Harvard resisted Trump’s pressure. It also made reforms on antisemitism, free speech.

Cambridge, Mass. | Oct. 07, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET | 8 min read During his second term, President Donald Trump has been suing, threatening, and imposing penalties on universities that, in his view, have become promoters of radical leftist politics. Harvard University tops the list, singled out in part for alleged tolerance of antisemitism on campus.The United States’ oldest and most prestigious university has pushed back, adopting a public profile of defiance that not every castigated university could afford to try. It didn’t capitulate in court and has not cut a deal with the Trump administration.Yet the Trump administration’s antisemitism lawsuit and investigations, and everything that precipitated those – beginning with the university’s reaction to the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 – forced a reckoning. Harvard has made changes that, in effect, reflect some concerns that the U.S. president raised. The changes, many underway before Mr. Trump’s reelection, are visible in efforts to combat antisemitism and elevate a climate where ideas can be freely expressed. Pressure on Harvard continues. And plenty of criticism might still come its way, whether from outnumbered conservatives on campus or pro-Palestinian protesters who argue their voices have been unfairly constrained as the university adapts.But evidence from polling and interviews with students, faculty, and religious advisers suggest a campus that has become safer for the kind of open debate long seen as vital to the mission of any leading university. Some skeptical donors have returned to the Harvard fold. A federal judge over the summer dismissed the U.S. government’s lawsuit against the school over antisemitism on campus, saying the incidents the administration detailed were too “isolated and episodic” to demonstrate that Harvard was breaking the law. The school’s free speech rating, rock bottom in 2024, has surged, according to one widely watched index.“The whole point of a university is to bring people together and exchange information,” says Jesse Fried, a Harvard Law School professor who served on the university’s antisemitism task force. He says the work the institution has put into a reckoning with free speech and student safety has prompted a deepening of its core values. “Harvard can play a very useful function in the world by bringing together people ... and getting them to talk to each other,” he says. Alfredo Sosa/StaffRabbi Hirschy Zarchi, founder and president of Harvard Chabad, a center for Jewish life, stands in front of Harvard's Widener Library in Cambridge Massachusetts, May 18, 2026. Rabbi Zarchi praises the Harvard administration for a commitment to "building the kind of culture that respects the identity of all its citizens." Jewish students and campus rabbis now paint a far more nuanced picture of the campus than the federal government does. Many say conversations about Zionism and Israel remain fraught, that antisemitism sometimes rears its head, and that Harvard must push harder to foster free speech for all students.And yet, most describe a campus not consumed by bigotry but having a vibrant Jewish community – and a university that has made missteps but seems committed to building something new.“It is true that Harvard had an antisemitism problem,” says Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism and a visiting scholar at Harvard. He says the institution is “coming up with a good balance of protecting people through freedom of speech.”“This is one of the best places to go to college in the world, and it will remain that way, and it will remain that way for Jewish students,” says Jerry Comar, a sophomore, at an event outside Harvard Chabad, an independent Jewish community center on campus.“I won’t talk with that person”To understand the changes, it’s helpful to recall where Harvard was a few years ago.A pro-Palestinian student protest movement emerged at Harvard and universities across the country after Oct. 7, 2023, when a Hamas attack killed 1,200 Israelis and took about 250 more captive. Controversy engulfed Harvard’s campus almost immediately. On Oct. 7, the undergraduate student group Palestine Solidarity Committee, alongside some 30 other student groups, released a statement calling Israel “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”The viral post – and a lack of response by the Harvard administration, led by then-President Claudine Gay – drew condemnation from Harvard alumni, including lawmakers, and from former Harvard President Lawrence Summers. Subsequent statements by Dr. Gay fell short of appeasing concerns, and by mid-October, several prominent donors publicly withdrew their support from Harvard over what they said was a “failure” to condemn Hamas.Meanwhile, supporters of pro-Palestinian students raised concerns, too, with reports of a truck circling campus revealing the names and pictures of students thought to be affiliated with groups that signed the Palestine Solidarity Committee statement.Rabbi Jason Rubinstein runs Harvard’s Hillel House, a center for Jewish life on campus. He says the Harvard administration had long struggled to “protect its own mission of teaching and learning and research from encroachments of people who said, ‘Oh, I won’t talk with that person. I won’t let them in my club.’”Turmoil hit a zenith in December 2023 when U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Harvard alum, grilled Dr. Gay and two other university leaders at a congressional hearing. In widely criticized remarks, Dr. Gay gave legalistic answers when asked by Ms. Stefanik about whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment. After Dr. Gay said it “depends on the context,” Representative Stefanik called for her resignation. Five days after her congressional testimony, allegations of academic plagiarism against Dr. Gray surfaced, and investigations into her academic work widened. On Jan. 2, 2024, she announced her resignation.Alan Garber, the school’s long-serving provost, became interim president. His task: to move quickly to stabilize the school.Debate over protestsJust