More than 120 Jewish faculty members and Harvard affiliates signed a letter arguing that the Department of Justice (DOJ) lawsuit against the university mischaracterizes campus conditions, overstates anti-Semitism, and exploits both to justify an authoritarian assault on higher education. They are wrong, and Harvard’s own record proves it.

Harvard’s own Presidential Task Force documented rampant campus anti-Semitism. President Garber acknowledged last year that Jewish, Israeli, and Zionist students reported hiding “overt markers of their identities to avoid confrontation” and that some had been “pushed by their peers to the periphery of campus life.”

The Task Force’s own data found that 26 percent of Jewish students felt physically unsafe on campus, 44 percent felt mentally unsafe, and 67 percent reported discomfort expressing their opinions, as well as recorded “disturbing reports that faculty members and teaching fellows discriminate against or harass students because they are Israeli or have pro-Israel views.”

Indeed, Harvard’s spring 2024 encampment occupied central campus for nearly three weeks while administrators acknowledged from the outset that it violated university policy. Demonstrations repeatedly targeted library reading rooms and other academic spaces. When enforcement finally came, it was partial and inconsistent. Conduct that would have triggered an immediate response in any other context was, when directed at Jewish students, tolerated, minimized, or reframed.

A federal judge, in fact, drew that conclusion about anti-Semitism at Harvard.

In Kestenbaum v. Harvard, U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns refused to dismiss the anti-Semitism complaint, finding Harvard’s response to be, in his words, “at best, indecisive, vacillating, and at times internally contradictory.” He offered concrete examples: The day after a Harvard Law School dean restricted a campus lounge to “personal or small group study and conversation,” protesters held a vigil for martyrs in that same space without administrative pushback—and the dean attended it. When a Jewish student was shoved at the encampment while Harvard police were present, the officers did not respond.

Stearns concluded that allowing Harvard’s public statements to shield it from accountability “would reward Harvard for virtuous public declarations that for the most part proved hollow when it came to taking disciplinary measures against offending students and faculty.” His bottom line was unambiguous: “The facts as pled show that Harvard failed its Jewish students.”

As for me, what makes this recent faculty letter so striking is that it comes from Jewish academics. There has never been a singular Jewish voice on questions of anti-Semitism, Israel, or campus protest, nor should there be. But this letter goes further than dissent. It actively denies documented instances of anti-Semitism and the harassment of Jewish students who faced exclusion, coercion, and discrimination, experiences confirmed by Harvard’s own task force and ratified by a federal judge. The signatories are not offering a different interpretation of contested events. They are contesting whether anti-Semitism at Harvard is a serious problem at all.

Disagreement within a community does not absolve institutions of responsibility. The existence of dissenting Jewish voices does not negate what other Jewish students actually experienced. Universities do not require unanimity to act. They act when their rules are plainly violated. At Harvard, they were.

The question Harvard now faces is whether its rules apply equally, regardless of the politics of the moment. Until it demonstrates that its standards mean the same thing when Jews are the ones targeted, its claims of principle will remain hard to take seriously.