Is Harvard an Islamic Outpost?

I knew it! I thought something funny was going on over there.

Harvard Is an Islamist Outpost

For decades it nurtured resentful leftists, and antisemitism united them in a common cause.

By Ruth R. Wisse, WSJ

April 24, 2025 11:49 am ET

I taught at Harvard from 1993 through 2014, and I don’t think the federal government’s threats will be effective at changing the university’s culture. Harvard’s leaders don’t yet understand the danger that culture poses to the country or why it required intervention.

On Sept. 11, 2001, the Islamists of al Qaeda attacked the U.S. in a suicide mission that used American planes as their instruments of destruction. On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas Islamists exploited Israel’s openness by invading the country, massacring civilians and kidnapping others. Jihadists use these new forms of warfare against those they can’t conquer by force. What concerns us here is their capture of elite American schools as outposts.

Harvard became directly implicated on Oct. 8, 2023, when the Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee issued a statement endorsed by more than 30 student groups that asserted “the Israeli regime” was “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Students for Justice in Palestine declared Oct. 12 a “day of resistance” and had a “toolkit” ready for the encampments and demonstrations that spread beyond campus. SJP praised the “unity intifada” and “resistance” and declared that Palestinian students were “PART of this movement, not in solidarity with this movement.” In 2001 there were no such support groups for Islamists at Harvard.

Harvard was a soft target for foreign penetration, having developed an adversarial relationship to the American government and increasingly to the country itself. Veterans of the antiwar movement banished the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps from Harvard in the 1970s and kept it off campus for 40 years. When memories of Vietnam faded, the military’s exclusion of open homosexuals became the high-minded excuse for shutting out recruiters—but not government funding. This selective antigovernment policy was reflected in the curriculum, which took an increasingly critical approach to America and Western civilization.

Meanwhile, the 1960s civil-rights laws that outlawed discrimination failed to satisfy those who sought equal outcomes. The university responded with group preferences in hiring for women and minorities. That elevated grievance groups and put Harvard solidly in the activist “progressive” camp. With rare exceptions, there would be no more hiring of conservatives or teaching their “reactionary” ideas.

By the 1990s, black campus groups were hosting Afrocentric and Nation of Islam speakers who agitated against whites and Jews. In 1992 Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. warned: “This is anti-Semitism from the top down, engineered and promoted by leaders who affect to be speaking for a larger resentment.” To this grievance coalition were added groups of Marxists, anticapitalists, anticolonialists, and anti-imperialists. The 2011 Occupy Wall Street encampments were allowed to close Harvard Yard for several months.

All these demonstrators lacked a common cause until they united around the handiest target in the history of civilization under the guise of liberating the Palestinians. Students who had been kept from marching for their country and warned against insulting every other minority jumped at the chance to attack a politically approved target.

In a letter to the Harvard community, President Alan Garber acknowledges valid concerns about rising antisemitism and pledges that Harvard will continue to fight “hate” with the urgency it demands and federal law requires. Harvard’s record provides ample evidence against this claim. Campus coalitions for jihad count on liberal administrators to accommodate their assault.

The most useful of many political functions of anti-Zionism—as with antisemitism before Jews returned to their homeland—is building coalitions of grievance and blame against a small nation with a universally inflated and mostly negative image. This galvanizing enmity has united the pan-Arab and Islamist alliance against Israel since 1948. It powered the red-green coalition at the United Nations and seeds anti-Israel campus coalitions that are anti-American in all but name. Attacking only the Jews—now only Israel—is its key to becoming the world’s most powerful antidemocratic ideology.

The goal of destroying Israel remains central to Arab and Islamist identity and was admitted to Harvard along with some foreign students and investors. The Education Department reports the university received more than $100 million from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bangladesh between January 2020 and October 2024.

In 2007 I began warning successive presidents and deans that academic standards were being violated by the substitution of anti-Israel propaganda for a comprehensive program in the Center for Middle East Studies. They acknowledged the problem but refused to address it. As long as other institutions took Muslim money and ignored the war against the Jews, why should Harvard be holier than the pope?

Oct. 7, like Kristallnacht in 1938, forced some people to confront what they had tried to ignore. Students and faculty celebrating the atrocities against Israel could have been perpetrating them, given the chance. A committee of the new Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance investigated the campus “hatred” and found it “worse than we had anticipated.” Ideological anti-Zionism governed not only the Center for Middle East Studies but also the School of Public Health and the Divinity School and figured in departments ranging alphabetically from anthropology and African American Studies to the Weatherhead Institute of International Affairs, and academically from music to the medical school. Harvard undertook a similar review only under pressure from Congress.

The university had taken steps to prevent campus unrest—by curtailing the Jewish and Christian presence. The Semitic Museum, established by Jacob Schiff in 1907 to make the same point as the Abraham Accords about the common sources of the three religions, was renamed the Museum of the Ancient Near East. The only vestige of Schiff’s intention remains in carved stone above the entrance. Archeological projects in Israel were discontinued and museum collections that once centered on the Bible and Jerusalem were refocused on the pyramids. The Harvard Divinity School restructured its curriculum to reflect that it was no longer a Christian or Unitarian seminary but a “pluralistic” religious-studies program.

Just when Harvard’s proud heritage should have been strengthened, biblical studies were degraded, and its traditions put on the defensive—Christianity even more than Judaism. Islamism was on the rise against America in decline.

There are still good people and programs at Harvard, and I am grateful for my time there. In an ideal world the government wouldn’t micromanage universities. But if Harvard shirks its responsibility to shore up the foundations of America and allows itself to be hijacked by an Islamist-inspired grievance coalition, why would it expect any support from the government?

Ms. Wisse is a senior fellow at Tikvah and author of the memoir “Free as a Jew.”