Harvard University students Prince Williams and Kojo Acheampong leading unauthorized demonstration at Harvard Yard on April 1, 2025. Photo: The Algemeiner.

Harvard University has imposed disciplinary sanctions on the pro-Hamas student group Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) following its staging an unauthorized demonstration, placing it on probation and suspending its privilege to hold campus events until long after the end of this academic year.

The measure, announced on Wednesday, brings PSC operations to a halt, The Harvard Crimson reported, as the group planned to hold eight events in the month of April alone. Harvard told the paper that PSC’s own actions prompted the severe response from the administration. The group, it said, used “amplified sound” during Tuesday’s protest outside University Hall, obstructed university business, and invited an unrecognized group, Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine (HOOP), to participate in the demonstration.

PSC lambasted Harvard on Wednesday, arguing in a statement posted on Instagram that the administration “sanctioned PSC without clarifying what relation, if any, it had to the rally.”

It continued, “We call on all student organizations to stand with the movement for Palestine — silence will not save us. Demand that Harvard: defend academic freedom, protect its students from [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement], and divest from genocide.”

Harvard’s swift sanctioning of PSC came just days after the Trump administration announced that $9 billion in federal contracts and grants awarded to the school will be considered for termination because of allegations that it has failed to meaningfully respond to the campus antisemitism crisis.

PSC’s cheering of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, atrocities across southern Israel, which included sexual assault and murder, are in part responsible for placing the university at the center of the debate on antisemitism and left-wing extremism in higher education

Beyond sanctioning the campus group, Harvard has recently taken other steps that appear driven by the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy for campus antisemitism. Last month, it fired a librarian whom someone filmed ripping posters of the Bibas children, two babies murdered in captivity by Hamas, off a kiosk in Harvard Yard and denounced him as “hateful.” Additionally, it paused a partnership with a higher education institution located in the West Bank, a move for which prominent members of the Harvard community and federal lawmakers had clamored in a series of public statements.

However, an Algemeiner investigation has uncovered that Tuesday’s demonstrations at Harvard were made possible by steps the university refused to take after PSC convulsed the campus with disruptions and occupations of school property during the 2023-2024 academic year.

Two ringleaders of the protest — Prince Williams and Kojo Acheampong — are among several undergraduates who the university suspended and then promptly reinstated for their roles in organizing a November 2023 unauthorized demonstration in which Williams led a chant of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”  — a popular slogan among anti-Israel activists that has been widely recognized as a call for the destruction of the Jewish state, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Williams also participated in the May 2024 occupation of Harvard Yard, which he attended while his disciplinary case was being processed.

A recipient of a full scholarship to attend Harvard, Williams announced his reinstatement to good standing in July 2024, proclaiming: “When I rejoin my peers in the fall, we must understand that our movement is working, that our momentum is growing, and that Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.”

His partner, Acheampong, previously participated in a “Student Intifada” event, in which he heralded Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel as “a really pivotal moment in the struggle” that pro-Hamas activists should “prepare” to welcome again. Acheampong added, “The broader task is to make Zionism untenable for the ruling class.”

Since the Oct. 7 atrocities, Harvard students and faculty have quoted terrorists, shared antisemitism cartoons, and mobbed a Jewish student, screaming “Shame! Shame! Shame!” into his ears. Such incidents have led federal lawmakers, Jewish civil rights activists, and others to argue that Harvard has not done enough to combat a surge in antisemitism on campus amid the Israel-Hamas war.

Williams, for example, has promoted a conspiracy theory which links Israel to lingering inequalities affecting African Americans in the US. Writing in November 2023 for the Crimson, for which he worked as an “editorial editor,” he said, “Black and Palestinian liberation go hand in hand … when we see repression for Black lives in places like Ferguson we also have to think about the Israeli police and the Israeli army.”

In another op-ed published by the Crimson, Williams endorsed the self-immolation and suicide of Aaron Bushnell in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, arguing that students should “remember him” and “join the mass movement for Palestine that is working each day on the right side of history.”

Harvard’s harboring of extremists is harming its image, US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon explained on Monday in a statement which announced the Trump administration’s review of its federal contracts and grants.

“Harvard has served as a symbol of the American Dream for generations” McMahon said. “Harvard’s failure to protect students on campus from antisemitic discrimination — all while promoting divisive ideologies over free inquiry — has put its reputation in serious jeopardy. Harvard can right these wrongs and restore itself to a campus dedicated to academic excellence and truth-seeking, where all students feel safe on its campus.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.