Harvard reverses course on human rights defender who criticized Israel

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The Harvard Kennedy School backtracked on Thursday and said it would offer a scholarship to a human rights advocate it had previously rejected, after news of the decision sparked a public outcry over academic freedom , donor influence and the limits of criticism of Israel.

Controversy erupted earlier this month, when The Nation published a lengthy article revealing that last summer Schools Dean Douglas Elmendorf vetoed a Schools proposal from the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy to offer a one-year fellowship to Kenneth Roth, the recently retired executive director of Human Rights Watch. At the time, Elmendorf told colleagues he was concerned about perceptions that Human Rights Watch was biased against Israel, according to two faculty members.

The revelation drew strong rebukes from prominent free-speech groups; a letter signed by more than 1,000 Harvard students, professors and alumni criticizing what she called a shameful decision to blacklist Kenneth Roth; and private complaints from teachers.

In an email to the Kennedy School community on Thursday, Elmendorf said his decision was a mistake and the school would extend an invitation to Roth.

Elmendorf, an economist who served as director of the Congressional Budget Office from 2009 to 2015, also pushed back against the accusation that donors influenced his original decision, which was suggested in the Nation article and reiterated in separate reports. Roth’s public statements.

Donors do not affect our review of academic matters, he said in the statement. Nor was my decision made to limit debate at the Kennedy School to human rights in any country.

He did not say why he rejected Mr. Roth’s scholarship, except to say that it was based on my assessment of his potential contributions to the school.

As for Roth, who after Harvard’s about-face accepted an offer from the University of Pennsylvania, where he is now a member of the Perry World House, Elmendorf said, “I hope our community can benefit from his deep experience. on a wide range of human rights issues.

Roth, reached by phone after the announcement of the cancellation, said he was pleased with the decision, which he attributed to overwhelming faculty concern, and that he would use the scholarship to work on a book about his decades of defense of human rights. But he also called for more transparency.

Dean Elmendorf said he made the decision because of people he cared about at the university, Roth said, referring to accounts published by faculty members. He still refuses to say who were these people who mattered to him.

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And he called on Harvard to be more committed to academic freedom, including for those who are unable to mobilize public opinion.

Punishing people for criticizing Israel is not limited to me, he continued. What is the Kennedy School, and Harvard more broadly, going to do to show that this episode reflects a renewed commitment to academic freedom, rather than just exceptional treatment for a well-known person?

The incident was the latest flare-up in the ongoing debate about when criticism of Israel turns into anti-Semitism, and when accusations of anti-Semitism, in turn, are used to silence criticism.

In interviews (and on Twitter), Roth, a Jew whose father fled Nazi Germany as a child, said Elmendorf’s initial decision reflected the influence of those seeking to delegitimize Human Rights Watch, who has monitored abuses in more than 100 countries, as an impartial observer on Israel. And he described it as a case of donor-driven censorship, although he said he had no proof.

Clearly, it is donor influence that undermines intellectual independence, he said in an interview with The New York Times last week.

(A Harvard spokesperson said the university and its president, Lawrence Bacow, had no comment.)

Donor influence can be murky, with details of conversations held behind closed doors rarely coming to the surface. But Israel has been a particular flashpoint in recent years, as some donors concerned about what they see as anti-Semitic or anti-Israel tendencies in academia have sought to rescind donations or influence hiring decisions. .

In 2020, the University of Toronto halted the hiring of Valentina Azarova as director of its law school’s human rights program, after a major donor contacted an administrator to express concerns about her scholarly work criticizing Israel’s human rights record. (After a public outcry, the university offered Azarova the job with academic freedom protections, but she declined.)

The University of Washington returned a $5 million gift last year, after a donor to its Israel Studies program expressed displeasure with a professor who joined other scholars Israelis and Jews by signing an open letter criticizing the conduct of the Israeli government towards Palestinians and Arabs in the Palestinian country and territories. The donor, according to the university, had requested that the donation agreement be amended to prohibit scholars supported by the donation from making statements considered hostile to Israel.

The Kennedy School, a confederation of 12 centers and dozens of other initiatives, is one of the nation’s leading schools of public policy. He is also no stranger to controversy, often stemming not from his regular faculty but from his more than 750 visiting fellows, which include prominent figures in politics, government and the media.

