A federal judge ruled Tuesday that a lawsuit accusing Harvard University of failing to address antisemitism on campus can move forward, less than a week after granting MIT’s motion to dismiss a similar case.
The decision comes after a group of students sued Harvard in January, alleging the university ignored discrimination against Jewish and Israeli students in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel.
In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns called Harvard’s reaction to antisemitic incidents on campus “at best, indecisive, vacillating, and at times internally contradictory.”
Although he did not rule on the merits of the claims, he said the plaintiffs plausibly alleged Harvard acted with deliberate indifference to the “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive harassment” of Jewish students.
“To conclude that the [lawsuit] has not plausibly alleged deliberate indifference would reward Harvard for virtuous public declarations that for the most part, according to the allegations of the [lawsuit], proved hollow when it came to taking disciplinary measures against offending students and faculty,” Stearns added. “In other words, the facts as pled show that Harvard failed its Jewish students.”
The judge added he was skeptical of the university’s claim that it let the protests continue in the interests of protecting free speech, writing that the court was “dubious that Harvard can hide behind the First Amendment to justify avoidance of its Title IV obligations.”
Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination in programs that receive federal funding.
A spokesperson for Harvard said in a statement that the university “has and will continue to take concrete steps to address the root causes of antisemitism on campus and protect our Jewish and Israeli students, ensuring they may pursue their education free from harassment and discrimination.”
“We appreciate that the Court dismissed the claim that Harvard directly discriminated against members of our community, and we understand that the court considers it too early to make determinations on other claims,” the spokesperson said. “Harvard is confident that once the facts in this case are made clear, it will be evident that Harvard has acted fairly and with deep concern for supporting our Jewish and Israeli students.”
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Stearns’s decision comes shortly after the judge tossed out a similar case against MIT last week, failing to find that the university acted with deliberate indifference in responding to campus demonstrations.
“[D]espite MIT’s failure of clairvoyance, it did respond with a perhaps overly measured but nonetheless consistent sense of purpose in returning civil order and discourse to its campus,” he wrote in Tuesday’s ruling.
“Liability attaches only when a school’s response is ‘so lax, so misdirected, or so poorly executed as to be clearly unreasonable under the known circumstances.’”
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