Supporters of the Palestine Solidarity Committee at Harvard University. Photo: Harvard PSC

Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) has received a searing legal letter calling for disciplinary measures against a professor who it months ago determined had “denigrated” several students for being “Israelis and Jews,” according to documents the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law shared exclusively with The Algemeiner.

Harvard made the admission in March following a third-party investigation of allegations that HKS professor Marshall Ganz refused to accept a group project in his course, titled “Organizing: People, Power, Change,” because its authors described Israel as a “liberal Jewish democracy.” Ganz admitted during the investigation that he felt “that the students’ description of Israel as a Jewish democracy…was similar to ‘talking about a white supremacist state.'”

Yet despite HKS dean Douglas W. Elmendorf’s acknowledging Ganz’s misconduct in correspondence with the Brandeis Center, the professor has not been punished.

“This failure, on top of other failures of leadership have set the stage for the worsening climate that we have seen for Harvard Jewish students since [Oct. 7],” the Brandeis Center said in Monday’s letter, connecting Ganz’s behavior to several other troubling incidents at Harvard, including 31 groups issuing a letter blaming Israel “solely” for the Hamas’ terrorist attacks earlier this month. “Harvard’s failure to speak out against antisemitism masked as anti-Zionism has only emboldened the student groups who are now celebrating Hamas’ atrocities. The silence needs to end.”

The letter adds that after rejecting the students’ project, Ganz fostered a hostile environment in which his Jewish students were maligned and subjected to defamatory comments about Israel, contravening Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits discrimination based on national origin, ethnicity, and ancestry.

“The professor is no civil rights champion when it comes to minorities he personally finds distasteful, namely, Jewish Israelis,” the letter continued. “He is in fact a civil rights violator, who undisputedly trampled the rights of members of his class without hesitation or apology, denigrating the students identity and preventing them from participating fully in his class.”

The Brandeis Center called on Harvard to require Ganz to issue an apology to the students whose rights he was found guilty of violating and publicly denounce his behavior, which, the Brandeis Center explained, echoed “classic earmarks of antisemitism.”

The presence of radical anti-Zionists on Harvard University’s campus has been a persistent issue for years. At the start of this academic year, a student and anti-Israel activist interrupted a convocation ceremony held by the school, shouting at Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana, “Here’s the real truth — Harvard supports, upholds, and invests in Israeli apartheid, and the oppression of Palestinians!”

According to a 2022 report by antisemitism watchdog AMCHA Initiative investigating previously unexamined ways that anti-Israel activists attack and undermine Jewish identity, more antisemitic incidents occurred on Harvard’s campus than on any other  during the 2021-2022 academic year.

“No other campus identity group is routinely subject to the kinds of well-orchestrated campaigns of identity assault that Zionist and pro-Israel students have had to endure for the last several years across the country,” the report said.

Earlier this month, Harvard University president Claudine Gay said that the members of 31 student groups who signed the statement blaming Israel for Hamas’s terror attack should not be punished, citing the university’s “commitment to free expression.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.