The Harvard Crimson - Volume CLII, No. 1

The Harvard Crimson

for Zionists and defining Islamophobia and antisemitism.

Harvard Faces Trump’s Onslaught of Orders

TIES. The Harvard Management Company reinvested $150 million in Booking Holdings Inc., a company under fire for its operation in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, according to the HMC’s 2024

President Donald Trump’s wave of executive orders targeting funding for education sent shockwaves through Harvard this week, briefly jeopardizing thousands of research jobs and more than 10 percent of the University’s operating revenue.

Though the most sweeping order — a temporary freeze on all federal funding to universities — was blocked by a judge and later rescinded by the Trump administration, future funding from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation remains temporarily frozen and stop work orders for diversity-related projects are still in effect.

The saga exposed Harvard’s deep reliance on federal support and clarified the impact of proposed funding cuts that have been looming over the University for more than a year.

In fiscal year 2024, the University re -

ceived $686 million from federal agencies, accounting for two-thirds of its total sponsored research expenditures and 11 percent of the University’s operating revenue.

“We could not carry out our mission the way we do now without substantial federal research support, nor could we provide the benefits to the nation that we do now without that support,” Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 said in a December interview with The Crimson.

Despite the Trump administration’s decision to rescind the memo announcing the freeze, many of the new executive orders that restrict federal funding are still enforceable, as are the department-level stop work orders.

Neal F. Lane, who served as the Director of the National Science Foundation under President Bill Clinton, said the freeze was unprecedented and will be difficult to reverse.

“The freeze was sort of in part a surprise because it was such a blunt instrument that it had really never been used before, not in that way,” Lane said.

“Once you start something like that, it’s very hard to unwind it immediately. So a lot of damage has already been done.”

‘If the Money Doesn’t Come’ Harvard’s research machine runs on federal dollars, and even a partial cut to funding from the NIH or NSF would be immediately felt by Harvard’s scientists.

Most of the $684 million in funding goes to four of Harvard’s nine faculties – Harvard Medical School, the School of Public Health, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. These four faculties, in addition to the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, make up 88 percent of sponsored expenditures.

The School of Public Health is the most reliant on sponsored support, which makes up 59 percent of its operating budget. Sponsored support, which includes both government funding and private grants, also makes up 35 percent and 37 percent of the HMS and SEAS operating budgets, respectively.

Most of Harvard’s federal research

funding comes from the Department of Health and Human Services, which gave Harvard $520 million in fiscal year 2024. The NIH alone accounted for $488 million, making it the University’s most important funding source. Many of the NIH’s institutes, including the National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, each fund dozens of Harvard research centers.

Some of the largest Harvard-affiliated recipients of NIH funding include the Harvard University Center for AIDS Research, the M.D.-Ph.D. physician-scientist program jointly hosted by Harvard and MIT, and a large clinical research center focused on diagnosing rare conditions.

Future NIH funding is still paused, as are grants awarded by the NSF, which awarded Harvard researchers $56 million last year.

Over a third of sponsored expenditures go toward salaries, and the loss of

As President Donald Trump rolled out sweeping new restrictions on federal research funding, Harvard administrators instructed faculty to comply with stop-work orders designed to halt the use of government funds for diversity initiatives.

The influx of orders — and abrupt walkback of a directive freezing all federal grants — left Harvard researchers confused amid mixed messages from the White House and attempts by administrators to clarify a swiftly changing situation.

The University’s initial batch of communications, which came as emails from research administrators Tuesday afternoon, urged researchers who received federal stop-work orders to comply, but to continue working on other federally sponsored projects despite the grant freeze.

“With these notifications, we are required to cease the identified sponsored

activities in accordance with the orders,” Sara Lyn Elwell, an interim co-lead of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Office of Research Administration, wrote in an email to FAS faculty. Even after Trump walked back the proposed freeze Wednesday afternoon, administrators continued to issue updated guidance on navigating the web of federal restrictions still in place.

In an email sent roughly an hour after the rescission, Harvard Vice Provost for Research John H. Shaw described it as “excellent news” but reiterated that researchers would need to comply with ongoing stop-work orders. Shaw specifically notified faculty that the University would begin assessing National Science Foundation grants after the NSF instructed researchers to cease activities barred under Trump’s DEI-related executive order.

The announcement marked an expansion of the University’s response to Trump and a reminder that Harvard’s researchers are not yet out of the woods. In the Tuesday email, Elwell and her

Researchers at Harvard’s Longwood medical campus contended with canceled talks and blocked international collaboration as White House officials issued a stream of restrictions on federal funding and communication.

Scholars across Harvard’s schools have faced confusion amid President Donald Trump’s crackdown on foreign aid and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. But much of the University’s federal research funding — 76 percent of which comes from the Department of Health and Human Services — flows into research at the schools in Longwood.

Trump briefly attempted to pause funding for federal grants and loans in an order intended to take effect Tuesday.

Despite Trump’s swift retraction of the order to freeze federal funding, many restrictions remain in place, including travel bans, paused grant reviews, and

restrictions on public statements.

The DHHS sent a Jan. 21 memo to the heads of its divisions — which include the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — instructing them to refrain from publicly issuing documents or participating in speaking engagements until the contents have been “reviewed and approved by a Presidential appointee.”

The communications ban is slated to lift on Feb. 1.

HMS professor Aaron S. Kesselheim ’96, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Law, Medicine, and

administration. “We had to pull the article because of the repressive policies of the new administration with respect to speech,” Kesselheim said. “I think it’s a sort of a bald example of censorship.”

AROUND THE IVIES

Barnard will cut faculty and staff benefits in 2025 as part of an effort to pay back their $252 million

and repair a growing deficit, the Columbia Spectator reported Tuesday. The deficit, which is projected to be $23.3 million at the end of the fiscal year, has grown by over $20 million over the past decade. The Barnard chapter of the American Association of University Professors wrote in a statement to the Spectator that faculty and staff have been “shut out of all financial decision-making,” and are now being asked to make a “series of sacrifices.”

THE COLUMBIA SPECTATOR

In Photos: Harvard Women’s Club Hockey

BY TESSA M. CAMPOLATTARO

The Yale College Council is looking for alumni and administrative funding for student needs this semester, after spending most of their budget during the first semester, the Yale Daily News reported Wednesday. The YCC budget goes to registered student organizations, Yale’s Spring Fling, and policy teams such as healthcare transportation programs. With its funding constraints, the YCC had to cut its internal team funding. “We are only as strong as the administration empowers us to be,” YCC Chief Financial Officer Adnan Bseisu said. YALE DAILY NEWS

The Daily Princetonian reported Wednesday that Princeton’s Graduate Student Government elections just concluded, with the new executive board featuring “four newcomers and eight returning GSG officers.” The role of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Chair will be unfilled this term due to a lack of candidates for the position. Officers said that they hope to “fight for greater transparency from the University in terms of decisions that affect the student population.” THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN $252 MILLION IN DEBT, BARNARD TO CUT FACULTY AND STAFF BENEFITS YCC SEEKS BUDGET SUPPORT FROM ALUMNI, ADMINISTRATION

CORNELL STUDENTS HOLD VIGIL FOR INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY

The Cornell Daily Sun reported Tuesday that four Cornell organizations, “Cornellians for Israel, Hillel, Chabad, and the Center for Jewish Living,” hosted a vigil in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Attendees of the event “joined together in reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish — a prayer for those who have died.” They ended the vigil by singing “Hatvikah” (known as “The Hope”) in English, which is Israel’s national anthem. Cornell Hillel President Maya Weisberg said, “I’m very happy we could have this event as a moment to remember the detrimental consequences of anti-semitism.”

THE CORNELL DAILY SUN

BROWN’S DECADE-LONG FUNDRAISING CAMPAIGN RAISES $4.4 BILLION

On Dec. 31, the BrownTogether fundraising campaign concluded with a total of $4.4 billion raised since 2015. In a press release, Brown called the campaign “the most ambitious and successful fundraising campaign in Brown University history.” This funding will help “eliminate packaged loans from undergraduate financial aid,” as well as “expand need-blind admissions policies to international and veteran students.” In addition, the BrownTogether funds will go towards improving research centers, campus facilities, renovations projects, and more. THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

KENDALL SQUARE. Eversource, a New England-based energy provider, broke ground in Kendall Square on Tuesday on what will be the largest underground electrical substation in the United States, following an extended battle with MIT over the placement of underground cables. BY STEPHANIE DRAGOI AND THAMINI

MAGNITUDE 3.8.

MEGAN M. ROSS — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

President Indi Wagner ‘26 chats with the referees before the team’s scrimmage. Wagner has been playing ice hockey since childhood.

The players fight to score a goal against the opposing team. This is Tufts’ first season as an all girls team, with the school previously playing as a coed team.

The team discusses game strategies before their scrimmage against Tufts University.

Sage Piekarski ‘27 faces off with a Tufts player for the puck drop. This was her first game with the women’s club hockey team here at Harvard.

The team congratulates goalie Bailey Plaman, a graduate student, on a game wellplayed. Plaman played hockey for Amherst College as an undergraduate student.

#4 Raquel Reis ’25 scores a goal in the second period. She began playing ice hockey prior to joining to club hockey team at Harvard.

MELANIE Y. FU — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

ADDISON Y. LIU — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

JANUARY 31, 2025 THE HARVARD CRIMSON

IN THE REAL WORLD

TWO KILLED IN SOUTHERN LEBANON AS PROTESTS AGAINST ISRAEL CONTINUE

Israeli troops fired upon protestors, killing two and injuring 17 on Monday in the second day of protests in Southern Lebanon opposing Israeli presence. Protests erupted as residents attempted to return to villages where Israeli forces remain after being displaced by the 14-month war between Hezbollah and Israel, according to the Associated Press. The shooting comes after a day of violence, where 24 people were killed and 130 were wounded when Israeli troops fired on protestors who broke through roadblocks at the border.

EU EXTENDS ITS RUSSIA SANCTIONS BY SIX MONTHS

The European Union agreed to extend Russian sanctions on Monday after Hungary lifted its objections to the action. The sanctions aim to deplete Russia’s ability to finance its war against Ukraine, according to the Associated Press. Remaining in place until July 31, the sanctions target energy, technology, transport, industry, and trade, including a ban on importing or transferring crude oil and other petroleum products from Russia to the EU. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán changed his mind on Russian sanctions on Friday after Kyiv halted the transportation of gas into Central Europe.

THE FED TO HOLD RATES STEADY, SEES INFLATION AS ELEVATED

The Federal Reserve left its interest rate unchanged on Wednesday, after previously cutting it three times in a row. Holding the rate steady signifies the Fed is taking a cautious approach to prepare for Trump’s possible new policies. According to the Associated Press, the Fed called the job market “solid,” also noting unemployment has “stabilized” at a low point in recent months. Both more stubborn inflation and a positive job market usually imply minimal rate cuts in the near future. Jerome Powell, the Fed Chair, noticeably deflected questions relating to President Trump’s recent comments, such as demanding lower interest rates and oil prices. The President stated he would talk with Powell, but the Fed Chair said he has made “no contact.”

TRUMP ANNOUNCES U.S. WILL HOUSE MIGRANTS AT GUANTÁNAMO

President Trump ordered his administration on Wednesday to prepare the Navy base at Guantánamo Bay to house tens of thousands of “criminal aliens.” The President called on both the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to prepare the site, according to the New York Times. Trump said, “We have 30,000 beds to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens,” adding, “Some of them are so bad we don’t trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back.” About 40,000 immigrants have been held in detention centers and jails around the country in recent weeks, and adding 30,000 beds would majorly expand the Government’s detention capacity.

What’s Next

Start every week with a preview of what’s on the agenda around Harvard University

Friday 1/31

GALLERY TALK: SUSAN MEISELAS’S 44 IRVING STREET, CAMBRIDGE, MA

Harvard Art Museums, 12:30-1:00 p.m.

Come dive into Susan Meiselas’s 1971 photo series chronicling the rooms in a Cambridge boarding house where she lived. Robinson Family Curatorial Fellow Madison Brown talks us through these intimate portraits.

Saturday 2/1

A NIGHT WITH THE DAILY SHOW’S JORDAN KLEPPER

Sanders Theatre, 7:00-8:00 p.m.

Emmy-winning Jordan Klepper, co-host of The Daily Show, lights up Sanders Theatre with a night of good laughs, good conversation, and a myriad of takes on politics and culture.

Sunday 2/2

BLODGETT CHAMBER MUSIC SERIES PRESENTS PARKER QUARTET

Paine Concert Hall, 3:00 p.m.

The Grammy Award-winning Parker Quartet plays Zemlinsky, Adès, and Debussy in this lovely program. Each member of the Parker Quartet is a Professor of the Practice at Harvard and they collectively serve as Blodgett Artists-in-Residence.

80 YEARS SINCE LIBERATION: THE LEGACY OF THE HOLOCAUST

JFK Jr. Forum/YouTube Livestream, 6:00 p.m.

Hear Holocaust survivor Magda Bader speak about her experience at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and her escape on the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation. The event is moderated by Mathias Risse, Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.

Tuesday 2/4

RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA MACHINE: MECHANICS OF SUCCESS

CGIS South Tsai Auditorium, 5:00 – 7:00 p.m.

Journalist Peter Pomerantsev and international affairs scholar Nina L. Khruscheva talk about the effects of Putin’s propaganda machine and everyday life of Russians under a dictatorship.

Wednesday 2/5

HUMAN RIGHTS FILM SCREENING: ASOG Sackler Lecture Hall, 5:00-8:00 p.m. Watch a documentary about a former comedian and a student journeying across the Philippines to pick up the pieces of their lives with commentary on colonialism, transphobia, land theft, and climate change.

Thursday 2/6

NO OTHER LAND FILM SCREENING Cader Room Swartz Hall, 6:00-8:30 p.m.

Watch a documentary capturing the resistance of Masafer Yatta, a Palestinian community in the West Bank, against displacement by Israeli settlers and soldiers. It follows journalists Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham as they document destruction.

Friday 2/7

LUNCHTIME ORGAN RECITAL Memorial Church, 12:15 - 1:00 p.m.

Henrique Neves, HLS J.D. Candidate and con -

Rose performs Biblical songs by famed Anglo-Irish composer Sir Charles Villiers Stanford.

A CHILLY COMMUTE

STAFF

ductor Barry

LOTEM L. LOEB — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

UNIVERSITY FINANCES

HMC Reinvests $150M in Booking Holdings

FINANCE STRATEGY. The Harvard Management Corporation reinvested $150 million in Booking Holdings after five-year dry spell.

BY AVANI B. RAI

The Harvard Management Company reinvested $150 million in Booking Holdings Inc., a company under fire for its operation in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, according to the HMC’s 2024 third quarter filings. The move marked HMC’s first investment in the company in more than five years — making it the third-largest holding in its public portfolio behind Meta and Alphabet. Booking Holdings — the parent company of several travel-related businesses including Booking. com, Kayak, and OpenTable — was included in a 2023 United Nations list of 17 parent companies involved in business activity in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, one of just seven not based in Israel.

The HMC’s investments in Bookings have been at the center of extensive debate about Harvard’s ties to Israel and calls to divest. In December 2019, the University had $194 million directly invested in the company, but had sold the entirety of its shares by March the next year. In 2018, Human Rights Watch found that Booking.com connects

travelers to rental properties in the Palestinian territories and alleged the company is complicit in human rights abuses against Palestinians. The company added warnings to rental properties located in Israeli settlements in 2022. After the reinvestment, Booking Holdings is one of 14 companies that HMC holds direct public investments in.

HMC spokesperson Patrick S. McKiernan declined to comment on the decision, citing a policy against commenting on individual investments.

Harvard’s direct reinvestment follows a year of heightened pro-Palestine activism and growing divestment calls amid Israel’s war in Gaza.

The student governments of at least three graduate schools — Harvard Law School, Harvard Divinity School, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design — passed resolutions urging the HMC to divest from institutions and companies that “aid the ongoing illegal occupation of Palestine.”

And last spring, pro-Palestine protest campus organizers staged a 20-day encampment in Harvard Yard to demand divestment. The action attracted significant national attention, but the key demands — investment transparency and divestment from Israel – went unmet.

The encampment ended on May 14, after the University offered protesters a meeting with members of the University’s governing boards about divestment in September.

Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 later rejected the protesters’ proposal to review all investments for links to human rights violations, telling the group in an email that he would not direct HMC to “use its endowment funds to endorse a contested view on a complex issue that deeply divides our community.”

Despite the extensive campaigns, activist groups have relied on very limited information about the true extent of Harvard’s investments in Israel.

Garber Says Some Research May Halt After Federal Grant Freeze

BY DHRUV T. PATEL AND GRACE E. YOON CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

Harvard President Alan M. Garber

’76 warned that federally funded research initiatives at Harvard could be forced to stop work to comply with President Donald Trump’s federal funding freeze in an email to affiliates Tuesday afternoon.

