Richard Stearns, a U.S. district court judge in Boston, ruled on Tuesday that a lawsuit about an “outburst of antisemitic behaviors on the Harvard University campus following the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel” can go forward.
The suit, which the firm Kasowitz Benson Torres brought on behalf of Harvard students and the nonprofit Students Against Antisemitism, in part accuses Harvard of shirking its obligations under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination based on “shared ancestry,” including religious bias. The university claims that the antisemitic speech in question is protected by the Constitution.
“It may be true that, as a policy matter, Harvard has elected not to curtail the protests in the interest of protecting free speech,” the judge wrote. “The court consequently is dubious that Harvard can hide behind the First Amendment to justify avoidance of its Title VI obligations.”
Whether the school’s argument “has any teeth is a decision best reserved for a later day,” Stearns added. “The record is too thin to determine whether Harvard, in fact, acted to protect free speech rights as it contends Title VI required it to do and whether the protest activity itself comes within the protections of the First Amendment.”
Harvard’s reaction to Jew-hatred, “as pled,” was “at best, indecisive, vacillating, and at times internally contradictory,” the judge wrote. He cited an example Stephen Ball, the Harvard Law School dean, emailing law students that a 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,” the judge wrote. “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.”
“The facts as pled show that Harvard failed its Jewish students,” the judge added.
Marc Kasowitz, a lawyer for the students, stated that “we are gratified that the court has upheld our clients’ civil rights claims against Harvard, finding that the ‘facts as pled show that Harvard failed its Jewish students’ and that Harvard’s ‘virtuous public declarations … proved hollow when it came to taking disciplinary measures against offending students and faculty.’”
“We intend to continue to take all necessary and appropriate steps to protect Harvard’s Jewish students, the first step being discovery of Harvard’s internal files and communications to prove the full nature and extent of Harvard’s failures,” Kasowitz added.
“Just hours after a judge ruled ‘Harvard failed its Jewish students,’ Harvard, rather than apologize, say they love their Jewish students and have always treated them fairly,” wrote Shabbos (“Alexander”) Kestenbaum, one of the students involved in the lawsuit. “What gaslighting and lying. With leaders like this, no wonder Harvard’s current reputation is what it is.”
Jason Newton, a Harvard spokesman, said “Harvard is confident that once the facts in this case are made clear, it will be evident that Harvard has acted fairly and with deep concern for supporting our Jewish and Israeli students,” The Harvard Crimson student paper reported. JNS