On Harvard, Antisemitism, and Democracy
This reflection first appeared in an April 3, 2025 message from our Executive Director, Aaron Dorfman, to A More Perfect Union’s partners and colleagues.
Amid the week’s barrage of news, I’ve been preoccupied with the threatened $9 billion in federal funding cuts to Harvard University. Threats like these have been levied at many American institutions over the last few weeks, and while they claim to be “fighting antisemitism,” they should raise a number of concerns for us as Americans and as American Jews. As a Jewish alumnus of Harvard’s Kennedy School, I feel them personally.
Attacks on colleges and universities have been a critical component of authoritarian governments’ consolidation of political power throughout the 21st century. Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey have all targeted higher education alongside other centers of independent intellectual activity in an effort to undermine potential opposition to their regimes. The Trump Administration’s early actions align it with this ignominious company and may be an ominous harbinger of what's to come.
The framing of these actions in terms of protecting Jews from antisemitism is disingenuous at best and dangerously manipulative at worst. The Administration has shuttered much of the Department of Education, including its Office of Civil Rights, which has been responsible for investigating allegations of antisemitism on campus. And there’s virtually no correlation between the threatened cuts at Harvard and any meaningful institutional improvements that might protect Jewish and other students. Invoking antisemitism to justify these cuts follows a tired antisemitic playbook in which Jews are instrumentalized in service of powerful figures’ political agendas – a pattern that rarely plays out well for the Jewish community.
Harvard’s response to date – encapsulated in President Alan Garber’s letter to the Harvard community, exemplifies the kind of “anticipatory obedience” that’s a foreboding sign of democratic backsliding and advancing authoritarianism. I was grateful that Garber took seriously and didn’t equivocate about the real dangers of antisemitism to Jewish students at Harvard and around the country – a level of acknowledgement and accountability that’s too often been missing from other university leaders. But the letter’s tone reads as a conciliation to an Administration working to silence dissent and squeeze civil society across almost every sector.
I don’t envy President Garber’s position. Leaders of all kinds of institutions – law firms, universities, independent media, faith-based organizations – are grappling with attacks that threaten their missions and, potentially, their survival. And yet, there is no future for American democracy if we do not stand up and fight for it. Giving in to anti-democratic demands only emboldens more anti-democratic behavior, which is why the only effective response is courage, clarity, and conviction. As Jews well know, appeasement is not a sustainable long-term strategy.
In the spirit of tochechah – respectful rebuke – and as a member of the Harvard Alumni community, I’ve shared these thoughts in an email to President Garber. And because it’s always better to be ahead of the curve than behind it, I’ve sent a similar note to the Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, of which I’m also an alumnus. It’s a reminder that each of us belongs to many communities and has many spheres of influence in which our voices matter.
If this resonates with you, I urge you to send similar messages to the presidents and alumni directors of colleges and universities with which you’re affiliated. Perhaps send them also to the CEOs of companies and law firms with which you do business, nonprofits to which you donate, and membership organizations to which you belong. Proactively express your support for democracy and your expectations for their principled leadership, and encourage them not to capitulate to antidemocratic demands, from whatever corner they may come. And if an organization you are affiliated with does demonstrate courage, thank them, celebrate them, and support them.
If it’s helpful, feel free to borrow language from this email with my blessing. And if you do write, please forward me copies of your emails – we need as many examples of courageous leadership as we can get right now.