But just minutes after Garber’s email, United States District Judge Loren L. AliKhan ordered an administrative stay on Trump’s directive until Feb. 3, temporarily preventing the order from going into effect Tuesday afternoon.

The freeze — which was announced by Trump’s administration Monday night — orders a pause on the disbursement of federal funding to nonprofit organizations, states, and colleges and universities, including Harvard.

AliKhan is expected to issue a permanent decision on Monday.

In the email, Garber wrote that the order — should it go into effect — will force some Harvard researchers who receive federal funds to stop their work.

“The directive does require a pause on a subset of federally funded research activities implicated in an evolving set of executive orders or through stop work orders or other guidance issued by federal agencies,” Garber wrote.

He also reiterated the Department of Education’s Tuesday clarification that federal student loans and Pell grants would be unaffected by the funding.

“If you are a student, you should continue to register for and attend classes unimpeded,” Garber wrote in the email.

Harvard received $686 million in federal funding in 2024, much of which was allocated towards financial aid programs and medical research. A significant fraction of sponsored research funding supports salaries and other compensation. Garber’s firm response is his first public comment on the string of executive orders that Trump has signed since assuming office last week. It is also his first direct response to Republican funding threats that have been looming over Harvard for more than a year.

Garber added that he will issue guidance later that afternoon to faculty members whose research engagements will have to be shuttered as a result of the freeze.

“In these challenging times, our efforts will be guided by our values

and commitments,” Garber wrote. A University spokesperson declined to comment on how the district judge’s administrative stay affects Harvard’s response. Garber’s email to Harvard affiliates follows similar messages from other colleges and universities, all warning of significant disruptions.

Stanford President Jonathan D. Levin penned a longer and more direct rebuke of Trump’s order Tuesday morning, calling it “extraordinary and disruptive.”

“We know they will cause a great deal of concern, exacerbated by uncertainty about what the full scope and impact will be,” he wrote. Unlike at Harvard, where Garber warned affiliates they might need to stop their research, Levin said that because of the memo’s “extensive uncertainty,” Stanford did not believe it was “necessary or appropriate” to pause such activity.

While Brown University President Christina H. Paxson issued a message similar to Garber’s, she also announced a new working group at Brown to “closely assess the orders coming out of Washington, D.C.”

No universities have announced plans to sue the Trump administration over the attempted funding pause — but 22 state attorneys general, including Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea J. Campbell, have announced plans to sue the White House, calling the freeze unconstitutional. Harvard, however, has not hesitated to challenge Trump on executive orders during his first term.

In 2020, the University successfully sued the administration over a Covid-era executive order that stripped international students of their visas if they attended virtual classes.

The pause — which puts trillions of dollars in federal funding in limbo — is intended to give the new White House “time to review agency programs” and reallocate

funding for programs aligned with Trump’s new policies.

Under the pause, federal agencies were charged with investigating their grants, loans, and programs to ensure compliance with Trump’s new policies, including his directive last week ordering universities to end diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

Matthew J. Vaeth, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, took direct aim at DEI initiatives in the memo Monday night, calling them a “waste of taxpayer dollars.”

House Republicans expressed broad support for Trump’s order, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who called the order “an application of common sense.”

“We want to make sure the orders of the new president are being fully complied,” Johnson said at an event Tuesday morning.

Johnson’s full-fledged endorsement of Trump’s order signals backing from the House amid confusion over whether the president actually has the power to withhold funds appropriated by Congress.

Trump’s directive also drew sharp criticism from some Democrats, who said the freeze would take away a critical lifeline from local governments, nonprofits, and hospitals.

“One man does not decide how taxpayers’ money is spent,” said Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) at a Tuesday morning press conference.

Barbara R. Snyder, the president of the Association of American Universities, also slammed Trump’s proposal, saying it could inhibit scientific research at universities.

“Even a temporary stoppage of critical scientific research is a self-defeating, unforced error,” Snyder wrote.

Garber has repeatedly defended the University’s position not to entertain calls for divestment, but in an April 2024 interview with The Crimson, he also said he did not know how much Harvard had invested in the country.

Rutgers Business School professor John M. Longo said this reinvestment was likely connected to expectations of future company growth.

“Travel tends to pick up during a good economy, the U.S. dollar is

strong, and jet fuel prices are expected to fall, so perhaps HMC’s managers expect an increase in travel plans for Booking’s customers,” Longo wrote in a statement.

The current value of HMC’s reported position in Booking Holdings is $172.5 million.

The SEC requires portfolios with over $100 million in investments to disclose their direct public holdings every quarter. The data released by the SEC during the third quarter of 2024 reflects the changes in HMC’s direct ownership in

Trump Staffs Ed Department To Upend University DEI Programs

BY DHRUV T. PATEL AND GRACE E. YOON CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

President Donald Trump tapped a slew of political appointees to the U.S. Department of Education last week, assembling a team to pressure Harvard and other universities to roll back diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.

The ten appointees will be led by Linda McMahon, the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, pending her confirmation, which has been delayed by the Senate. Denise L. Carter — the deputy chief for student aid — will serve as the acting secretary of the Department.

Though McMahon will be a newcomer to national education leadership — serving on Connecticut’s Board of Education and heading the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term — several of the department picks were already vocal critics of diversity initiatives in higher education. Several have specifically criticized universities’ handling of campus antisemitism.

Craig Trainor — the new deputy assistant secretary for policy at the Office for Civil Rights — previously served as the primary counsel to the House investigation that led to the proposal of the Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023.

The bill sought to require the Department of Education to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism when handling discrimination complaints. Harvard agreed to use the IHRA definition last week as part of a settlement agreement resolving two lawsuits that accused the University of tolerating campus antisemitism.

While the department did not often publicly challenge Harvard under the Biden administration, it is likely to play an outsized role in the Trump administration as House Republicans seek to turn threats of an endowment tax and cuts to federal funding into legislative action.

Ahead of department-level action, Trump has already signed an executive order mandating federally funded colleges and universities to sunset DEI programs — a directive that the appointees will now likely be responsible for executing.

Top House Republicans have also threatened to use the department to revoke Harvard’s federally certified accreditation, a certification required to receive federal student loans, research grants, and other federal funds.

“Your accreditation is on the line,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) said in an October recording obtained by The Guardian. “You’re not playing games any more or else you’re not a school any more.”

The Office for Civil Rights in particular is responsible for soliciting and investigating discrimination complaints, including allegations of antisemitism — a process that Trainor will now help oversee.

Just three days before Trump took office, Harvard quietly resolved a 2024 federal complaint filed with the OCR accusing the University of failing to protect students from anti-Palestinian harassment and intimidation.

Jonathan W. Pidluzny — the next deputy chief of staff for policy and programs at the department — comes from the America First Policy Institute, where he led an initiative focused on improving protections for free speech and intellectual diversity in higher education.

Pidluzny slammed the department he now joins for refusing to investigate universities accused of tolerating antisemitism in June testimony before the House Committee on Ways and Means.

“University administrators have reacted to antisemitism, including its violent manifestations, with callous disregard for their Jewish students’ wellbeing,” Pidluzny said.

Per Trump’s order, the education department will be charged with identifying up to nine institutions with endowments larger than $1 billion whose DEI initiatives violated civil rights legislation — a list that Harvard will likely be a target for. Since Trump’s inauguration last week, the department has terminated DEI training programs, withdrawn its 2022 plan focused on increasing diversity, and scrubbed webpages housing resources focused on diversity.

Pidluzny took particular aim at DEI initiatives at colleges and universities, calling them “hostile” to democratic ideals and a catalyst for campus antisemitism.

“DEI aims to use the university to reengineer American society away from its founding ideal — equality before the law and equal treatment according to individual merit,” Pidluzny said.

Candice Jackson — who was promoted to the deputy general counsel at the department — also came under fire when she was first appointed by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos as head of the OCR for once arguing she was discriminated against for being white.

As an undergraduate at Stanford in the 1990s, Jackson penned an op-ed that called a special math section for minority students a form of “racial discrimination.” Jackson endorsed Trump’s executive order challenging diversity programs at colleges and universities in a Saturday post on X, writing that it is critical “to put the brakes on federal overreach and DEI/gender insanity.” The Department’s other picks include the heads of non-partisan think tank groups, former officials from the House of Representatives and Department of Justice, and a law professor. Two of the appointees have no prior experience in education.

Despite the early preparations for a slew of education policies, Trump still maintains he will abolish the department and send its authority “back to the states.” Jackson suggested in her X post that abolishing the education department would be a longer-term goal. “It will take time,” Jackson wrote.

“So have public servants, including the U.S. Department of Education, which has utterly neglected its responsibility to hold colleges to account,” he added.

The Harvard Management Company reinvested $150 million in Booking Holdings Inc., a company under fire

its operation in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. JULIAN J. GIORDANO — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

Trump ordered a pause on the disbursement of federal funding to nonprofits, states, colleges, and universities. CAROLINE S. ENGELMAYER — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

Harvard Settles Antisemitism Lawsuits

Harvard settled two Title VI lawsuits accusing the University of tolerating antisemitism on campus for an undisclosed amount on Tuesday, closing the proceedings just after President Donald Trump — who has promised to punish universities over antisemitism claims — took office.

Per the settlements, Harvard will clarify that its non-discrimination policies protect Israeli and Jewish students and adopt the widely-used but controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of antisemitism.

The definition — which a group of pro-Israel affiliates urged Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 to adopt in a May letter — classifies certain criticisms of Israel as antisemitic. The definition could allow Harvard to crack down on pro-Palestine student protesters who have condemned Israel’s war in Gaza and policies toward Palestinians, often in harsh terms.

Harvard explicitly stated it will adopt the definition’s “accompanying examples,” which state that it is antisemitic to describe Israel’s existence as a “racist endeavor” or compare its contemporary policies to those of the Nazis.

The settlements apply to litigation efforts from Students Against Antisemitism, a group of six Harvard students, and the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and Jewish Americans for Fairness in Education. At least two students in the SAA lawsuit refused to agree to the settlement. Alexander “Shabbos” Kestenbaum, SAA’s lead plaintiff and a vocal public critic of Harvard, rejected a last-minute attempt by Harvard’s lawyers to persuade him on Monday. Kestenbaum will pursue additional litigation under new counsel.

Kestenbaum wrote in a statement that he plans to take Harvard to trial and depose top administrators including Garber, former Harvard President Claudine Gay, and Harvard Divinity School Dean Marla F. Frederick. In August, a judge ruled that Kestenbaum may seek damages but “lacks standing to pursue proper injunctive relief” because he is no longer enrolled at Harvard. A University spokesperson

declined to comment on a potential trial.

The SAA filed its lawsuit in January, alleging Harvard was negligent in addressing “severe and pervasive antisemitism on campus.”

In May, the Brandeis Center accused the University of “deliberately” ignoring antisemitism by slow-walking its response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. The suit cited accusations of antisemitism against Harvard Kennedy School lecturer Marshall L. Ganz ’64 and a viral confrontation between an Israeli Harvard Business School student and pro-Palestine demonstrators at a “die-in” protest at HBS in October 2023. Harvard unsuccessfully motioned to dismiss both lawsuits. In November, a judge consolidat-

ed the two suits.

In the weeks preceding Donald Trump’s Monday inauguration, a wave of universities — including the University of California system and Brown University — have settled Title VI complaints under the Department of Education alleging they failed to respond to campus antisemitism. The settlements allowed universities to close the proceedings before Trump took office.

Top House Republicans released a report in December following a year-long probe into antisemitism on college campuses, encouraging Congress to more rigorously enforce Title VI antidiscrimination provisions at universities like Harvard.

Under Tuesday’s settlements, Harvard will adopt an official

partnership with a university in Israel — directly contradicting the demands of pro-Palestine campus organizations, which have urged Harvard to cut ties with Israeli institutions.

Harvard will also appoint an employee at its Office for Community Conduct to supervise and consult on antisemitism complaints and will compile an annual report on all Title VI complaints under its non-discrimination and anti-bullying policies for the next five years.

Harvard Law School Professor Noah R. Feldman ’92 said he believed the University was “happy to agree” to the settlement as a clear public statement against antisemitic speech — something he said Harvard sorely needed after Gay’s congressional testimony.

Harvard Jews for Palestine Demonstrate Against New Disciplinary Guidelines

another holocaust,” they added.

Roughly twenty students stood outside Widener Library on Monday afternoon to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day and to protest new disciplinary guidelines adopted under the University’s settlement of two antisemitism lawsuits. The demonstration — organized by Harvard Jews for Palestine, an unrecognized pro-Palestine student group — came around one week after the University adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which labels certain criticisms of Israel as antisemitic, as part of the settlements.

The agreement sparked fierce criticism from faculty and students who said they fear the broad definition could make it easier for the University to crack down on speech critical of Israel.

Unlike past pro-Palestine protests, Monday’s demonstration

did not feature call-and-response chanting. Instead, students stood at the base of the library steps mostly in silence for more than two hours holding banners that read “Jews Against Zionism” and “The Holocaust Does Not Justify the Nakba.” At the end of the demonstration, the protesters recited the Mourner’s Kaddish — a Jewish prayer for the dead — “in remembrance of the Jews killed in the Holocaust and Palestinians killed in the ongoing genocide in Gaza,” according to a J4P press release. The group distributed a pamphlet at the demonstration that criticized Harvard’s decisions to establish ties with an Israeli university and to apply its non-discrimination policy to Zionists, two conditions of the settlements.

“We condemn this University’s embrace of Zionism, which we understand as inextricable from the displacement of Palestinian people, destruction of Palestinian homes, and denial of Palestinian history,” the group wrote.

“We reject the memory of the Holocaust being abused to justify

Under the new guidelines, which were added to the University’s Non-Discrimination and Anti-Bullying Policies and Procedures “Frequently Asked Questions” page on Friday, speech that targets Zionists can be considered discriminatory harassment. The page includes “applying a ‘no Zionist’ litmus test for participation in any Harvard activity” as an example of such conduct.

Harvard J4P organizer Violet T.M. Barron ’26 said in a Monday interview that the group’s pamphlet compares the Holocaust to Israel’s war in Gaza and likely violates Harvard’s NDAB policies.

“The language pretty explicitly violated certain examples provided for an IHRA definition,” Barron said.

“Harvard probably still has a choice as to how they can enforce the rules,” she added.

Previous Harvard J4P protests have also included chants that may violate the updated NDAB policies.

At a November rally outside Harvard Hillel, Harvard J4P protesters chanted “Zionists not wel-

come here” and faced criticism from both Hillel leadership and the Harvard Chaplains Executive Committee.

University spokesperson Jason A. Newton declined to comment on the protest, but referred The Crimson to earlier statements regarding the settlement.

“The University stands strongly for reasoned dissent and the free exchange of ideas, beliefs, and opinions,” Newton wrote. “This commitment to free speech and open inquiry is enshrined in the University-wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities.” Barron said the new rules will not deter the group from organizing protests.

“Even before they adopted this definition, there was arbitrary rule-making and rule enforcement,” Barron said. “I’m not any more afraid than I already was. I don’t think anyone else is.”

“We are just emboldened to demonstrate just how ridiculous the terms of the settlement were,” she added.

“I think the plaintiffs got what they wanted, and the University got an opportunity to clarify its policies,” Feldman said.

Former Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow wrote in an emailed statement that the settlement “takes important and needed steps to prevent legitimate debate from spilling over into bigotry and hatred.”

But Harvard’s decision to adopt the IHRA definition and enshrine protections for Zionist students drew concern from some free speech advocates.

“Criticizing Israeli government policy can now get you punished at Harvard,” the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression wrote in a post on X.

“Instead of choosing consistent, robust protection for free speech,

Harvard is opting for consistent censorship.”

Two scholars affiliated with the Nexus Project, which developed a definition of antisemitism that does not classify “contentious, strident, or harsh criticism of Israel” as necessarily discriminatory, said Harvard’s decision to adopt the IHRA definition could blur the lines between legitimate political discourse and antisemitic rhetoric.

University of California Los Angeles professor of Jewish history David N. Myers, who sat on the task force that developed the Nexus definition, called the IHRA definition a “form of virtue signaling,” saying that it did not offer a practical tool for combating antisemitism.

“It’s a very coarse filter that mistakes criticism of Israel for antisemitism, and therefore it doesn’t really allow us to get at what is antisemitic,” Myers said.

Joshua Shanes, a Jewish studies professor at the College of Charleston who also sits on the Nexus task force, said some anti-Zionist rhetoric can tilt into antisemitism. But he said he found it “troubling” to treat Zionism as a protected category instead of a matter of political debate.

“If someone’s going to come along and say, ‘Jews are a constructed nation, Palestinians are a constructed nation, let’s just create a democracy’ — I totally reject that would be antisemitic, although I think defenders of IHRA would say it is,” Shanes said. Feldman said he did not think Harvard’s new guidelines would imperil debate. The University’s disciplinary policies apply to harassment and bullying but not to speech per se, he said — even if that speech is antisemitic, racist, or otherwise offensive. But some Harvard affiliates said the settlement alone was not enough. Harvard Hillel notified affiliates Tuesday morning that the group had created a community engagement role last week that would be responsible for enforcing the settlement agreement going forward.