In 2017, Elmendorf canceled a scholarship offered to Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who in 2010 leaked archives of military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks, following criticism from Mike Pompeo, then director of the CIA, and other members of the intelligence community. In 2019, Rick Snyder, a former governor of Michigan, withdrew from a scholarship after his nomination sparked a backlash on social media and from students who cited his role in the crisis. water in Flint.

As for partisan voices on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the school has hosted a variety of fellows in recent years, including Amos Yadlin, a retired senior Israeli general, and Saeb Erekat, then chief Palestinian negotiator and Secretary General of the ‘Palestine Liberation Organization. .

Roth had been recruited for the fellowship, which does not include any teaching duties, by Mathias Risse, the director of the Carr Center. In an email to Carr Center students, faculty, fellows, alumni and others following the Nation article, Risse called him one of the most distinguished human rights leaders. the man of our time and said that the scholarship rejection was one of the lowest moments of my professional life. .

In interviews and emails with The Times, Risse and fellow faculty member Kathryn Sikkink said that Elmendorf, in explaining his rejection of Roth, cited the perception that Human Rights Watch was biased against Israel. He told them he became aware of the problem following discussions with anonymous people within the university, they said.

Donors, they said, were not mentioned. But they said a 2021 report by Human Rights Watch, which concluded that Israel’s policy towards Palestinians in the occupied territories met the legal definition of the crime of apartheid, was discussed.

Whether Human Rights Watch is fair to Israel has long been a source of contention, inside and outside the organization. In a 2009 opinion piece in The Times, Robert Bernstein, one of the group’s founders, claimed that his criticisms of Israel were helping those who wanted to turn Israel into a pariah state.

In 2019, Israel expelled the groups’ director for Israel and Palestine and lead researcher and author of the 2021 report, Omar Shakir, under a law banning foreigners who support a boycott of Israel or its territories. At the time, Shakir denied that he or Human Rights Watch had called for a massive consumer boycott of Israel or its settlements.

With its 2021 report, A Threshold Crossed, Human Rights Watch became the first major international human rights group to apply the term apartheid to Israeli conduct. Six months later, Amnesty International followed suit in its own report. (In 2022, the Harvard Law Schools International Human Rights Clinic published a similar, less noticed report.)

Sarah Leah Whitson, former Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said the apartheid designation came after painful internal debate.

We had to work for years to build trust among the organization’s top leadership that this was an important place for us, said Whitson, now executive director of Democracy in the Arab World Now, or DAWN. There was a fear that if you cross those red lines they will try to decapitate you as an effective defense group.

The Human Rights Watch report was beset by Israel, whose ambassador to the United States said it borders on anti-Semitism. The American Jewish Committee called it a chop and accused Roth of harboring personal animosity toward Israel. Some progressive Jewish groups that have expressed concern over the vitriolic attacks on the report have also noted their own disagreement with the term apartheid.

The report did not characterize Israel, as some (including some Israeli groups) have, as an apartheid state. He used the term to refer not to the character of the Israeli government, but to specific discriminatory policies in the occupied territories, which he said met the definition of the crime of apartheid set out in the internationally ratified legal prohibitions adopted by the United Nations. United and the International Criminal Court. To research.

Roth said the purpose of the report, which he personally spent a lot of time editing, was not to equate Israel with the former racist regime of South Africa, but to apply legal definitions. And that reflected the reality, he said, that the peace process was dead.

There is no evidence that what is happening today will go away, he said. This is what has made us all realize that we have to change our paradigm.

For some on campus, the problem is less about Roth or Human Rights Watch and more about the balance of discourse on campus.

From a free speech perspective, yes, he should be eligible for a scholarship if the Carr Center saw fit to invite him, said Natalie Kahn, a senior at Harvard College and co-chair of Harvard Students for Israel. I think, however, that there are so many people at Harvard who espouse anti-Israel views that we really don’t need another one.

Ahmed Moor, a 2013 Kennedy School graduate who helped organize an open letter from Palestinian alumni protesting Elmendorf’s initial decision, noted that the school hosted Yadlin, the Israeli general, but had also people like me.

This is fine and appropriate for this kind of institution, because representing many viewpoints is part of the goal of a prominent public policy agenda.

With the original decision, he added, this is where the current dean messed things up.

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