world today, and to carry on like it isn’t — to pummel the University with abandon, to instrumentalize it for your narrow purposes — is to say you don’t care about the immense costs it will impose on Harvard and the people far from Harvard, disproportionately worse off than you, who would benefit most from the research that happens here.

I am not going to pretend that anyone at Harvard can keep Republicans from attacking the University. But how the months and years ahead unfold could mean the difference of millions or billions in federal funding. As such, while the assault continues, we affiliates can make a meaningful difference in Harvard’s fortunes by acting with caution as we engage in university politics.

It is time that protesters leave behind language and conduct that opens them to the charge of antisemitism, and indeed that they condemn antisemitism in the strongest terms and eradicate it from their number. It is time that pro-Israel affiliates stop crying antisemitism in hopes of silencing pro-Palestine protesters, and indeed that Harvard Hillel and leaders in the Jewish community come out unequivocally against federal funding cuts. It is time that the citizens of Harvard stop making it the villain in their story and acting surprised when the nation agrees.

Since the ’60s, universities have played host to protest movements with extreme elements, and those offended by their extremity have criticized those elements. But America has never, in the age of campus protest, been this hostile to universities or led by politicians this reckless, craven, and fascistic.

It was not a sunny day in Cambridge. The University faces more dire threats now than at any other point in its modern history, and it made the only choice it could. Now, if it is to weather the storm ahead, we must do our part to protect it.

Tommy Barone ’25, a former Crimson Editorial Chair, is a Social Studies concentrator in Currier House.