“No settlement or report is worth more than the consistency and breadth of its implementation,” Rabbi Jason B. Rubenstein ’04, Hillel’s executive director, wrote in an email.

“Today’s settlement reflects Harvard’s enduring commitment to ensuring our Jewish students, faculty, and staff are embraced, respected, and supported,” a Harvard spokesperson wrote in a Tuesday press release. Harvard’s agreements with the plaintiffs did not admit any wrongdoing or liability.

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Next Dunster Faculty Deans Named

ine commitment to building an inclusive community,” Khurana wrote.

Government professor Taeku Lee and education researcher

Shirley Lee will serve as the next faculty deans of Dunster House, Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana announced in an email to Dunster affiliates Wednesday afternoon.

Taeku Lee is a scholar in racial and ethnic politics and was the first ethnic studies scholar to be brought on by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in a 2022 cluster hire. He currently serves as president of the American Political Science Association.

After earning a masters in public policy from Harvard Kennedy School, Lee taught at HKS between 1997 and 2002. He then taught at U.C. Berkeley before returning to Harvard. Shirley Lee, a specialist in K-12 education, came to Cambridge after working as an education researcher at the U.C. Berkeley.

“I have been struck by Taeku’s and Shirley’s warmth and genu-

Current Dunster House Faculty Deans Cheryl Chen and Sean D. Kelly announced their decision to step down from the position at the end of the academic year in an August 2024 email to Dunster affiliates. Kelly became dean of the Arts and Humanities division on

samuel.church@thecrimson.com

TITLE

Harvard settled two lawsuits accusing the university of mishandling antisemitism for an undisclosed amount. JOEY HUANG— CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

BY SAMUEL A. CHURCH AND MATAN H. JOSEPHY CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

BY SAMUEL A. CHURCH AND CAM N. SRIVASTAVA CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

COVER STORY

Alan Garber Awaits a Fight for Harvard’s Funding

THREATS TURN

With Trump in office, Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 is finding it harder to avoid a battle.

BY DHRUV T. PATEL

Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 has spent the last year investing in relationships with politicians in Washington, avoiding direct confrontation with the threats he has long acknowledged.

Now faced with a barrage of funding cuts, Garber may find himself pushed into a fight.

Since assuming the Oval Office Jan. 20, Trump has signed more than 20 executive orders — gutting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, ramping up scrutiny on international students involved in pro-Palestine protests, and demanding federal agencies to investigate potential civil rights violations at universities with en-

dowments exceeding $1 billion.

The flurry of directives — with potentially severe consequences for Harvard research initiatives — represent a major test for Garber, who has previously told faculty members that he hopes to build a more diplomatic, cooperative relationship with Trump.

Garber addressed a now-rescinded order to freeze all federal funding on Tuesday, telling affiliates to comply with orders to stop work and promising to uphold University “values and commitments.”

The statement was Garber’s most explicit response to the Trump administration yet. But it stopped short of forcefulness, neither directly condemning Trump’s orders nor vowing to resist them.

Before Tuesday, Garber had not publicly commented on the effects of a Trump administration, only privately expressing concern over endowment tax hikes.

“This one goes to the heart of their whole financial wellbeing and to their status and position in the world as a research institution,” said Stanley M. Brand, former general counsel to the House

of Representatives. “I don’t see how they can let this one go.”

But Trump’s Monday directive to pause all federal funding was enough for Garber to break his silence.

“In these challenging times, our efforts will be guided by our values and commitments: supporting academic excellence and the pursuit of knowledge,” Garber wrote on Tuesday.

The funding threats, which were reignited by Harvard’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel and inflamed again by former University President Claudine Gay’s testimony before Congress, have been building in the last year, gaining bipartisan support and evidence collected by subpoena.

Garber, in turn, has made several trips to Washington, met with his most outspoken critics, and earlier this month, hired a lobbying firm stacked with former Trump administration officials and allies.

But without control of the executive branch, Republicans in Congress have been limited to sending strongly worded letters and pub-

Medical Researchers Face Freezes

A planned Feb. 6 talk at Harvard and MIT’s Broad Institute by Michael E. Ward, an NIH scientist who studies neurodegenerative disorders, was canceled when the NIH prohibited its staff from traveling to external meetings. Following Trump’s communication ban, the NIH also abruptly canceled its study sections, which are a key step in accepting and managing grant applications, until Feb. 1. On Jan. 27, the NIH relaxed some restrictions, saying that employees could submit articles to journals, though they were still barred from publishing preprints.

Harvard received more than $520 million in funding from the DHHS in fiscal year 2024.

Trump’s slew of executive orders this week also included requirements that federal agencies and educational institutions receiving federal funding terminate their DEI programs. Federal agencies have told researchers to cease work on initiatives that violate the new guidelines.

HMS Professor Charles A. Nelson III — who co-directs the Healthy Brain and Child Development Study, a multi-million dollar NIH project with 27 sites across the U.S. — explained that orders banning DEI initiatives have limited the scope of his work.

“We were told clearly last week that our DEI working

group needs to be formally disbanded,” Nelson said. The HBCD’s DEI committee assisted consortium members with implementing unconscious bias trainings and developing guidelines for interacting with diverse study participants.

“The consequences of this pause is that now we don’t have a team of people who can go through our measures and methods,” Nelson said. “So, it reduces our ability to make sure that we’re deploying things that are sensitive and respectful of the populations we’re working with.”

Aside from the NIH, Trump’s executive orders have had broader implications for partner organizations of Longwood labs — bringing some international projects to a standstill.

A Jan. 20 executive order froze almost all foreign assistance for 90 days, causing researchers and humanitarian workers worldwide to receive stop-work orders from the U.S. State Department.

Funding for the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center lab run by HMS professor Dan H. Barouch ’93, which researches vaccine development, has not been interrupted. But Barouch’s collaboration with groups in Africa on HIV research has been halted due to a stop-work order from the U.S. Agency for Inter-

national Development.

So far, funding and travel freezes have been temporary, billed as a mechanism for the Trump administration to review programs and axe initiatives that break with his administration’s priorities. But the restrictions have left Harvard researchers unsettled and administrators scrambling to respond.

HMS Dean George Q. Daley ’82 addressed the confusion over NIH funding in an email to affiliates on Wednesday, thanking researchers for their “patience during this complicated and rapidly changing time.”

“Harvard’s leadership — including myself and the deans of all Harvard schools — and our government relations team are closely following and assessing the implications of all the relevant emerging executive orders and directives,” Daley wrote.

Kesselheim said that Trump’s decision to freeze research funding was “completely problematic and completely disastrous and completely unprecedented.”

“There have been transitions before between Republican and Democrat administrations and between Democrat and Republican administrations,” said Kesselheim, but “science has never stopped.”

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lishing damaging reports with subpoenaed documents. They had been previously unable to pass legislation through the Senate or use executive orders, which do not require Congressional approval, to punish Harvard.

Now, Republicans have everything they had asked for — a friend in the White House, control over both chambers of Congress, and a public mandate to punish elite universities.

“I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before,” Trump threatened.

While some of Trump’s orders have already been challenged in court, the proposals alone are a clear signal that Trump and Republicans are willing to follow through on plans to pressure colleges and universities.

Donald F. Kettl, the former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, said Trump’s approach is primarily about messaging.

Kettl said Trump’s administration is “spoiling for a fight, not only

to defund these efforts but also to establish the president’s power to make such decisions.”

“They want to fight this battle, and they think they’re going to win it,” he added.

Harvard Kennedy School professor John P. Holdren — a former senior science advisor to President Barack Obama — also warned that future orders from Trump will likely be more pointed and targeted at Harvard.

“They understood belatedly that the original memorandum was too broad and too vague, so they will get narrower and more specific in some of these memorandum going forward,” he said.

Garber may soon have to follow in the footsteps of former Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow, who successfully challenged the Trump administration in court over a Covid-era immigration policy for international students enrolled in virtual classes.

But even as Republicans’ threat to cut Harvard’s federal funding finally materializes, Garber has been mild in his response — both compared to other university administrators and his own

predecessors.

Former Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust called Trump’s election “divisive and contentious” in 2016 and Bacow said the immigration order’s “ cruelty” was “surpassed only by its recklessness.”

Garber’s decision to not directly condemn Trump’s recent orders is a sign that Harvard is celebrating that it has begun to leave the limelight and that federal attention is being directed to other universities like Columbia. But Garber’s hope to keep Harvard away from the headlines may be only a pipe dream.

“If one wants to get in the news and does not care about fairness, one targets famous people and things,” wrote Emory University law professor Matthew B. Lawrence in a statement. “That has happened to Harvard before and I worry it will happen again now with funding threats and related scrutiny coming from the executive branch,” he added.

dhruv.patel@thecrimson.com grace.yoon@thecrimson.com

Harvard Law Students Hit by Federal Hiring Pause

BY CAROLINE G. HENNIGAN AND BRADFORD D. KIMBALL CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

Many Harvard Law School students found themselves without jobs or summer internships last week after President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to pause hiring, forcing departments to rescind permanent and temporary employment offers to law students.

The freeze, signed on Jan. 20, prohibits filling civilian vacant positions and creating new positions in all federal executive departments and agencies, including the Department of Justice. The administration also directed the budget office to create a plan to shrink the federal workforce permanently within 90 days.

Federal clerkships, which employ more than 10 percent of the law school’s graduating class each year, are unaffected by the freeze.

In a Friday email to HLS students obtained by the Crimson, the school’s Office of Public Interest Advising addressed the freeze, writing that it will “impact both paid and unpaid, volunteer summer internships, and that previous offers will be revoked.”

“We are reaching out to you as we know that many of you have applied to, or accepted offers for, summer internships in federal government agencies,” the OPIA office

wrote. “As you have likely heard, an executive order establishing a federal hiring freeze was issued on January 20th, and we know that many of you have questions about how this may impact you.”

Law School spokesperson Jeff Neal declined to comment on how many students are likely affected or if the school is anticipating permanent employment changes.

Julia A. Kepczynska, a second-year law student, had accepted an unpaid summer internship at the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section of the Department of Justice before it was rescinded this week.

Kepczynska had not heard from HRSP for several days after Trump’s order and contacted the department after receiving OIPA’s email.

“I got an email that, pursuant to the executive order, they had to rescind my offer,” she said.

“On top of that, part of it, I believe, is that they’re no longer allowed to communicate at all with candidates,” Kepcyznska said. “So I am not to respond to the email.”

Kepcyznska said she spoke to an HLS advisor and several employees in the Department of Justice after the November election to determine if her work might be in jeopardy. “They weren’t anticipating anything,” she said.

Instead of working in Washington, Kepcyznska is now looking abroad, both for her second-year summer internship and for full

time work after graduation.

“I really was not anticipating — especially the office I was in — to get impacted,” Kepczynska added. Many law school students plan to return to their second-year summer job after they graduate, and even a temporary pause in hiring could affect long-term employment plans. Kepczynska said the order had quickly captured the attention of HLS students.

“Everyone’s talking about this,” she said. The executive order also affects students who had accepted fulltime federal job offers, including students accepted into the DOJ’s Attorney General’s Honors Program, which places recent law graduates into jobs throughout the DOJ. The competitive program offered fifteen HLS students full-time jobs in 2022, the last year for which data is publicly available.

There were 22 students from the HLS Class of 2023 who entered jobs in government after graduation. In the email to the student body, OPIA wrote that the order had sparked questions about government jobs for law students.

“We realize uncertainties remain about the status of positions at other federal agencies, and as we learn more, we will continue to share updates,” they wrote.

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FRANK S. ZHOU — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

THE HARVARD CRIMSON

FUNDING BREAKDOWN FROM PAGE 1

Harvard’s Federal Funding Is Under Fire

federal funding could endanger entire research labs. More than 6,200 Harvard employees, including 1,673 faculty members, relied on sponsored expenditures for at least part of their pay in fiscal year 2024.

“The researchers are paying salaries for their students, postdocs, they’re buying reagents, they’re buying equipment, they’re turning on the lights in the laboratories,” Lane said. “If the money doesn’t come, then it’s all on the University’s back, and they have no choice but to find the money or shut down the activity.”

Finding the money, despite the size of Harvard’s $53.2 billion endowment, will be a challenge should the freezes become permanent. The majority of the endowment has already been spoken for, earmarked for specific programs, departments and professorships.

Only 20 percent of Harvard’s endowment is not set aside for a specific purpose. Pierre Azoulay, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, said Harvard could temporarily sustain research programs without federal support in the short term.

“Harvard has the wherewithal to kind of float its investigators,” Azoulay said. “Use a little bit of endowment money

to make sure that we don’t fire people, we don’t stop projects.”

But that strategy, which would gradually shrink University investments, would also trade off with Harvard’s longterm financial health.

A University spokesperson declined to comment on whether Harvard would use endowment money as a substitute for federal grant funding.

Financial Aid

While the Department of Education carved out an exception for Pell Grants and federal student loans in the rescinded Wednesday freeze, Federal Work Study Program funds were not exempted and could affect graduate student financial aid if the freeze is reinstated.

In his message addressing the order, Garber wrote directly to students who receive federal funding to attend the University.

“If you are a student, you should continue to register for and attend classes unimpeded,” Garber wrote on Wednesday. Garber’s emergency message highlighted the stakes of future executive orders that are not accompanied by specific financial aid carve-outs.

“It’s a little bit dicier there

because you’re dealing with a lot of relatively young, inexperienced people, 18-, 19-year-olds, even those who are still in high school, thinking about applying for financial aid, and they read the headlines and they may be a little bit more dissuaded,” said Donald E. Heller, former University of San Francisco provost.

At least at Harvard College, federal funding plays a relatively small role in financial aid.

The University’s need-based grant program covers most financial aid, with 80.8 percent of undergraduate assistance coming from Harvard grants. Pell Grants and federal loans make up less than a fifth of the aid awarded to undergraduates.

Graduate and professional students depend slightly more on federal aid. At Harvard Law School and HMS, where Harvard grant funding is less common, federal loans make up a significant portion of financial aid packages — 23.7 percent and 26.2 percent, respectively.

Harvard’s financial aid model, which blends institutional grants and federal assistance, remains threatened by future orders, including a policy proposal by House Republicans that would require graduate students to pay taxes on their scholarships and fellowships.

Financial aid expert Mark Kantrowitz said both scholarship taxes and a proposed end to student loan forgiveness to graduate students pursuing public service careers would hurt Harvard’s graduate programs.

At HMS, 67.8 percent of aid is grant-based, but loans still account for 32.2 percent, meaning medical students pursuing public service careers — who often graduate with significant debt — are especially vulnerable to an end to student loan forgiveness.

‘Illegal DEI’

Trump’s attempted funding freeze is only an escalation of his directive to eradicate federally funded diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives — an order that is still in place and could hurt any number of Harvard initiatives depending on how DEI is defined.

The order, signed on Jan. 21, requires Harvard and other federally funded educational institutions to remove any “illegal DEI” policies and race or gender-based diversity programs. It also asks federal agencies to “enforce our longstanding civil-rights laws and to combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies,

programs, and activities.”

Research policy experts say it is unclear what Trump’s directive means.

Anna M. Quider, Director of the Quider Group — a STEM research development consulting firm — said that because DEI has yet to be explicitly defined by the federal government, its relatively amorphous designation is sowing greater confusion amongst researchers.

“Diversity, equity, inclusion and access is about ensuring that all people have the opportunity to participate in and lend their talents to and thrive in the American research enterprise,”

Quider said. “So of course, race and ethnicity and gender are ways that we can measure the diversity of individual characteristics of the researchers and participants in the research enterprise.”

“What about programs for low income students of all races and genders and geographies?” Quider added. “What about programs for first generation college students, which are also underrepresented in the research enterprise?”

NSF and NIH grants are required to have a public impact statement explaining how the proposal will contribute to “desired societal outcomes,” listing inclusion as an example. Many

Harvard-associated research proposals mention diversity, equity, inclusion or similar language in their statements.

“Some of them will have said it’s going to enable underrepresented minorities or low income first generation college students to benefit them in some way,” Kantrowitz said. “You don’t know whether the Trump administration is going to say, ‘Oh, these are DEI. We shouldn’t fund them.’” With tens of thousands of grant proposals, Lane said it would be particularly difficult for the Trump administration to even enforce these policies.

“You would have to go out somehow into the tens of thousands of budget lines in different agencies and try to find those you think might have these kinds of activities that the president doesn’t like,” Lane said.

Regardless of the funding freeze’s legal merit or implementation, Lane said the “damage has been done.”

“You don’t want to be constantly clutching at pearls and claiming the sky is falling down. It gets old,” Azoulay said. “But maybe this time, the sky is falling down.”

