The College Fix

‘Hate speech’ should be condemned, Alan Garber says

Discouraging “hate speech” fits in with Harvard University’s institutional neutrality pledge, the Ivy League school’s newest president said recently.

“We would strongly discourage certain kinds of speech, particularly if a reasonable person might feel that the language is antisemitic or racist or comprises other kinds of hate,” President Alan Garber told the student newspaper on Tuesday.

“I do believe that we need to continue to condemn the use of speech that is widely viewed as antisemitic or as hate speech in other forms, even if not everybody agrees,” he told The Harvard Crimson.

The comments came in response to a “Jews for Palestine” rally outside the campus Hillel last month. “Zionists not welcome here,” some in the crowd chanted, along with “From the River to the Sea” and “Israel is a terrorist state,” according to The Crimson.

In October, he also criticized a campus group’s “offensive” comments praising the Hamas attack on Israel.

“Gaza broke through Israel’s blockade,” the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee said in describing the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

“Although I don’t agree with the statement — in fact, there are aspects of it that I personally find offensive — I am not about to make University statements about matters of public affairs that are not part of the core of the University,” Garber (pictured) said, while making a statement on the matter.

In the latest interview, Garber said pro-Palestinian activism could relate to the university.

“The current protests have mixed together elements of statements about what’s going on in the world, particularly the Palestine-Israel conflict and related conflicts, with those that are local to our campus,” he told The Crimson.

“Harvard’s interests,” may necessitate the school getting involved, however.

“But very often, protesters and other groups are making statements that are directly about the campus, and in some cases, this has included threats to escalate protest activities that can be read as implying actual crime, including vandalism, breaking into locked spaces and so on,” Garber told the student newspaper.

“That is something that we do condemn and are actually encouraged to do under the institutional voice policy,” he said.

The university adopted its “institutional neutrality” position in May. However, the position does not preclude the university from divesting from Israel.

The university has previously deemed national political issues as directly related to its “mission,” including the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol (nearly 500 miles away from Harvard) and the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, as The College Fix previously noted.

MORE: Columbia student group launches paper ‘glorifying violence’ against Israel

IMAGE: Harvard University/YouTube

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