This seems like a lawsuit destined to fail — a lawsuit by alumni against a university they no longer attend and have no contractual ties with:
Ten Harvard University alumni filed a lawsuit against the school, alleging that Harvard “despicably failed to address, prevent, and rectify the prevalence of antisemitism, hate, and discrimination on its campus.”
The civil action lawsuit states that “[p]laintiffs all attended Harvard for their higher education with the expectation that Harvard would strive to uphold its reputation as one of the highest-ranking universities in the world with a strong commitment to its values” and that “[p]laintiffs have been harmed as a direct result of Harvard’s abject failure to address and prevent antisemitism . . . The value of a Harvard degree has been significantly diminished, rendering it functionally damaged in the professional and academic spheres. Plaintiffs are in a situation they never imagined: they are ashamed to say they went to Harvard.”
The complaint lists several incidents of anti-Semitic actions that took place on Harvard’s campus, including vandals targeting Harvard Hillel’s building, the Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee inviting a speaker who previously blamed Israelis for “eating the organs of Palestinians and having a thirst for Palestinian blood,” and protestors “march[ing] through Harvard’s main campus, chanting the genocidal ‘from the river to the sea,’ [and] accusing Israel of ‘genocide’” shortly after Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7.
It continues: “Various business [sic], companies, law firms, and other employers have publicly announced they will no longer hire Harvard graduates following the events and incidents that transpired at Harvard after the October 7 Attacks.”
As listed in the complaint, all plaintiffs are alumni of Harvard University and five of them are residents of Jerusalem in Israel. Other plaintiffs reside in California, Florida, and Oregon.
The 21-page lawsuit aims for an injunction to require “Harvard to rehabilitate the value of a Harvard degree by taking remedial measures, including: (i) terminating deans, administrators, professors, and other employees who facilitate or fail to respond to the antisemitism permeating Harvard; and (ii) suspending or expelling immediately students who participate in hate speech and antisemitic conduct.”
Harvard has displayed deplorable double standards, putting up with bigoted acts against Jews that it would not tolerate about other groups, like black people or transgender people. But students, not alumni, have borne the brunt of that, and no one has a “right” to not be embarrassed by their school. That would allow all schools to be sued by alumni every time a school experiences a scandal. Colleges have been embarrassing their alumni for generations.
Harvard’s behavior was shameful and embarrassing. It told Jews to hide their menorah at night during Hanukkah, rather than protecting it from antisemitic vandals. Harvard routinely allowed pro-Hamas students to disrupt class with noisy protests that violated time, place, and manner restrictions on speech that Harvard would enforce against a conservative group if it similarly had the audacity to disrupt class.
Harvard’s actions over the past several months might be something it could be sued for, but only by its students, not by its alumni, who weren’t even on campus, and no longer have a contractual relationship with Harvard. The existence of a hostile learning environment for Jews is something only Jewish students would have a right to sue over, not alumni, who aren’t even in that environment. So the alumni can’t sue under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. 1981, or the Massachusetts Civil Rights Act, which bans “hostile learning environments” to an even greater extent than federal law.
Harvard’s former President Claudine Gay told a Congressional committee in December that whether advocating genocide against Jews was compatible with Harvard’s speech rules depended on the “context.” Those comments did not go down well with the public, partly because they were hypocritical: Harvard has punished far less offensive speech when it does not involve Jews as a target — such as misgendering and anti-black speech, even if such speech does not advocate genocide or violence, and even if the “context” of such speech makes clear that it would be protected by the First Amendment in society as a whole.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression gives Harvard its worst rating for failure to comply with academic-freedom norms. In FIRE’s 2024 College Free Speech Rankings, “Harvard University obtained the lowest score possible, 0.00, and is the only school with an ‘Abysmal’ speech climate rating,” notes FIRE.
Claudine Gay’s genocide comments, in combination with the discovery that she committed pervasive plagiarism in her writings, ultimately led to her resignation.