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Harvard Begins Reviewing National Science Foundation Grants

interim co-lead, Katherine Gates, wrote that Harvard was working to comply with NASA’s Jan. 23 instructions to halt diversity efforts on projects receiving NASA grants. NASA sent $5.8 million to Harvard researchers in fiscal year 2024. The NSF’s message threatens to impact a wider range of researchers at Harvard. In fiscal year 2024, the University received $59 million in funding from the Foundation, which funds research across the natural sciences and social sciences — including projects that investigate quantum materials, team-based learning in high school classrooms, and the economics of infrastructure.

In another email sent Wednesday afternoon, Harvard Medical School Dean George Q. Daley did not issue specific guidance on handling Trump’s

orders, but assured affiliates that University leadership was closely assessing the situation.

“I understand that the pace of announcements and issuances over the last week has caused uncertainty and concern,” Daley wrote, before adding that the school’s “long legacy of leadership in education, research, and service to humanity is not in question and will continue for centuries to come.”

But faculty who are still waiting to discover whether they will receive stop-work orders remained uncertain Thursday afternoon about how Trump’s directives might disrupt their research.

Harvard Medical School professor A. Sloan Devlin ’06 — who receives a diversity supplement for one of her National Institutes of Health grants — said in an interview Wednesday

that she expects a stop-work order “imminently.” Such an order would mean losing the supplement that funds the salary and supplies for one of her senior graduate students.

“That’s basically a person’s worth of research that I lose,” Devlin said.

Government professor Jennifer L. Hochschild wrote in a statement Thursday that she had paused submitting a research proposal to the NSF and that the threat of stop-work orders would “increase the already high sense of anxiety and uncertainty” around research funding.

“The metaphor of throwing a rock in a pond and watching the widening ripples comes readily to mind,” Hochschild wrote.

NATALIE Y. ZHANG — CRIMSON DESIGNER

LEGACY OF SLAVERY INITIATIVE

Harvard Identifies 913 Enslaved People

SLAVERY REMBRANCE

INITIATIVE. 913 individ-

uals enslaved by Harvard affilliates were identified in a December Report.

BY SOPHIE GAO AND ALEXANDRA M. KLUZAK CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

The Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery initiative identified at least 913 individuals enslaved by Harvard faculty, staff, and leadership and at least 403 of their living descendants, according to an internal report from December. The report, obtained by The Crimson, was a monthly update from genealogical society American Ancestors to the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program, the Legacy of Slavery initiative’s descendant research wing. American Ancestors, which was previously one of HSRP’s external partners, took over the work in full last week after Harvard laid off HSRP’s internal staff. The Crimson previously reported in September that HSRP had identified more than 300 people who were enslaved by Harvard affiliates and more than 100 living descendants.

Harvard-affiliated enslaved people from 70 to almost 1,000,” Cellini added.

“The former HSRP staff and leadership believes that every family is precious,” Cellini said, alluding to his prior allegations that the University had tried to limit the number of descendants his team attempted to find. “You can never find ‘too many descendants.’”

Despite identifying more than 400 living descendants, the University has yet to formalize a plan for how it intends to notify or engage with those descendants.

“What does engagement mean? What does it look like? It’s a very obfuscating word, which is fine at the beginning of a project but, this deep into it,

As part of their work, HSRP cross-referenced dates to avoid

Wayne W. Tucker, a former HSRP researcher, said the HSRP’s internal team had identified the Harvard-affiliated enslavers using archival materials and confirmed a “a generation or two” of descendants before handing the research off to their collaborators at American Ancestors. American Ancestors “would do the real legwork from, say, 1800 or so, whereas I kind of did a preview, a cursory look,” Tucker said. “They would go in and fill in the gaps with very high accuracy and precision.”

counting enslaved individuals more than once if they had been referred to by more than one name in different records or counting those enslaved by non-Harvard affiliates with the same names as Harvard affiliates.

According to Tucker, the more than 400 living descendants so far can all be traced back to one of just three sets of ancestors. He added: “Even just one ancestor might increase that direct descendant total

by 100 or so, potentially, if not, thousands.”

But Tucker said the work of finding people enslaved by Harvard affiliates is still far from completed. Tucker said HSRP’s internal team had not yet begun researching those enslaved after 1800 before they were terminated — work that will now fall entirely to American Ancestors.

Harvard spokesperson Sarah E. Kennedy O’Reilly wrote in a state-

ment that the University hopes to “leverage American Ancestors’ unparalleled genealogical knowledge and experience” to continue identifying direct descendants. Harvard’s work with American Ancestors began in 2022.

Former HSRP Program Director Richard J. Cellini wrote in a statement to The Crimson that HSRP was “proud” of its research.

“In just over 18 months, we increased the number of known

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Professor Vincent Brown Quits Legacy of Slavery Committee

for reckoning with its past.

Harvard professor Vincent A. Brown resigned from a committee within the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery initiative on Monday, condemning the University’s decision to lay off the staff of the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program in a scathing resignation letter. In the letter, which was obtained by The Crimson, Brown criticized the decision to lay off the HSRP team as “vindictive and wasteful,” adding that he feared the turbulence within the Legacy of Slavery initiative would sow mistrust and compromise his own academic

reputation. Brown, who has appointments in the History and African and African American Studies departments, served on the initiative’s committee tasked with designing a memorial for those who had been enslaved by Harvard affiliates. HSRP’s work to identify the descendants of those enslaved by Harvard faculty, staff, and leaders has now been fully outsourced to American Ancestors, a Boston-based genealogical society. Brown wrote that he was confident American Ancestors’ research expertise would allow them to “carry this work forward,” but he censured the outsourcing of the project in the letter, writing that he felt the University should be responsible

One week before the layoffs, Brown and members of the HSRP team conducted a research visit to Antigua and Barbuda, where they met with the prime minister and governor general to discuss expanding their research efforts in the Caribbean nation.

“Harvard’s relationship with Antigua should be something the university rediscovers and nurtures for itself, not one left to a business partnership with an external concern,” Brown wrote in his resignation letter.

In the letter, Brown wrote that he was concerned by what he described as Harvard’s lackluster response to an unfriendly political climate.

He criticized what he called the University’s inability to deal with “the intervention of some of the university’s philanthropists” and “a national government hostile to the concerns for racial reconciliation that animated the 2022 Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery.”

“Harvard has shown itself to be unwilling or unable to defend its students, faculty, and staff from politically-motivated attacks,” he wrote.

Brown declined to comment further, citing concerns that individuals “hostile” to the Legacy of Slavery initiative would use any criticisms to “undermine” the work.

A University spokesperson did not immediately respond to a re-

quest for comment. Brown is not the first person to resign from the memorial project committee in the past year. In May, English professor Tracy K. Smith and Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts Director Dan I. Byers resigned from their positions as the committee’s co-chairs, writing in their resignation letter that they felt University administrators had rushed their process and hindered descendant outreach. Brown wrote the controversies engulfing the Legacy of Slavery initiative had distracted from its original mission, which he described as “memorialization and education, supporting descendant communities, and advancing HBCU partnership.”

After the churn of departures from the Legacy of Slavery initiative, Brown wrote, the ensuing scandal shifted the focus from more important questions: “How many people did Harvard leaders enslave, and where? What were their names? What can we discover about their lives? Who are their descendants and how can we help reconnect them to the stories of their ancestors?”

“I wish all the best for your strategic plan,” he wrote to the University, referencing the process that landed on the HSRP team’s dismissal. “I only regret that I cannot formally be part of that effort.

After Settlements, Harvard Revamps Non-Discrimination Policies

includes 21 new questions and answers.

antisemitism, Islamophobia, zionism, and anti-Arab discrimination.

Harvard’s Office for Community Conduct dramatically expanded its guidance for applying the University’s Non-Discrimination and Anti-Bullying Policies and Procedures on Friday, specifying protections for Zionists and defining Islamophobia and antisemitism.

The update fulfills a key condition of two agreements that Harvard reached to settle lawsuits filed by six students from Students Against Antisemitism and the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and Jewish Americans for Fairness in Education. The NDAB “Frequently Asked Questions” webpage, which quadrupled in length on Friday, now

The page lists both “advocating genocide” and “accusing an individual of supporting genocide” based on protected characteristics alone as possible violations of the NDAB policy.

According to the updated policies, political beliefs are protected categories, and speech can be considered discriminatory harassment if it individually targets Zionists, anti-Zionists, non-Zionists, and people who support Palestinian rights.

Conduct must be both “severe or pervasive” and “so objectively offensive that it denies access to the workplace or educational environment” to be considered harassment under the policy.

The page includes six questions and answers specifically to address

The words ‘antisemitism’ and ‘antisemitic’ appear 14 times in the updated document. The word ‘racist’ appears once, and ‘racism’ does not appear at all.

Harvard also incorporated revisions agreed upon as part of a Jan. 17 resolution to a federal complaint that accused the University of failing to protect Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian students from harassment and intimidation.

The complaint — filed by the Muslim Legal Fund of America — was submitted to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in January 2024 and resolved just three days before President Donald J. Trump took office.

Upon reviewing Harvard’s NDAB policy, the OCR found that in addition to failing to respond

effectively to student complaints of a “hostile environment” based on national origin, “the University’s policies and procedures for receiving and responding to Title VI harassment appear not to be sufficient.”

Christina A. Jump, Civil Litigation Department Head at the Muslim Legal Fund of America, said that the updated FAQs do not materially change the NDAB, which were established in 2023.

“These still revert back to and rely on 2023 policies and that’s just not going to cut it,” Jump said.

The University has four months to submit an updated version of the NDAB Policies and Procedures to the OCR for approval.

Jump also said that the updated FAQ has “some very careful wordplay” and provided a larger amount of detail upon describing antisemitism in comparison to Islamophobia.

A University spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday evening.

The new NDAB Policies and Procedures FAQ page delineates that the policy protects Harvard affiliates who have faced “discriminatory disparate treatment or discriminatory harassment based on antisemitism and Islamophobia.”

Harvard officials also added the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definition of antisemitism — a key provision in the lawsuit settlements — in addition to the United Nations’ definition of Islamophobia.

University spokesperson Jason A. Newton wrote in a statement that the decision to include the definition of ‘Islamophobia’ was “consis-

tent with the University’s ongoing commitment to addressing Islamophobia in our community.”

In the lawsuit settlements, the University agreed to explicitly adopt the IHRA’s examples of antisemitism that include labeling “the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”

The FAQ page qualifies that the University will consider such examples “to the extent that those examples might be useful in determining discriminatory intent.”

The updated policy explicitly acknowledges the “different level of detail” included in the definition of Islamophobia and antisemitism, but says that the groups are protected equally. The FAQ also states that the IHRA definition for antisemitism is the definition used by the OCR.

Alexander “Shabbos” Kestenbaum, a lead plaintiff of Students Against Antisemitism — one of the two groups that filed an antisemitism lawsuit against the University — wrote in a statement that he was “delighted” by the changes.

Kestenbaum, who chose not to settle his case against Harvard, wrote that “a significant amount of what is on the NDAB list were already prohibited. When Professors and students violated them, there were no consequences.”

Kestenbaum wrote that he viewed the section that addresses Zionism as “a begrudging recognition that an attachment to the land of Israel is central to the identity of the Jewish People.”

University spokesperson Jason A. Newton wrote in a Jan. 23 statement that “the University stands strongly for reasoned dissent and the free exchange of ideas, beliefs, and opinions.” The University’s NDAB policies “make clear that harassment or discrimination against any member of the community is unacceptable,” Newton wrote.

Despite including the question “Can pure academic speech violate the Non-Discrimination Policy,” the guidelines do not explicitly address whether academic speech can violate the policy.

A separate answer asserts that controversial statements in academic work or scholarship “ordinarily” will not be violations.

“Discriminatory disparate treatment is singling out or targeting an individual(s) for less favorable treatment because of their protected category,” according to the web page.

Jump said that the academic speech answer did not reassure her that certain academic arguments on the conflict in Israel and Palestine will not be prohibited.

“That’s the only example I saw where there’s not a yes or no right afterwards,” Jump said.

The section cites examples that could violate the policies, including “applying a ‘no Zionist’ litmus test for participation in any Harvard activity” and the conspiracy that “Zionists control the media.” University officials argue the policies are consistent with the University-Wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities, do not protect affiliates from “all uncomfortable or challenging conversations,” and have been “carefully crafted” not to constrict academic freedom in the FAQ.

Wadsworth House, the second oldest building at Harvard, is located at 1341 Massachusetts Avenue. JULIAN J. GIORDANO — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

IN MEMORIAM. Har -

vard Junior Lakota Tolloak Remembered as an Energetic Mentor, Supportive Friend

BY SAMUEL A. CHURCH AND CAM N. SRIVASTAVA CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

awsar Yasin ’26 met Lako-

Kta J. Tolloak ’26 at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport while they were on the same flight to Visitas during senior year of high school.

“He was the second person I met before coming to Harvard,” said Yasin, a Crimson Editorial editor.

Throughout her freshman year, Yasin said, Tolloak was a “super comforting presence.”

She said he came up with an idea that every time they ran into each other, they would “always have to list a little win we have, even if things are tough” — wins like receiving grants, starting new jobs, or loving their dorm rooms.

“Lakota always brought such a light and an energy to whatever space that he was in,” said Hannah L. Niederriter ’26, who became friends with Tolloak during freshman year and took several premed courses with him.

Tolloak, a junior in Pforzheimer House concentrating in Integrative Biology on the premedical track, died on Jan. 17 after a brief illness. He was 21.

‘Unapologetically Himself’ Tolloak was born on Oct. 29, 2003, in Ada, Oklahoma, and raised by his mothers Charity Tolliver and Tommie Postoak. Tolloak lived in Ada his whole life before coming to Harvard as a recipient of the Gates Scholarship.

OBITUARY

Lakota Tolloak, 2003–2025

Tolloak had a “slight southern accent,” Lubniewski wrote, and enjoyed observing cultural differences between the Northeast and in his hometown. He talked about his family often and showed her photos of his nieces and nephews.

Niederriter, Tolloak’s friend and premed classmate, said Tolloak had a knack for sparking conversations and mutual trust with anyone he encountered.

“He had a way of being able to talk to anyone at any time about literally anything,” Niederriter said. “He was able to make people feel so comfortable within the first few minutes of meeting them.” Freeman, Tolloak’s high school teacher, paid Tolloak a visit while he was at Harvard, while Freeman was in Boston in the fall of 2022.

“I messaged him and I said, ‘Hey, I’m in Boston. Are you available for dinner one evening?’ And he was like ‘absolutely,’” Freeman said. Tolloak took her around Harvard’s campus, out for dinner, and to pick out a Harvard sweatshirt. Eli Johnson-Visio ’26, who met Tolloak prior to the start of freshman year, said Tolloak “was a very funny guy, always cracking jokes.” Mia A. Russ ’26 met Tolloak in an admitted students group chat in December 2021. According to her, they instantly “hit it off.”

“When I moved into college, Lakota was the first person to visit me in my dorm, helping me carry my things from the car and unpack,” Russ wrote. “We spent the whole day together.” She called Tolloak “fiery, smart, funny, and beautiful.”

As a student at Ada High School, Tolloak was active on the student council, the science club, the art club, and the math club — “every” club at school, according to his high school teacher Shawn Freeman. “He saw people, he listened to people, he engaged people,” Freeman said. “He wasn’t afraid of a challenge to try to make a difference or make an impact.”

At Harvard, Tolloak served as a Peer Advising Fellow for Harvard freshmen, mentoring 15 students living in Grays Hall. Sophia C. Scott ’25, Tolloak’s co-PAF, said Tolloak immediately made her feel at home in the entryway after she was randomly assigned to the Grays PAFing team.

“He knew so much about all the students and their interests, and it was just incredible to see him work with kids from so many different backgrounds,” Scott, a former Crimson News editor, said.

Scott said Tolloak “put a lot of thought and time” into supporting his PAFees — and planning activities for their weekly study breaks. He had the PAFs print out designs of cookies and cakes, then task their students to recreate the designs on the actual desserts.

Amanda Lubniewski, who worked with Tolloak as a proctor advising freshmen in Grays, wrote in a statement that Tolloak “was particularly adept” at mentoring first generation, LGBTQ, and Indigenous students.

“Lakota always had an eye on making our entryway and events as inclusive as possible, considering multiple perspectives and dimensions of identity,” Lubniewski added.

Chloe M. Becker ’25, who met Tolloak his freshman year and became his co-PAF the following year, said Tolloak “was just so unapologetically himself in every space he was in and made people feel okay being themselves.”

Tolloak’s also joined the Radcliffe Institute’s Emerging Leaders Program, in which Harvard undergraduates mentor high school sophomores in the Boston area. Sherry Sklarwitz, the ELP’s director, said Tolloak was part of the “core fabric” of the program.

Lubniewski — who also serves as a student engagement specialist at the Radcliffe Institute — described how Tolloak immediately had an impact on the ELP program.

“Lakota told us that he had an idea for something different than your usual name-game activities, but that it would be fun,” Lubniewski wrote. “We cleared away the chairs, turned up the music, and Lakota got on stage at the front of the room — and started teaching everyone a choreographed line dance.”

