Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon highlights the latest questionable action from Harvard’s leaders.
Harvard University, where 33 student groups signed a statement blaming Israel for Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks, now says that calling someone a “terrorist sympathizer” can violate the school’s anti-discrimination policies, according to a mandatory training for all Harvard students obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
“Accusing an individual of being a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer, supporting genocide, or urging them to self harm based solely on their race, ethnicity, religion, or other protected characteristic” may violate school policies, a slide from the training says.
Other parts of the training suggest students can be sanctioned for mocking a wide range of religious institutions, including the Mormon Church, and for “denying the ancestral history of another person or group.” Actions including teasing, mocking, and ridiculing are described as “verbal abuse.”
Conducted by Harvard’s anti-discrimination office, the training also discusses anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism and appears to be a response to the Trump administration’s campaign against the school. But legal experts say the guidance goes far beyond what the law requires and has the potential to chill all kinds of protected speech, including criticism of the protesters who made Harvard exhibit A for campus radicalism run amok.
“Because each provision essentially vests unfettered discretion in the enforcing officials, they can—and, predictably, will—exercise that discretion in accordance with their own subjective values,” said Nadine Strossen, a former head of the American Civil Liberties Union. “And that will in turn lead certain members of the campus community—defined in terms of both identity and ideas—disproportionately to engage in self-censorship.”
David Bernstein, a law professor at George Mason University, argued that the “based solely on” caveat would do little to mitigate the training’s chilling effects.
“You have to be careful here,” Bernstein said.