over two weeks after his tenure began in January 2024, Dr. Garber, who is Jewish, announced the creation of two task forces: one to counter antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias, and another to counter anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias.Almost concurrently, Harvard released updated guidelines prohibiting protests inside dorms, classrooms, and libraries. Indoor protests against Israel had become commonplace in the fall, rankling many Jewish students and faculty, who felt they inhibited their ability to use university spaces freely.Protests that were “disturbing places where students [live] ... there’s no room for that. That should never have been able to occur,” says Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi, who runs Harvard’s Chabad.Soon after Dr. Garber’s task forces set up work, Harvard faced another test. In the spring of 2024, pro-Palestinian student protesters erected an encampment on Harvard Yard, staking a claim to the heart of the university’s 400-year-old campus. Students decried Israel’s conduct in the war in Gaza, which had killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and triggered a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Some Jewish students reported being verbally harassed while walking near the encampment. Ben Curtis/AP/FilePassersby walk past students protesting Israel's war in Gaza, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 25, 2024. The encampments tested Alan Gerber, at the time a few months into his appointment as Harvard's interim president. Dr. Garber’s administration responded forcefully. Harvard placed at least 22 students involved in the encampment on involuntary leave. In a parallel process, the university suspended five students and prohibited 13 seniors from graduating. Ultimately, most of the punishments were rolled back, in part due to a faculty council finding them too severe.That fall, pro-Palestinian students on campus argued that their free speech rights were being curtailed by some of Harvard’s new rules. At least 60 students were temporarily banned from the school’s flagship library after they worked there silently with signs condemning Israeli strikes in Lebanon and Turkey taped to their laptops. Nationwide, Muslim and pro-Palestinian students argued that their speech had been stifled. Muslim students in particular “felt invisible when something happened to them,” says Saher Selod, director of research for the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a think tank based in Dearborn, Michigan. “They felt like there was no structure in place to support them if they had experiences with someone discriminating against them for their religious identities.”A call to action on free speech, constructive dialogueAs these tensions simmered on campus, the task forces addressing bias dug into their work, conducting listening sessions across campus. Each had 15 members, a mix of Harvard faculty, staff, and students.The two groups say each reached around 500 students and employees, according to internal reports. They agreed on one central charge: Harvard had to do more to foster free speech and constructive dialogue, and live up to its stated values of celebrating diverse perspectives, for the good of all students.In a survey that the task forces conducted jointly in 2024, and released in their final reports last year, 54% of Jewish students said they felt uncomfortable expressing their religion or ethnicity on campus, and 61% said they did not feel comfortable expressing their political opinions. In the same survey, 72% and 87% of Muslim students said the same to those questions, respectively.Harvard administrators moved to adopt changes, several based on task force recommendations.In 2024, Harvard added a supplemental essay question to its application that asks prospective students to detail an instance when they “strongly disagreed with someone” and how they engaged with that person.Campus leaders provided training for teaching fellows to facilitate difficult classroom conversations, and funding for student events that bring people of different ideologies and cultures together. Dr. Garber, who shed his “interim” title in August 2024, created a working group on constructive dialogue. He’s fundraising to endow new professorships in a viewpoint diversity initiative. A conservative legal scholar from the University of Notre Dame will join the Harvard Law faculty in January. Debates are in vogue on campus, including a “Change My Mind” debate Sept. 28 between a Harvard law professor and a conservative commentator.Harvard’s free speech improvement “coincides with President Garber having the interim tag removed, being very clear about the importance of free speech, and directly opposing the efforts of the Trump administration to reform higher education,” says Sean Stevens, chief researcher at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Harvard surged up 174 places in its ranking of free speech on college campuses after coming in last in 2024 and 2025.Rabbi Zarchi says that Harvard’s leadership is “serious and so committed to correcting what needs to be corrected, to enforcing the rules that need to be enforced, and to building the kind of culture that respects the identity of all its citizens.”Yet many agree that the university should do more to build a culture of free speech. A Jewish student interviewed for this story requested anonymity in order to speak freely about issues that, despite a cooler campus, remain divisive. “There is probably no topic on campus that is harder to discuss” than Israel, says the student. “I agree with some figures in the Trump administration that viewpoint diversity is a virtue” for colleges.“But I don’t think viewpoint diversity is something that can be forced from above.” ALREADY A SUBSCRIBER? LoginReal news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.The Christian Science Monitor was founded in 1908 to lift the standard of journalism and uplift humanity. We aim to “speak the truth in love.” Our goal is not to tell you what to think, but to give you the essential knowledge and understanding to come to your own intelligent conclusions. Join us in this mission by subscribing.