“It was such a hit, that we asked Lakota to do it again during his second year of ELP,” Lubniewski added. “This year, we’ll have to dance in his honor.”

A Friend Who Could ‘Talk to Anyone’ Lubniewski wrote that she bonded with Tolloak when he repeatedly locked himself out of his room in his first week at Harvard.

“I would hear a knock on my door, open it, and find Lakota, no shoes, no keys, and no cell phone, shaking his head and laughing, ‘Amandaaa, I may have locked myself out of my room again. Can I call Securitas from your phone?’” Lubniewski wrote. While Tolloak waited to be let back into his room, Lubniewski sat with him in her living room. She grew to see him as a vivid conversationalist and a leader who attended peers’ shows and games, was an active participant in the entryway’s groupchat, and organized activities for the entryway.

“He was equally capable of helping me with my biology homework as he was teaching me how to put on eyeliner,” Russ wrote. “He truly was an extraordinary person.” Tolloak — an advocate for first-generation and low-income peers and leader in Harvard’s queer space — had his eyes set on being a physician, a role that many said would have suited him well.

“He would have been an incredible doctor,” Johnson-Visio said. The mark Tolloak left on students at Harvard and beyond will not soon be forgotten, Lubniewski said.

“Across these communities, I can think of so many people who deeply felt ‘I belong here’ because of Lakota’s presence. Lakota has been such an integral part of these multiple communities, and it’s hard to wrap my mind around the fact that he’s gone,” Lubniewski wrote.

“We were so lucky to know him,” she added.

samuel.church@thecrimson.com cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com

How Harvard Chooses Its Next College Dean, Khurana’s Successor

BY SAMUEL A. CHURCH AND CAM N. SRIVASTAVA

More than four months after Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana announced he would step down at the end of the academic year, the search for his successor is entering a new stage as the Faculty of Arts and Sciences targets an announcement in the spring. In the fall, FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra and her 10-member faculty advisory committee gathered input from students and faculty during three public town halls. She also attended a monthly meeting of the faculty deans — professors who live in and advise students in the College’s 12 undergraduate Houses — to gather their input on challenges facing the next dean and qualities they should possess. But Hoekstra’s next steps will happen in private. Before Harvard’s next Dean of the College is announced, she and the committee must narrow the list of candidates. If Hoekstra does not break with her predecessors, she will interview finalists — historically a single-digit list. Her appointment will be “subject to approval” by a committee that includes University President Alan M. Garber ’76 and select members of the Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers, according to FAS spokesperson James Chisholm. Hoekstra has indicated that the FAS plans to select the next dean well before the end of the

spring term to maximize overlap between Khurana’s term and his successor’s.

So far, Hoekstra’s process has closely resembled the last College dean search, conducted by then-FAS Dean Michael D. Smith in 2013. Smith’s search, which ended with Khurana’s appointment, finished roughly nine months after his predecessor announced her plans to resign. With the current search now entering its second semester, the FAS has yet to provide any updates on its progress.

Chisholm declined to comment on the ongoing search.

This year’s search has granted Hoekstra and her advisors a luxury their predecessors did not have: time.

In 2013, Harvard appointed Donald Pfister as interim dean days after former College Dean Evelynn M. Hammonds resigned following revelations that she had secretly authorized searches of a resident dean’s email accounts. Similarly, during the search in 2007 that led to Hammonds’s appointment, David R. Pilbeam was made interim dean only two months after former College Dean Benedict H. Gross stepped down.

Unlike his predecessors, who resigned suddenly and left the College under interim leaders, Khurana gave Harvard a school-year long notice of his intention to step down in July 2025.

Khurana had originally planned to depart the role in spring 2024, following his com -

pletion of two standard fiveyear terms. But senior administrators persuaded Khurana to stay on amid turnover as Claudine Gay left the FAS deanship to assume the University presidency.

Given more than a year of advance notice, Hoekstra has the chance to make a seamless transition — with time to prepare for a search, and without the extra step of appointing an interim dean.

One week after Khurana announced his plans to step down, Hoekstra began soliciting confidential feedback over email from students and faculty. By mid-October, Hoekstra had formed a ten-person faculty advisory committee to aid her search.

Hoekstra and the advisory committee scheduled three town halls in undergraduate dorms to discuss the search. Though Hoekstra advertised snacks for attendees, only about 20 students showed up.

In addition to public town halls, Eliot House Faculty Dean David F. Elmer ’98 said Hoekstra discussed the search at a regular meeting of the faculty deans in November.

“Dean Hoekstra attended one of those meetings to collect our input about the search and in a very general way,” Elmer said. “We weren’t discussing candidates.”

Up to this point, Hoekstra’s process for selecting the next College dean has been almost identical to Smith’s approach in 2013. Following the

formation of an advisory committee, Smith began his search by soliciting information from students, faculty, and staff at public discussions around Harvard. According to a faculty member familiar with past searches, the information from those public discussions was used to help narrow a long list of more than 50 potential candidates down to fewer than 30 names that were then brought to the advisory committee.

The committee then worked with Smith to shorten the list to five or six contenders before conducting official interviews. Each interview included a different selection of committee members, along with Smith. The list was then shrunk again and finalists were selected for second-round interviews.

Three months after the last public town hall, Smith and the committee landed on Khurana. After then-University President Drew Gilpin Faust and members of the governing boards granted their approval, Khurana was finally announced as the next College dean on Jan. 22, 2014 — days before spring classes began.

samuel.church@thecrimson.com cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com

Lakota Tolloak speaks at Radcliffe Institute’s Emerging Leaders Program, through which Harvard students mentor local high schoolers. COURTESY OF KEVIN GRADY

Lakota Tolloak poses for a photo with the PAFs and proctor, Amanda Lubniewski, for the Grays West entryway. COURTESY OF AMANDA LUBNIEWSKI

STUDENT LIFE

‘Baffling’ Winthrop Dining Hall Odor Persists

MYSTERY ODOR. Since the 1970s, Harvard’s Winthrop House has been battling a foul odor with little success.

BY HIRAL M.

Winthrop House management undertook an extensive effort over winter break to sniff out the source of a years-long odor permeating the dining hall — but when students returned, so did the smell.

Though a response team went to lengths to locate the cause of the notorious scent — inspecting the ventilation system, sealing the basement crawl space, and enacting a smoke test on the plumbing — their effort’s results were still inconclusive.

“While our interventions showed promise of resolution (no smell during break), it seems that now that the house is fully occupied again, the odor issue has returned,” Nancy Hodge, Associate Director of Residential Facilities for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, wrote in a Thursday email to all Winthrop residents.

Winthrop’s odor issues trace back to the 1970s, when a sewer system stoppage resulted in a pungent predicament. Complaints of the smell have only grown since then.

“I have been here for a little over three years and during that time the order in the Win-

throp House DH has been one of our most challenging facilities issues,” Hodge wrote in the Housewide email.

The odor response team will proceed with a review of “all ventilation features” and “additional camera work to the city main sewer connection,” according to Hodge. College spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo declined to comment on the anticipated timeline for the odor review.

“We want our Winthrop

House residents to know that we have done extensive work to address the issue and will continue to do so until resolved,” Hodge wrote in an email to The Crimson.

But as the situation remains unresolved, Winthrop residents are left to cope with the persistent odor in their House dining hall.

Bank E. O. Ayeketi-Daniel ’25 described the smell as a “nebulous, unexpected thing you have to get used to,” though he said it also smells of “sewage, and then

sometimes there’s odors of veggies and fruit.”

Students were split on whether or not Winthrop’s efforts to improve the stench were effective.

“It is baffling, it’s constant, and yet there seems to be no solution,” Ayeketi-Daniel said. “I will not miss the odors of Winthrop once I have graduated.”

Emily Ruiz ’25 said she noticed lavender air fresheners placed around the dining hall last spring, but added that they were

not effective in resolving the issue.

“I don’t think it’s enough. This problem has been persisting for years,” Ruiz said. “They definitely need to invest more.”

In response to a request for comment, Palumbo wrote that “this is ongoing work,” adding that Hodge provided “as much detail as is available” in her email to the House.

Some students said that the odor had recently diminished

thanks to mitigation efforts, adopting other, nicer fragrances in its stead.

Winthrop “smells very fresh right now,” Joanna O. Osaghae-Nosa ’27 said. “I don’t know what they’ve done specifically, but I hope they keep doing it because it’s working.”

“I’m a senior in Winthrop and I can remember coming as a sophomore and thinking that the smell was really bad at some points,” Jose M. Rivera ’25 said. “I do think that they’ve sprayed some cologne or something along those lines, and it has improved.” While Jason M.C. Rodrigues ’27 acknowledged the smell, he said that “you just get nose-blind to it eventually.”

Some students even said they did not detect any odor whatsoever — like Irati Evworo Diez ’25’26, who calls herself a “Winthrop smell denier.”

“I’m from Spain, and I grew up in France,” Diez said. “My palate was developed on French cheeses, including Muenster, so perhaps I’m just not sensitive to pungent odors in the way others are.” While Diez once “caught a whiff” of an odor, she said that she primarily “feels like a flat Earther in a world of round Earthers.” Despite the widespread disagreement, several students expressed gratitude for the efforts being made to rectify the smell. “I’m just happy they’re trying to make a change,” Cael J. Berg ’25 said.

QuestBridge Partnership Receives Mixed Reactions

student demographics.

Harvard College will host Emmy-winning comedian Jordan Klepper on Saturday night in an event promising both humor and serious dialogue on politics as the University faces continued pressure from the White House.

The conversation with Klepper is the Intellectual Vitality Initiative’s first sponsored speaker event of the semester and comes less than two weeks after President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Klepper is a correspondent on The Daily Show who spent several years chronicling conservatives’ reactions to Trump’s first presidential term. In a Tuesday interview with The Crimson, Klepper said he is excited to come to Harvard to gauge whether students have observed “emboldened conservative takes on campus,” noting that he has not been to a college campus since Trump’s re-election.

“There’s a lot that’s happened on a federal level in the last week and a half,” Klepper said.

“I think a lot of people are taking a step back and trying to see,

‘How is this affecting people on a more localized level?’” The event — co-sponsored by the Dean of Students Office and the Intellectual Vitality Ini -

tiative — will consist of a guided question-and-answer session moderated by Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana and audience questions.

Though Klepper said he has not closely monitored responses by the University to Trump’s recent executive orders — which include mandates to cut Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs at institutions including Harvard and an attempted federal funding freeze — he said he is an “open book” regarding the topics of Saturday’s discussion.

Intellectual Vitality Student Board co-chair Ariel F. Kohn ’26 said the student board — which consists of 11 students — was not involved in the decision to invite Klepper to Harvard.

Still, Kohn said the student board has been tasked with making the College’s commitment to intellectual vitality more accessible to students.

“One of the student advisory board’s charges is to make intellectual vitality less of an order from on high — something that’s inaccessible, something that only has bearing in the classroom — and to make it more translatable to the student experience,” Kohn said.

The Intellectual Vitality Initiative, championed by Khurana, was made public last spring amid intense student divisions over activism surrounding Israel’s war in Gaza and has since expanded its programming to

College-wide events including a faculty-led dialogue series and freshman orientation sessions.

Kohn said the Intellectual Vitality Initiative’s future events “will definitely be much more serious and rigorous in tone,” but that she hoped the light-hearted spirit of the event with Klepper “resonates” with attendees.

“This is just one facet of intellectual vitality,” Kohn said. “Part of what we want to show is that we don’t need to force these kinds of conversations to happen.”

College spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo did not specify the focus of Saturday’s conversation, but wrote that the DSO is “committed to facilitating robust conversations around important topics and bringing together voices from across a series of perspectives.”

The event will take place in Sanders Theatre and is open to all Harvard ID holders.

While Kohn said she thinks the initiative’s “traditional approach is not going to be to have comedians,” she anticipates the conversation will be “really fun.”

“Our hope is that Jordan Klepper will — through his comedy but also perspective on being a comedian talking about very serious issues — engender that spirit in attendees,” Kohn said.

Harvard affiliates expressed excitement about the University’s new partnership with QuestBridge’s National College Match program, though some held reservations about its impact on the diversity of incoming classes.

The partnership, which was announced Jan. 23, is the latest addition Harvard has made to its recruitment efforts in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down affirmative action in 2023. Harvard was the last Ivy League school to join the program, which is designed to help low-income students gain full scholarships to top schools.

Many students expressed praise about how this partnership will help Harvard increase the socioeconomic diversity of the student body.

Tiffany V. Tran ’28 said she thought the partnership would have a “positive” impact on Harvard’s incoming classes.

“I feel like just expanding a number of opportunities to students who may not have had the chance to attend an institution like this — that’s a great way to increase diversity,” Tran said.

“I fully support it,” she add -

ed. Shakira Ali ’28, a former QuestBridge finalist who did not match with any of her topranked schools, said the program would make applying to Harvard more accessible for low-income students.

“There’s a lot of talented people out there, and people just don’t apply because they have a lot of financial constraints,” Ali said. “I think it’ll be good for both Harvard and all the QuestBridge scholars out there.” College admissions experts had mixed opinions about whether the partnership would encourage more low-income students to apply to Harvard.

Anthony A. Jack, an associate professor of higher education leadership at Boston University who researches the inequalities in the college admissions process, said QuestBridge will magnify Harvard’s outreach efforts in underrepresented areas.

“An admissions office, even one as big as Harvard, cannot go to every city in every state across the country,” Jack said.

“But when you are able to partner with places that are at strategic nodes across the country, then you can amplify your message in very different ways.”

But other experts still cast doubt on whether this move will actually change Harvard’s

“I don’t know that Questbridge could help Harvard because Harvard is not an unknown quantity,” Akil Bello, an education policy consultant, said. “There are no students who could conceivably be admitted who have not heard of Harvard in all likelihood.” It is also possible for students who fit Harvard’s criteria to get a full scholarship to the College even if they do not get matched by QuestBridge. Though Questbridge requires applicants to have a family income of $65,000 or less to participate in the program, Harvard currently provides cost-free attendance for students with a family income of $85,000 or less per year.

“Harvard is not hurting in the category of name recognition or getting people to know who it is,” Jack said. “But Harvard is hurting in the sense of: can I afford it? How will I be treated there? Will I be supported?”

“Overall, I definitely think it’s a positive,” Angel A. Rabines ’28 said.

“Long ago, Harvard should have been added to QuestBridge, but better late than never,” she added.

BY CASSIDY M. CHENG AND CLAIRE T. GRUMBACHER CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

Comedian Jordan Klepper speaks at an Institute of Politics event in 2017. Harvard will host Klepper in a Sanders Theatre event Saturday. MARGARET F. ROSS — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

EDITORIAL PACKAGE

Harvard Settles, Eight Affiliates React

The Settlement Is a Start — But Only a Start — To Restoring Harvard.

BY LAWRENCE H. SUMMERS

Harvard’s settlement last week of two lawsuits alleging antisemitic discrimination surely does not represent the end of overdue efforts by the University to combat antisemitism. To amend Winston Churchill at a key juncture during World War II, it does not even represent the beginning of the end of the University’s efforts to right the ship after the failures of the last academic year. But it may — if our leaders act with boldness — be seen as the end of the beginning of the University’s restoration.

Harvard’s official embrace of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which recognizes the many overlaps between antisemitism and anti-Zionism and condemns the singling out of Israel as antisemitic, is a historic step forward for Harvard and for higher education. And the commitment of the University to enter into partnerships with an Israeli university, is a welcome and decisive rebuke of the morally compromised Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions idea. But rhetoric and good intentions are not enough. Harvard must take inevitably controversial steps if it is to meet the challenge of campus antisemitism.

Both those who support and oppose the settlement exaggerate what has been agreed. The settlement, properly interpreted, does not de facto prohibit antisemitic speech — or any other kind of speech. The University generally follows First Amendment principles, and the Supreme Court has been crystal clear that free speech can be hate speech. Instead, Harvard has appropriately clarified what it regards as antisemitic speech and what will be treated as prejudice in cases where elements of bullying and harassment are present.

Furthermore, the IHRA definition of antisemitism is not an attack on pro-Palestinian speech or criticism of Israel. Both are totally legitimate. What becomes problematic is when observers celebrate violent terror against Jews, deny the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination, or treat Israel as the world’s worst oppressor nation while turning a blind eye to other countries. I am very sympathetic to advocacy for the Palestinians but worry about antisemitism when advocates are unwilling to recognize any culpability on the part of any state other than Israel.

For decades Harvard’s leaders have been vigorous in condemning and rooting out racism, sexism, and homophobia. A discriminatory environment will continue to exist until the University is equally aggressive with respect to antisemitism. That has not happened because the constituency at Harvard for views that are antisemitic, in effect if not intent, is far larger than for other forms of prejudice. To decisively address antisemitism, Harvard must now answer three questions.

First, will there be enforcement of University policies against student protests that do not conform to time, place, and manner restrictions?

The record of the last year is very troubling. When students engaged in a clearly impermissible occupation of University Hall, a dean offered the protesters burritos. When Harvard College students were barred from graduation for their participation in the unauthorized occupation of Harvard Yard last spring, faculty members attempted to engage in a kind of juror nullification of University policies by voting to confer the protestors’ degrees (indeed, not all Havard schools even attempted discipline according to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce’s recent report). And when the University finally sanctioned participants in that protest, it doubled back barely a month later by shamefully allowing 11 of 13 protesting seniors to graduate.

Most recently, the University has backed off of the policies it stated with respect to chalking and failed to publicly impose anything more than symbolic sanctions on those violating the rules by using the library as a protest venue. Ultimately, accountability for maintaining a nondiscriminatory environment rests, under law, with the governing boards. And indeed, the initial refusal of The Corporation to grant degrees to student protesters whose penalty had been overturned by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences was a welcome but isolated step. Our leaders must tell us why, given recent history, we should believe that central administration policies are anything more than feckless requests.

Second, will the University actively police antisemitic statements made, not by its community members, but made with its apparent imprimatur? To say that Harvard must permit even hate speech by community members is not to absolve it of responsibility for the words and deeds of those who speak and act with its administrative authority. To date, the University has failed to publicly address antisemitic content — as I judge it by the IHRA definition — promulgated by multiple university centers and programs. Harvard has continued partnerships with Birzeit University, even as many members of its student body cheer on Hamas terrorists and its administration proudly discriminates against Israeli scholars by boycotting their institutions. It has extended recognition as eligible for University funding to student groups who apparently celebrate the Hamas attacks on Israel.

The central administration has had no policy of publicly withdrawing from scholarly organizations like the American Studies Association that are currently engaged in boycotts of Israel, even while other universities have severed ties. The Dean of the Divinity School in her convocation address used the politically freighted term Nakba to

describe Israel’s founding and worse yet spoke of it in parallel structure with the slave trade and the holocaust. (Recall that the IHRA definition of antisemitism is very harsh on statements comparing Israel and the Nazis.)

Only a few years ago, the University took the position that sexism was so serious an issue that students who joined a single-sex social club should not be eligible to receive a fellowship recommendation letter. Surely it is reasonable to expect the university administrative apparatus to ensure that it itself does not engage in antisemitic rhetoric or actions.

Third, will the University’s leadership — through their own words and through those they invite to the campus, temporarily or permanently — be a source of moral clarity?

This is certainly no violation of the University’s institutional voice policies, as it goes directly to upholding fundamental community values. And indeed, it is a Harvard tradition.

University President James B. Conant, Class of 1914, eloquently called on the Harvard community to uphold a commitment to truth and freedom when the Nazis invaded Poland. When a small group of Harvard students announced their intention to hold a Black Mass that was profoundly offensive to Catholic students, then-President Drew G. Faust recognized their right of free speech but condemned their moral judgement. On many occa-

sions University leaders have spoken out vigorously to label and condemn what they saw as racist or sexist free speech by community members. Last year’s Commencement speaker claimed that she was “called antisemitic by power and money” — in itself an antisemitic dog whistle — while a Harvard Rabbi was driven to walk off the stage and no University official took responsibility. Despite strong rhetorical commitments to bringing more balance to campus debates about the Middle East, I receive far more notifications of events where progressives and harsh critics of Israel are holding forth than those where Israel is being defended. I deplore the heavy-handed and inappropriate efforts of the Trump administration to dictate what Harvard studies and teaches. The University must do what it thinks is right and not try to placate politicians when academic freedom is at stake. But the legitimate desire for autonomy cannot be an excuse for complacency or drift on moral issues. Yes, in its normal, cautious way the University is taking constructive steps to address antisemitism and is fortunate in the wisdom and skill of its president and provost. But ending the crisis will, I am convinced, require using the recent agreement as a springboard for greatly accelerated action.

–Lawrence H. Summers is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and served as the 27th president of Harvard University.

I Am a Jewish Student. Harvard’s Settlement Is Bad News.

BY CHARLOTTE P. RITZ-JACK

News broke this week that Harvard will adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definition of antisemitism as part of a settlement in two lawsuits accusing the University of tolerating discrimination against Jews. Rather than delivering a principled response to campus tensions, the IHRA definition promotes a hollow, and thus dangerous, standard for both the University and its affiliates.

I am concerned by instances of antisemitism and discrimination against Israeli students at Harvard. But I, alongside other Jewish peers, don’t believe the problem is as extreme as the University’s loudest critics have made it out to be, nor am I convinced that this settlement is actually about antisemitism. Instead, it is part of a larger right-wing effort to attack higher education under the auspices of challenging antisemitism. Indeed, the settlement comes on the first full day of the Trump administration, which has already threatened to cut Harvard’s $600 million in federal funding. Others have already correctly noted that the settlement indicates Harvard’s worrying willingness to

twist its standards under the politicized pressures of just a few affiliates rather than defend its intellectual environment. As someone who studies Middle Eastern politics, I am worried that necessary conversations in the classroom will no longer be possible. Ironic, considering the University is pouring money into intellectual vitality initiatives and even boasted about them the same day the settlement was announced. Second, and more significantly, Harvard has adopted an intellectually vacuous definition that not only muddles what speech is considered immoral, but now that which is subject to disciplinary sanction. The IHRA definition will not defend Jewish students against serious antisemitism.

That definition reads as follows: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

Defining antisemitism as an amorphous “certain perception of Jews,” renders the term potentially applicable to, well, any understanding of Jews. A telling source of ambiguity in the IHRA definition

is “may” — antisemitism “may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” It therefore may also be any other expression about Jews. Even though it then outlines where versions of “rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism” could appear, this text does nothing to further narrow what those manifestations are.

Technically, then, it seems any perception of Jews rhetorically or physically expressed can be antisemitic. “Jews have a tradition of studying.” “There are a good number of Jews in New York City.” Try any discussion or scholarship around Jews, and it could qualify.

The next portion of the definition doesn’t get more specific: Antisemitism can be directed towards “Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property.” All individuals are either Jewish or non-Jewish.

The IHRA seems to know its definition is weak. Rather than producing a different one, though, it lists 11 accompanying examples of antisemitism that Harvard has also agreed to adopt. I am deeply offended by some and Harvard certainly should be. But others, which outline criticisms of Israel, dangerously designated legitimate discourse as discrimination against Jews.

The thin definition coupled with these precisely chosen examples allows Harvard to haphazardly levy charges of antisemitism across diverse contexts. Now, the University can punish reasonable and valid criticism of Israel, including that which Jewish students initiate, as analogous to genuine targeting of Jewish students. These criticisms aren’t only important to dissect and debate here — at an institution of higher education promising to expand student perspectives — but certainly are for the sake of holding Israel, like any other country, accountable for its policies. If the past year has taught us anything, it’s that people have very different intuitions about what is, and is not, antisemitic. Jews ourselves cannot agree on what constitutes antisemitism. Harvard’s adoption of the IHRA definition does nothing to end this uncertainty — indeed, it exacerbates it. For a University that sits at the helm of higher education — and claims “truth” as its motto — this definition mixes lazy, poorly written prose to threaten important student and faculty voices.

–Charlotte P. Ritz-Jack, a former Crimson News editor, is a Social Studies concentrator in Pforzheimer House.

All It Takes To Censor Speech at Harvard Is a Lawsuit

BY TOMMY BARONE

Harvard announced today that it has allowed the plaintiffs behind two obviously weak lawsuits to dictate how it regulates speech and conduct critical of Israel. Over roughly the past year, two different groups of Jewish students have filed suits alleging Harvard’s response to widespread Israel-critical speech and conduct on campus, along with some isolated incidents of antisemitism, discriminated against Jewish and Israeli students in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. That the University settled the cases is unremarkable. It did not acknowledge any wrongdoing, and, like many large institutions, it routinely settles civil suits to avoid the headaches that come with a public trial. What’s concerning is that the settlement makes a major, possibly unprecedented change in University policy that will repress criticism of Israel and invites further legal challenges that would erode the status of free speech and academic freedom at Harvard.

As part of the settlement, Harvard will adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definition of antisemitism, which categorizes a wide

swath of criticisms levied against Israel as ipso facto antisemitic. Under the IHRA definition, non-exhaustively, criticisms of Israel construed to “[deny] the Jewish people their right to self-determination” or judge it by a standard other than that “expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” represent antisemitism.

These provisions leave much up to interpretation, but there’s reason to believe Harvard will interpret them expansively. For one thing, the settlement stipulates that the University will also embrace the IHRA’s examples of antisemitism, which include calling Israel’s existence a “racist endeavor.” Anyone who’s paid attention to recent Israel-Palestine discourse at Harvard could tell you that Israel’s stauncher defenders on campus and beyond believe most criticisms of Israel fall into one of those categories — and will redouble pressure on the University to punish them as such.

Reasonable people can surely disagree over what constitutes antisemitism, and it’s perfectly legitimate for an individual to prefer the IHRA definition. But it’s just as plain to me that it is inappropriate to a pluralistic, liberal institution tolerant of a wide range of viewpoints and dedicated to open engagement.

The IHRA definition, enforced as the litigants probably intend, would slam the door shut on a range of seri-

ous and legitimate criticisms that many Jewish people at Harvard tolerate and have even themselves levelled. It could discourage important ethical inquiry into Israel’s foundation and present conduct, including as to the permissibility of establishing an ethnostate and whether Israel is engaging in apartheid or ethnic cleansing.

To see the problems the IHRA definition poses for such discussions more clearly, it’s worth considering some analogous cases. Is it legitimate to call all white Americans racist? To say that Saudi Arabia mistreats women? To accuse the Catholic church of cruelty to gay people?

Each position is to some extent controversial and closely identified with a Title VI-protected group that could claim it bigoted and demand a definition of bigotry that declares it categorically off-limits. Certain instantiations of each criticism would be bigoted under most reasonable definitions. But it is not obvious that these criticisms are necessarily or usually bigoted, don’t add to campus discourse, or should be eliminated by the powers that be in this community of very intelligent adults.

Imposing such a sweeping definition in an area of such vigorous disagreement is a shocking abrogation of the University’s commitments to free speech and academic freedom. Ironically, in an indication of how much Harvard conceded to the litigants, it also exceptionalizes antisemitism: As far as I can tell, none of Harvard’s rules governing free speech, bullying and harassment, or student conduct at the College even mention — much less define — racism, sexism, or any other ism, relying instead on more uncomplicated categories like identity-based bullying, discrimination, or disrespect.

Most worryingly, with this move, Harvard has signaled that upset constituents — and outside groups backing them — can bring thinly-supported, mostly-anonymous legal complaints against the University to reshape policies at the heart of the academic mission.

Harvard has been a contentious place since October

7th. It has seen much more protest than usual, some of it featuring chants and signs I have myself criticized as insensitive and counterproductive, and it has borne witness to a few appalling incidents of antisemitism (that mostly received swift, widespread condemnation, it should be noted). But a bastion of antisemitism Harvard was and is not. What the two legal complaints frame as “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” harassment — one of the standards for the Title VI claim that would have proceeded to trial — fall into one of two categories: Rare and isolated incidents not characteristic of the overall climate at Harvard and anti-Israel speech from classes, protests, and elsewhere that — odious or not — is far from harassment.

Some Jewish students undoubtedly experience Harvard as hostile and threatening lately. I know people who do, and I hear and sympathize with their fear. Still, I believe that the concerns about antisemitism are massively overstated — a position shared by many on campus, including, again, many of my

This Holocaust Remembrance Day, Remember Gaza Too

BY VIOLET T.M. BARRON

Growing up, I was consumed by the scale of the Holocaust’s destruction. Most everything I was taught — algebra, Mandarin, the structure of an essay — came easily to me. The Holocaust was one of the few things I couldn’t wrap my mind around. The more I tried to understand its evil, the more opaque it grew. So, on birthdays and holidays, I asked for hints in the form of stories and eventually received enough to fill a row in my childhood bookshelf. “Number the Stars,” “The Girl in the Blue Coat,” “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” Still, I remained baffled as to how my world — in which I existed freely as a Jew — was once a world where Jews were killed for being Jewish. I have spent my whole life wondering what exactly that means — to be Jewish. Contained within the question is another which has haunted me for nearly as long. How could people have hated Jews so much that they murdered them by the millions?

Last week, in its settlement of two antisemitism lawsuits, Harvard adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism,

established a new partnership with an unnamed Israeli university, and effectively declared “Zionist” a protected identity. Others have aptly critiqued the timing of the settlement: Coming on Trump’s second day in office, its terms scream spinelessness and an alarming acquiescence to a right-wing, anti-intellectual agenda. Peers have rightly denounced the IHRA definition of antisemitism for its vagueness and potential to stifle speech.

Yet the most concerning aspect of the settlement is neither the IHRA definition’s threats nor flaws. Rather, it is what the settlement, taken as a whole, reveals. Fifteen months into Israel’s annihilation of Gaza, Harvard has chosen to tie itself to Israel, shield certain criticisms of the state, and align itself more closely with Zionism, its founding ideology.

The University’s full-throated embrace of the Zionist project is not surprising. It was foreshadowed by an institutional Palestine exception, repeatedly demonstrated in the administration’s disproportionate discipline. In 2019, $86,625 of Harvard’s endowment was linked to the Israeli military; last winter, a Harvard Management Company executive took part in a trip designed to express solidarity with Israel. Harvard’s longstanding allegiance to Israel is no secret.

Harvard’s redoubled commitment to Israel and Zionism comes at a time when Israel has been interna-

tionally accused of genocide. The decision is not lost on anyone who understands the weight of genocide — and of the Holocaust.

The capital “H” Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored extermination of six million Jews. It is, without a doubt, one of the single worst events history has witnessed. It severed countless family trees and entrenched deep, existential fear in Jews worldwide. For many, it serves as the reference point for all we have endured since.

Yet when we close our eyes and picture the Holocaust as a singular, exceptional evil, we become willfully blind to the world around us, in which present-day holocausts are unfolding. We ignore the genocide in Gaza, even as it is broadcast live on our Instagram pages and television screens. “Never again,” a promise for a world free of genocide, devolves into denial — even justification — of a genocidal reality.

The irony is piercing. Israel, most of all, should know the weight and meaning of “holocaust.” Which makes it all the more insidious that it is Israel who executes the holocaust of our time.

I compare the holocaust in Gaza to the Holocaust in Europe just as others have compared the Israeli occupation of Palestine to South African Apartheid. We do

not draw these parallels because they are perfect; we do so precisely because they are blunt. When all other options have been exhausted, it is blunt force alone that will awaken us from the dream that history does not repeat itself.

For parallels — shocking and painful as they may be — are not meant to diminish one tragedy, but to instill the urgency necessary to prevent another.

I no longer need to open a book to understand the depths of the hate that fueled the Holocaust. Echoes of it ring loudly throughout Israel’s persecution of Palestinian people and occupation of Palestinian land. Israeli settlers treat the West Bank as Lebensraum; under Israel’s blockade, Gaza has long been likened to a ghetto. Today, each of us now bears witness to the holocaust Israel commits in Gaza.

Yesterday, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the world paid tribute to the victims and survivors of the Holocaust. It’s high time for us to remember the victims and survivors of the holocaust in Gaza too — even if Harvard wants us to forget them.

– Violet T.M. Barron ’26, a Crimson Editorial Comp Director and Associate Editorial editor, is a Social Studies concentrator in Adams House and an organizer with Harvard Jews for Palestine, Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine, and the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee.

BY CHARLES M. COVIT

After a brutal year for Jewish students at Harvard, there is finally a glimmer of hope. Just one day after President Trump’s inauguration, Harvard settled two lawsuits accusing the University of mishandling antisemitism. The University will now take some critical, commendable steps forward, including adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism.

While the adoption of the IHRA definition is an important symbolic step, given both the timing of the settlements and Harvard’s unwillingness to seriously confront antisemitism in the past, we shouldn’t assume all is right on campus.

Harvard’s decision caused significant backlash, but upon hearing the news, I thought back to my time as a freshman living in Harvard Yard and felt relief.

Then — as now — it was not the chants of “globalize the Intifada” themselves that kept me up at night, but rather that student and faculty groups seemed intent on dismissing or denying such antisemitism plaguing our campus.

As former visiting Harvard professor Dara Horn ’99 precisely explained in the Wall Street Journal, “‘intifada’ simply means ‘uprising.’” But as she argues, symbols and terms can take on contextual meaning. “‘Sieg Heil’ simply means ‘Hail victory,’ and Confederate flags are simply regional symbols,” she notes.

As justification for why anti-Israel chants are benign, we are told time and again that anti-Zionism does not equate to antisemitism. But as history demonstrates, anti-Zionism has been a thinly veiled version of antisemitism dating back to the persecution of Soviet Jews. In the 1980s, the KGB’s Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public released propaganda with titles like

“The Criminal Alliance of Zionism and Nazism,” linking Zionism to humanity’s worst evils, including racism, genocide, colonialism and apartheid. Some material even pulled from Mein Kampf.

The consequences of the Soviets’ ideology were real. Soviet Jews were arrested and sent to prison camps, on charges of “ties with the Government and Zionist circles of Israel.” 20,000 Jews were expelled from Communist Poland after party leader Władysław Gomułka now infamous 1967 speech railing against “Zionists.” The speech did not even include the word “Jew.”

As Izabella Tabarovsky, a scholar of Soviet and leftist antisemitism, puts it, “claiming that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are not the same may make for an interesting intellectual exercise. What happens in practice is another matter.”

The IHRA definition of antisemitism does not equate all anti-Zionism with antisemitism, but it does assert that calling Israel a racist or Nazi state is antisemitic. Given the historical background, Harvard’s adoption of the definition was an imperative.

Despite this step forward, I remain skeptical. Harvard has not spoken out until now. So, do I believe the University when, right after President Trump is sworn in, it suddenly announces its intention to reverse course? Not entirely.

For one, it appears Harvard did not discipline the students who stood in front of Hillel and chanted, “Zionists not welcome here.” Harvard seemingly chose not to expel the two students facing criminal charges of assault and battery for an alleged their attack on an Israeli student at a pro-Palestinian demonstration. And even after Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine shared a blatantly antisemitic cartoon on Instagram – featuring a hand adorned with a Star of David and a dollar sign holding a noose around what appears to be one Arab and one Black man – the perpetrators did not face consequences.

The preliminary recommendations released this past summer by Harvard’s vaunted Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism border on the laughable. The word “Zionist” does not appear a single time; there is not even an explicit mention of the attacks on October 7th, nor the anti-Israel protests that plagued our campus in their aftermath.

The report did, however, stress the importance of properly labeling pork products in the dining hall, and it offered a useful Jewish calendar and accompanying explanations of the holidays. Such accommodations are merely performative.

More substantive change could involve addressing Harvard’s plummeting Jewish enrollment. Harvard’s Jewish population is precipitously low, dropping to 5.4 percent of the Class of 2027, according to The Crimson’s freshman survey. Even after anti-Jewish admissions policies were implemented in the 1920s, the percentage

JULIAN J. GIORDANO— CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

JULIAN J. GIORDANO— CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

Harvard Asked to Increase City Payment

The city hopes to increase Harvard’s payments in alignment with the University’s financial growth since the initial signing of the agreement.

Tto the city.

he city of Cambridge called on Harvard to increase their optional municipal payments at a city council meeting Monday night — after failing to reach a new agreement with the University by the end-of-year deadline.

The current Payment in Lieu of Taxes program, which replaces the property taxes that Harvard is exempt from paying, is set to expire in early June. A failure to reach an agreement with Harvard could result in Cambridge losing $4.7 million in annual voluntary payments. While the city is still in active negotiations with the University, Cambridge City Manager Yi-An Huang ’05 said that the offer that the University made was “not yet” high enough for the city to agree to the contract.

The PILOT program asks large, tax-exempt nonprofits in the city to voluntarily pay a portion of what they would otherwise pay in property taxes to help supplement the city’s budget.

“When we originally signed our agreement, the University had an operating budget of $2.5 billion and an endowment of 22.6 billion,” Huang said. “20 years later, the University’s budget is now more than twice as big, at $6.4 billion, and the endowment has more than doubled to $53 billion.”

In 2004, Harvard signed a 50year PILOT agreement that allowed the city to terminate the agreement in 20 years — at the end of 2023. The University and the city agreed to a one-year extension of the original contract and negotiated throughout 2024 but could not come to an agreement, which led to the termination of the PILOT program at the end of the year.

While Harvard has no legal obligation to participate in PILOT payments, their “voluntary agreement is based on the university’s commitment to be part of this community and part of finding funding for the things that are really important,” Huang said.

“We’ve got to get this thing done, and if we don’t get it done, then what is at risk is the existing agreement and the funding level that the University was already committed to in the prior agreement,” Huang said.

At Monday’s meeting, City Councilors also discussed the need for Harvard to increase its graduate student housing to ease the housing burden in areas around Harvard.

“Not only do they have to build

more, but

jack.reardon@thecrimson.com shawn.boehmer@thecrimson.com

HLS Professor Criticizes Trump’s Move to End Birthright Citizenship

BY MEGAN L. BLONIGEN AND FRANCES Y. YONG

Harvard Law School Professor Gerald L. Neuman ’73 denounced President Donald Trump’s stalled attempt to end birthright citizenship — seven years after he first criticized the president over the same issue.

After Trump first reportedly considered the measure in 2018, Neuman joined 14 constitutional law scholars in a statement denouncing the action. Now, after Trump signed an executive order to end birthright citizenship in the first few hours of his second term, Neuman is reiterating his concerns.

“The theory on which the executive order is based is junk science, but one can’t predict what an individual judge will do when presented with a highly political case, and one might not even be able to predict what the United States Supreme Court will do,” Neuman said.

After Trump signed the executive order, 22 states — including Massachusetts — multiple cities, and activist groups filed six lawsuits against the action. These 22 states are seeking to preliminarily halt the enforcement of the executive order, and invalidate it altogether before its impact worsens. “Birthright citizenship in our country is a guarantee of equality,

born out of a collective fight against oppression, slavery and its devastating harms,” Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell said in a press release. “It is a settled right in our Constitution and recognized by the Supreme Court for more than a century.”

These lawsuits have temporarily delayed Trump’s attempt to overturn birthright citizenship — a century-old right enshrined in the 14th Amendment to grant citizenship to anyone born in the US, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. On Jan. 23, the order was temporarily blocked by Federal District Court judge John C. Coughenour.

Neuman, who teaches human rights, constitutional law, and immigration and nationality law at HLS, said Trump’s executive order directly contradicts the “purpose that the 14th Amendment was adopted for.”

“In particular for the undocumented, it would appear that results would be that children would be born as undocumented themselves, and the consequence of a

system like that would be a hereditary caste of non-citizens, vulnerable to exploitation and abuse,” Neuman said. Neuman also said that the ramifications of the executive order could reach far beyond children born to non-citizens, “who could now be told that they are not citizens.”

The executive order threatens the citizenship status of individuals who rely on federal programs — which Campell’s office warned could jeopardize portions of the state’s federal funding. “Among other things, this Order will cause the coalition of states to lose federal funding for programs that they administer, such as Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and foster care and adoption assistance programs, which all turn at least in part on the immigration status of the resident being served,” Campbell’s office wrote in a press release last week.

megan.blonigen@thecrimson.com frances.yong@thecrimson.com

Cambridge Police Commissioner

Christine A. Elow, Mayor E. Denise Simmons, and City Manager Yi-An Huang ’05 faced heated questions from residents over the Cambridge Police Department’s response to an unsolved fatal shooting in North Cambridge at a Tuesday night community meeting. The meeting, held at the Peabody School in North Cambridge, took place two weeks after 21-yearold Angel Nieves died after being shot multiple times on Clifton Street — the second shooting in Cambridge since the new year. More than 100 residents and city officials — including nearly the entire City Council — attended.

Several residents criticized the officials for a perceived lack of communication about the incident and asked why the city did not provide more information about the shooting in the immediate aftermath. Several residents stated that, though they heard the gunshots outside, they were unaware of what had happened until the following morning. Within an hour of the shooting,

CPD notified residents through their Tip411 and NextDoor systems — though residents must opt in to both services. CPD’s statement about the shooting was also posted on their website, and later verified by the DA’s office communication channels. The same information was also disseminated via the city’s daily email blast, according to city spokesperson Jeremy C. Warnick. Joanna Jimenez — Nieves’ mother — attended the meeting to urge residents and city staff to work together to resolve lingering complaints.

“This had to happen so that we can come together and speak in a room where pain, hurt, and whatever it is that we need will be the pillar in our community, so we can do better,” Jimenez said.

“Don’t be hard on the community, the community is here,” she added, addressing her neighbors in the audience.

In her prepared remarks, Elow confirmed CPD has been working with both the Massachusetts State Police and the Middlesex District Attorney’s office to investigate the incident, though no arrests have been made since the shooting.

But as residents continued to press for answers — many of

which Elow could not provide — the meeting turned to focus on how the city will address gun violence going forward.

Though Cambridge saw more gun violence in 2024 than in the past five years, CPD Superintendent Frederick Cabral told attendees that crime trends in the city were “pretty stable.”

“We are coming off of literally historic lows in the early 2020s. 2020, 2021, and into 2022 were some of the lowest crime rates in the history of the city. So, it may be raising a little bit, but it’s not anywhere near the peak it was,” Cabral said.

Still, arrests for six shootings in the past year — including that of Nieves — have yet to be made.

“Some of the challenges that we have is having people that are willing to go into court and say ‘This is the person,’” Elow said.

“We’re lacking eyewitness testimony to go in and help us with these prosecutions.”

Despite the setbacks, Simmons said she is committed to reducing gun violence in the city.

“Gun violence has no place in Cambridge,” she said.

BY DIEGO GARCÍA MORENO AND SUMMER E. ROSE CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

After dozens of Cambridge residents spoke in favor of preserving the city’s current multifamily zoning proposal, the Cambridge City Council voted to reject an amendment that would allow developers to build fewer stories without affordable housing units.

The amendment, which was brought before the council by Councilor Ayesha M. Wilson and co-sponsored by Councilor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler, reduced the number of stories that developers could build without providing affordable housing from four to three.

Wilson said the change would “create the most housing possible” for developments smaller than six stories — an idea that was also brought up in public comment.

“Cambridge Development Department numbers said that the three plus three, with no minimum lot size, will produce more units of inclusionary housing than four plus two with minimum lot size,” resident Gail Charpentier said.

Vice Mayor Marc C. McGovern was skeptical of the predictions — calling them “possible projections”

— while Councilor Patty M. Nolan ’80 largely trusted the estimations.

“They’re the best estimate based on everything that we know about how development happens in the city,” Nolan said. “So I take that as a given.”

Despite these predictions, the council voted 4-5 against the amendment and then voted to pass the proposal to a second reading — leaving it just one vote away from passing the full city council.

The vote was in line with the majority of residents in the public comment period. The majority of the 99 residents who spoke said they wanted the proposal to pass without any amendments. Many residents said the current plan is the best way to ensure residents can find affordable housing in the city.

“I urge you to move the four plus two proposal forward with no further delays or amendments,” said resident Katie Blair. “When we have such a huge demand and an affordability crisis, the first step is to create more supply by building up. I think Cambridge is a great place to live, and I want other people to be able to live here too.”

“Three plus three is the only way to protect the diversity of Cambridge,” resident Andy Nash said. After the vote, McGovern — who voted against the amendment — said that the city can pursue alternate options to increase affordable housing.

“We can make up those numbers by building much taller on the corridors,” he said. We can make up those numbers by building more affordable housing in the city-owned lots in Central Square.” diego.garciamoreno@thecrimson.com summer.rose@thecrimson.com

“Bringing in more people, increasing diversity, helps make us stronger and more vibrant — and building up urban areas also helps the environment for all,” she added.

Cambridge City Hall is located at 795 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge. JULIAN J. GIORDANO — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

THE HARVARD CRIMSON

JANUARY 31, 2025

Anna Wilson is an Assistant Professor of English. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

FM: In both your scholarly research and your teaching career, you have explored the intersections of medieval literature and fanfiction. How did you come to see these two areas as connected?

AW: I actually did my undergraduate degree in classics, and towards the end of my degree, I got very interested in late antique writers who were beginning to get further and further away from the culture of Imperial Rome, but were increasingly rewriting and transforming their work. And I was reading fanfiction — just as a fan for fun — and I began to see that there was a similar kind of culture of rewriting and transformation using some of the same techniques. And that resemblance just kind of stayed with me. I didn’t take it up in my scholarship for quite a long time, but as I moved and got more and more interested in later and later literature, I continued to be interested in what is called “reception” in that field — which means the receiving and the transformation of texts, hundreds and even thousands of years after their original composition. Then I had the opportunity to bring fanfiction in more explicitly as I started to work on reception in my Ph.D., and that’s what brought me here.

FM: What is your favorite fanfiction trope?

AW: I’m very interested in coffee shop AUs at the moment.

The coffee shop AU — as you know, but the readers may not — is when all of the characters from the original text get reimagined in a very mundane setting, typically a coffee shop. But I also love it when they’re reimagined into other mundane settings — you know, workplaces. I like it when people use their real knowledge of their workplace to bring it in. And so, there’s some incredible ones about people working in museums and libraries and aquariums and all kinds of things. But I can’t read the academia ones because those weird me out.

FM: What is a common misconception about medieval literature?

AW: There’s lots of common misconceptions about medieval literature: that it’s boring, that it’s full of men fighting other men.

I think people are frightened of medieval literature, and I often have students in class where they’ve had to take the class for a requirement. Then they finish the class and go, “This stuff is incredible.

Q&A:

ANNA WILSON ON FANFICTION, MEDIEVAL LITERATURE, AND INTERDISCIPLINARITY

THE ASSISTANT

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH sat down with Fifteen Minutes to discuss “The Book of Margery Kempe,” coffee shops AUs, and the gender politics of fanfiction.

BY ELANE M. KIM CRIMSON MAGAZINE ASSOCIATE EDITOR

AW: A lot of the students come to Harvard very concerned about their future. This is a moment of real economic anxiety and precarity. Generally, my message to students is — there is no job for life anymore.

I think that the idea that an English degree is somehow a less good bet to a job is completely wrong-headed. What we offer are incredibly important skills and also access to a cultural heritage which will stand you in good stead for the rest of your life. Books will always be there for you. You will always be able to read and learn, and taking some time to learn how to do that, and to be assisted into reading some stuff that might be a little more difficult to approach on your own, is such a good investment for your life. And also, we’re fun and we have candy.

What else can I read? I can’t believe that I avoided reading this.”

There’s a lot more medieval literature about a bigger variety of things than people think. There’s a romance about a trans knight, which I often teach, which people — their minds are blown by how relevant to modern trans experience it feels and how much the poem is kind of thinking through ideas about nature versus nurture and what it means to feel a different way from the people around you.

FM: Are there any lesser known writers from the medieval period whose work you believe deserves more attention?

AW: Well, yes, but they are generally more in terms of works than authors, because there’s a lot of anonymous works from the Middle Ages. The text I just mentioned is called “Le Roman de Silence,” or “The Romance of Silence.”

There’s also a fantastic author called Marie de France who also wrote in French, but her stories are very widely available, and they’re really fun, weird, little fairy stories and romances about mostly women having weird adventures.

There’s a woman who gets locked away in a tower and wishes for a lover. A hawk shows up and turns into a man and they become lovers. Then her evil husband catches him, and she climbs out of the

tower and follows her hawk-boyfriend to a fairy kingdom. And it’s all very exciting. There’s one with a werewolf. It’s great.

FM: Fanfiction has often been described as a predominantly female-driven space. How do you think gender dynamics shape the way fanfiction is written, consumed, and perceived?

AW: I often will go back to the beginning of the early novel and the rise of copyright in the 18th century.

When copyright comes to exist, you get a division of creative activity between illegal creative activity — which people can’t make a profit off of — and legal creative activity. That comes to be gendered almost immediately, because you have a public sphere where people are encouraged to publish, and you have a domestic private sphere where people are just playing. The domestic private sphere is increasingly thought of as the domain of women and children. What we now think of as kind of fanfiction and fan-ish play becomes something which is appropriate to women and young people.

Fast forward 150 years, you’ve still got this marginal, unauthorized space where young people and women find it easier to build their own community than to try and break into mainstream publishing, which is still quite sexist and ageist — less so now — but up until recently also enforced various kinds of misogynist narratives, or wasn’t really open to certain kinds of story-

telling. Fanfiction, I think, has stayed this space where people have been able to explore women’s perspectives, LGBTQ perspectives, in ways there wasn’t really space for in mainstream publishing.

FM: You teach an English course called “Medieval Fanfiction.”

What do you personally hope that your students take away from approaching medieval literature through the lens of fanfiction?

AW: What I really hope is that students come to the class excited by that juxtaposition, either because they know a little bit about medieval literature and they want to think about it through fanfiction, or because they know a lot about fanfiction and they want to see where that takes them.

A lot of the students who take that class are actually STEM students. This is sometimes the only literature class that they take, but they know a lot about fanfiction, and that slowly starts to come out over the course of the class.

I want to help them translate that experience into the classroom and show them how they can apply it to other kinds of literature. They already possess all of this proficiency in thinking about things like reception and transformation, which have these literary names, but which they have effectively been studying for quite a few years and thinking quite a lot about. I want

them to value that knowledge. And if they come to value fanfiction as an art form, that’s great too. I see the two things as sort of interrelated.

FM: Fanfiction thrives on the dynamic interplay between writers and readers in vibrant communities. How have these communities influenced your own experiences as both fanfiction writer and scholar?

AW: I have been a member of fan communities since I was 15 or 16 — more than half my life — and they’ve been immensely important for my formation as a reader and my happiness as a person. They’ve been a really important source of comfort, kindness, and learning for me, and I try and be mindful of that debt that I owe to them. They’ve also been important to my scholarship, because I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what fanfiction was. How do you define fanfiction in a way that makes it meaningful to talk about it in relation to medieval authorship? Because people often say, “Well, fanfiction is stories that are not written with copyright approval,” but there was no copyright in the Middle Ages. So then, is everything fanfiction? That’s not a very useful definition to me.

I began to think of fanfiction as, specifically, fiction by fans, for fans. So the community becomes an incredibly important part of the literature.

FM: Any words of advice for prospective English concentrators?

FM: What is your favorite medieval text, either to teach or to read?

AW: My favorite medieval text is called “The Book of Margery Kempe.” I have read and taught it many times.

It is the 14th-century memoirs of a woman who had a mental breakdown after her first child, and then had a very intense series of religious experiences. She continued to be married and to have children — she had 14 pregnancies — but she then became a wandering teacher later in her life.

She was a very intense person, and her memoir is such a fascinating and strange insight into a fascinating and strange life, but it also has these beautiful sections where she’s having visions of having these domestic, intimate moments with Jesus and with the Virgin Mary. I never get tired of reading it. I find something new every time I read it.

FM: What tropes do you see in medieval literature?

AW: My favorite trope in medieval literature is when authors say at the beginning of their stories that they’re going to tell you a story that they read out of a book, but they’ve entirely made up the book and they’re just pretending that it existed to make the story sound older and more authoritative than it is. I find that really funny.

FM: What is next on your reading list?

AW: I’ve been reading the Golden Age mysteries of an author called Ngaio Marsh, who was a New Zealand writer who’s a contemporary with Agatha Christie, who was very prolific and successful, but isn’t as well known now as Agatha Christie. And I’m really enjoying those.

FM: What advice would you give to your past self?

AW: Go on antidepressants earlier. That’s it.

FM: Lastly, what is bringing you joy right now, professionally, personally or creatively?

AW: I’m teaching my medieval fanfiction class, I’m teaching a graduate class on queer theory that I love teaching, and I’m excited. Both of those classes are so fun, and I get to meet such interesting people when I teach them, and I’m just really excited to meet this semester’s groups and start working with them.

Fifteen Minutes is the magazine of The Harvard Crimson. To read the full interview and other longform pieces, visit THECRIMSON.COM/ MAGAZINE FM elane.kim@thecrimson.com

COURTESY OF ANNA WILSON

BY KHADIJAH OLUFAYO CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

Just months after the viral sensation of “Challengers,” Italian director Luca Guadagnino has returned with “Queer” — a new film guaranteed to provoke and confuse. In “Queer,” Guadagnino is at his most experimental, daring to subvert expectations and genre conventions in this imaginative love story based on William S. Burroughs’ novella of the same name. The first chapter of “Queer” establishes Lee (Daniel Craig) as a gay man addicted to opiates and alcohol in Mexico City during the 1950s. During the day, Lee lounges around a cafe with his friend, Joe (Jason Schwartzman), who is also gay. Their conversations provide necessary exposition on their everyday experiences — and the shapes that their romantic lives as gay men in the ’50s take. But nighttime is when “Queer” comes to life. Cinematographer and frequent collaborator Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (“Call Me By Your Name,” “Suspiria,” “Challengers”) works with Guadagnino to replicate the electricity of desire in urban nightlife. The score is magnificent; composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (“Bones and All”, “Challengers”) construct an emotional core for the intoxicating visuals.

A scene partnering Craig with singer-songwriter and acting newcomer Omar Apollo, whose character is unnamed, showcases “Queer” at its most provocatively beautiful. Flickering red strobe lights signal pulsating desire in a sleazy motel room. The abrupt and full-frontal nudity that follows disrupts the sensuality of the se -

‘Queer’ Review: Love is a Weird Kind of Magic

BLISTERINGLY INTIMATE. While “Queer” is another triumph in eroticism for Guadagnino, the risks he takes are too uncoordinated and imprecise to provide any additional insight into the inner workings of the heart. ‘A Complete Unknown’ Review: Can

BY HANNAH E. GADWAY CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

James Mangold — the director behind the Academy Award-nominated “Walk the Line” — seems to be on the hunt for Oscar buzz yet again with his latest musician-focused biopic, “A Complete Unknown.” Mangold’s newest film follows a young Bob Dylan as his creative urges conflict with the expectations of folk music and the relationships that first thrust him into fame. Instead of tackling the entirety of Dylan’s long and iconic career, “A Complete Unknown” narrowly focuses on a 4-year period in the early 1960s. This peek into Dylan’s beginnings is led by an almost disconcertingly accurate performance from Timothée Chalamet. While the film’s vision seems muddled at times, Mangold’s latest project is an overall success due to its modest goals, and is sure to make Bob Dylan a new darling of Gen Z.

quence, but afterward the pair share cigarettes in bed while maintaining a level of eye contact that is blisteringly intimate. When Lee meets the other romantic lead, Allerton (Drew Starkey), “Queer” unveils the ugliest stage of wanting: Desperation. It’s reminiscent of “Call Me By Your Name,” with

Lee’s addiction taking the place of Elio’s youthful naivete. Daniel Craig’s acting shines as he verbally and physically flails for the attention of the younger man. His embarrassment is so genuine that one almost wants to look away. It’s a testament to what Guadagnino does best: Portraying real people and rela -

tionships.

Eventually, Lee and Allerton travel to South America together, a journey that unfolds in remarkably gorgeous scenes. Mountains and streets are draped in a grainy filter that makes every frame feel like a hazy fragment of a dream. All this beauty is contrasted with

the ugly sides of Lee’s addiction that manifest when he loses access to his vices — the chill of night shivers can be felt even in the theater. Later in the film, Guadagnino leans away from a typical romantic drama to pursue the avant-garde. At Lee’s urging, he and Allerton pursue a mysteri -

A Bob Dylan Biopic Work?

ous plant that is said to grant its users telepathic powers. Here, Guadagnino employs magical realism, a subgenre strongly associated with Latin America, where the film is set — low-tier magic like this is not questioned in the otherwise true-to-life universe of “Queer.” What follows is a sharp departure from the sexy first act; under the influence of the plant, the two perform a strange dance routine that begins with their hearts falling out of their mouths and ends with their bodies grotesquely enmeshed together. The message of “Queer” here is clear — feelings are difficult to articulate and the entanglement involved in knowing another person is not always pleasant. It’s what Guadagnino has always alluded to in his films, but he’s never before needed such a heavy-handed visual metaphor. The crudeness of the fantasy

ful, Mangold had to understand that his film may not stand as the definitive work based on Dylan’s life. On the other hand, in order to be marketed among the plethora of biopics flooding theaters, Mangold’s film had to also advertise itself as somewhat representative of Bob Dylan’s life as a whole.

Mangold seems to have anticipated these conflicting expectations perfectly and places his film neatly at the beginning of Dylan’s career, as the music legend transitioned from a kid just moving into Greenwich Village to one of the most popular artists in the United States. The film modestly tackles Dylan’s origins in New York City and his first forays into true independence as a musician. Its fouryear time span is manageable and the movie is well-paced. In short, Mangold doesn’t bite off more than he can chew. Nonetheless, since the vision is so concise, there seems to be a spark missing from the plot. By focusing on Dylan’s shift from

The inconclusive feeling of where Dylan’s musical choices will lead him next leaves the film lacking some of the singer’s inherent magnetism and urgency.

The script of “A Complete Unknown” — written in part by Mangold and based roughly on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book “Dylan Goes Electric!” — walks a careful line. Bob Dylan films have been made before, and they have generally been good. “I’m Not There,” which features six actors portraying different eras of Dylan’s life, received multiple Oscar nominations in 2008; Martin Scorsese’s “Rolling Thunder Revue” was an iconic entry into documentary film history; Dylan himself starred in and wrote the Grammy-winning soundtrack of the 1973 western “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.” Therefore, to be success-

a pure folk singer to an electric — and eventually genre-defying — artist, Mangold keeps the script tight. Yet, the overall message that the film seems to impart to its audience is somewhat unclear. Throughout the movie, it’s hammered home that Dylan’s transition from folk to electric is controversial, but the importance of this shift seems always out of reach. Beyond Dylan’s relationships with folk legends like Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), the larger significance of the change isn’t quite articulated. Perhaps this tendency to gesture instead of spell out is inevitable — Dylan himself is hard to pin down, and those who try to trap his “message” in a bottle do more harm than good. But the inconclusive feeling of where Dylan’s musical choices will lead him next leaves the film lacking some of the singer’s inherent magnetism and urgency.

The script’s problems fade away when considered beside Chalamet’s electric leading performance. Chalamet completely melts into the role and nails Dylan’s mumbling charisma with an almost unnerving ease.

The singing — which was reportedly all done live — is familiar while avoiding blatant mimicry. There’s also a lot of singing. Chalamet uses his numerous musical numbers to truly tell Dylan’s story through song, which is what the Nobel Prize-winning writer is known for in the first place. The leading star is also unafraid to show the singer’s nasty side and is mean when he needs to be. Every part of the film supports the idea that Chalamet is the real deal — from the realis-

tic costuming (Arianne Phillips) that includes Dylan’s gritty fingernails and rumpled shirts to the sound design, which piercingly sends out Chalamet’s voice directly into one’s bones. Somehow, the answer to “Can a Bob Dylan biopic work?” seems to be, at least after Mangold’s latest movie, “Yes.” Chalamet has proven himself a force to be reckoned with after this performance, and the film encapsulates an important early arc in Bob Dylan’s career. James

Beanpot Redemption

Boston University, Boston College, Harvard, and Northeastern, began in the 1952-53 season, and, since 1996, has been held at Boston’s TD Garden in front of crowds as high as 19,600 people.

In 2022, the Harvard men’s ice hockey team fell to the eventual Beanpot champion Boston University Ter -

Northeastern is the tournament’s most recent winner, having defeated BU 4-3 in overtime in 2024, while Harvard continues to search for its first win since 2017.

Speaking after the team’s 3-1 victory versus the Yale Bulldogs,

always a super fun game when you can play any of these Boston schools,” Moore said. “There will definitely be a lot of emotions in that game.”

“And we definitely [have] to stick to our game plan, stick to our identity, not stray away from it,” he added. “Play hard defense, be physical, make simple plays, and work as a cohesive unit.”

Ahead of the Beanpot, Harvard is slated for a Friday contest at home against the Prince -

the fierce Colgate Raiders.

The Raiders hold multiple victories against previously ranked #17 Dartmouth. Colgate also has wins over former #12 Cornell, and #18 Quinnipiac.

The tally in Harvard’s win column marks its 7th of the season, tying its win total from the 2023-24 season with still 10 games to play in the regular season including the Beanpot.

would require stronger team effort, even off the ice.

“We kind of had a slow start before break,” Severo said, “and we’ve come back and taken it upon ourselves in the room to build our identity.”

The team hopes that the Beanpot will serve as an opportunity to showcase all its new changes and development.

Yet in the two months since the Crimson returned from the Friendship Four tournament in Belfast, Northern Ireland, it has struggled to string together wins against a mix of conference and Ivy League competitors, including a potential Beanpot foe in Boston College.

After defeating Yale on Cleary night at Bright-Landry, Harvard took to the road for its game against the Eagles on Jan. 14 before making its way up to New York for games against Union, Cornell, and Colgate.

Junior forward Casey Severo, also speaking after the win, believed that moving forward against strong ECAC and out-of-conference opponents

Much of the slog now, including the poorer performance last season, is mostly seen as attributable to Harvard’s need to start from scratch after its top 5 scorers from 2022-23 left for the NHL.

Additionally, while Harvard boasts a strong freshman class in Justin Solovey, Lucas St. Louis, Mick Thompson, Ben Charette, and others, starting games on time and closing out in the final minutes have certainly been one of the team’s major difficulties thus far.

At times this has resulted in taking untimely penalties in an effort to play more aggressive in late-game comeback attempts.

Six of the Crimson’s games before the start of the new year were decided by a single goal, with Harvard losing four of them.

Harvard ranks 3rd to last on the power kill in the ECAC, but several spots higher in goals allowed with 12, tied with Cornell.

This certainly had an impact on those six games and even some after the break.

On the season as a whole, Harvard has struggled mightily at home, with just a 2-5-2 record compared to an even 4-4-0 on the road.

Maybe a return to road and neutral site competition before returning home on Feb. 21 to play host to Union College can elevate the team’s play.

Crimson Eyes Ivy Crown SPORTS

BY OSCAR E. MERCADO CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

Fresh off its 91-35 demolition of rivals Yale, Harvard women’s basketball (15-2, 4-1 Ivy) continues its home stretch with back-toback games against conference foes Columbia (14-4, 5-0 Ivy) and Cornell (4-14, 0-5 Ivy).

The Crimson’s premier matchup will be Friday’s battle against the Lions, the current League leaders, for pole position in the Ivy League in ESPN’s Game of the Week.

Season Recap

Harvard has enjoyed a remarkable season thus far, sitting in a tie for second place in the League and just one victory away from tying last season’s win total. Head coach Carrie Moore, who is in her third season with the team, and senior sensation Harmoni Turner received national recognition, being named to the midseason watch list for the Mid-Major Coach and Player of the Year awards.

Beyond individual accolades, the team boasts the top scoring defense in the country, allowing only 50.9 points per game. Harvard currently holds the best overall record in the Ivy League and has consistently earned top-25 votes in AP polls. This is the most complete team of Moore’s tenure, best equipped to end the program’s 17 year conference championship drought.

The Crimson opened the season with a commanding 7158 victory over UMass led by junior Gabby Anderson’s 20 points and 4 assists. Later that week, the team traveled to Bloomington, IN and made a statement with a marquee 72-68 overtime victory over then-No. 25 Indiana. The performance showcased the team’s potential and ability to compete with top-tier programs as well as netting Harvard’s first ranked win of the Moore era.

Three days later, Quinnipiac snatched Harvard’s undefeated record, soundly defeating the Crimson 76-53 in the team’s worst defensive outing of the season. Following the loss, Turner responded in a big way, scoring a program record 41 points and 10 rebounds en route to a 78-70 victory over Boston College. Turner’s dominant perfor -

mance marked the start of a ten game win streak for the Crimson including a last second buzzer beater to down St. John’s.

dominant stretch of the season, demolishing Brown, Penn, and Yale each by at least 29 points. Moore attributes the streak to a shift in team philosophy.

The Crimson tasted defeat again against perennial powerhouse Princeton, conceding a heartbreaking buzzer beater in the 52-50 defeat. Since then, Harvard has gone on its most

“We try to focus less on what the other team is doing,” Moore said. “This year, it’s about focusing on us, who we are, and how we can be successful. The ability to get stops when we need them has really allowed us to compete and win a lot of games. I’m really proud of the growth on that end.”

Scouting Columbia

Columbia remains a powerhouse in Ivy League women’s hoops, boasting an undefeated conference record and the number one seed.

The Lions have dealt the season-ending blow to every Moore-led Harvard team, 7771 in the 2023 WNIT tournament and 63-61 in the 2024 Ivy League playoffs.

“We obviously are excited to host a nationally televised game on our home court,” said Moore. “It’s an opportunity to play the best team in the league and I feel that our team is ready to own this opportunity. The difference of the game will come down to toughness and second and third efforts.”

Columbia boasts the top scoring and rebounding Ivy League program, led by a three-headed monster of Riley Weiss, Kitty Henderson, and Cecilia Collins, each averaging double figures.

Harvard’s keys to victory rests on the defensive end to limit Columbia’s explosiveness and minimize turnovers.

Scouting Cornell Cornell sits at the exact opposite end of the spectrum, yet to win in Ivy League play. Cornell’s offensive struggles are well documented as the team has the lowest scoring average in the Ivy League and the team attempts the least amount of three pointers.

Many have written off Big Red, but coach Moore does not underestimate her opponent.

“We often say our next game is the biggest game of the year. That will be the approach for Saturday’s game just like we’ve been doing all year long.” Moore said she wasn’t worried for the team’s endurance in the back-to-back, citing the two road back-to-backs in the fall. In this stretch, Harvard defeated Illinois State, Northwestern, Stony Brook, and St. John’s. The key to victory for Harvard will be its three point shooting. The Crimson attempt 10 more three-pointers per game than Cornell and convert them at a higher rate (30.9% versus 24.8%).

If Harvard can continue its perimeter dominance, it will have a decisive advantage in this matchup. Look for Harvard to use its spacing and ball movement to generate looks from beyond the arc and put sustained pressure on Cornell’s defense. As Harvard heads into this pivotal home stretch, these matchups will provide a measuring stick for the Crimson’s postseason aspirations. If Harvard can secure a pair

“They feed off of what they could do in transition,” said Moore. “From the three point line, not giving up a lot of open looks is a huge part of our game plan. Luckily for us, over the season it has not been a one off, it is who we’ve been all year long.”