The Harvard Kennedy School reversed course on Thursday and said it would offer a fellowship to a prominent human rights advocate who had previously declined, after the decision sparked public outcry over academic freedom, donor influence and limited criticism of Israel.
The controversy erupted earlier this month, when The Nation published a lengthy story revealing that last summer, the school’s dean, Douglas Elmendorf, had rejected a request by the school’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy to award a one-year fellowship to Kenneth Roth, the retired director of Human Rights Watch. At the time, Elmendorf told colleagues he was concerned about the perception that Human Rights Watch was biased against Israel, according to two faculty members.
The revelation sparked sharp criticism from prominent liberal groups; a letter written by more than 1,000 Harvard students, faculty and alumni condemning the so-called “disgraceful decision to hire Kenneth Roth”; and specific complaints from faculty.
In an email to the Kennedy School board on Thursday, Elmendorf said his decision was “wrong” and the school is inviting Roth.
Elmendorf, an economist who served as director of the Congressional Budget Office from 2009 to 2015, also denied allegations that donors influenced his original decision, which was reported in a Nation article and echoed Roth’s statement.
“Donors do not influence how we think about education,” he said in a statement. “My opinion is no longer intended to limit the debate at the Kennedy School about human rights in any country.”
He did not say why he refused to associate with Mr. Roth other than to say that “it was based on my bias in terms of what he could contribute to the school.”
Regarding Roth, who after Harvard’s face was accepted at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is now a fellow at Perry World House, Elmendorf said, “I believe that our community can benefit from his experiences in life. Many issues of human rights.”
Roth, reached by phone after the announcement, said he was pleased with the decision, which he said was “overwhelming.” concern from the faculty, is that he will use the fellowship to work on a book about decades of civil rights struggle. But he also asked for transparency.
“Dean Elmendorf has said that he made this decision because of people who ‘like’ him at the university,” Roth said, referring to accounts published by faculty members. “He still refuses to say who the people who were important to him were.”
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And he called on Harvard to make a strong commitment to academic freedom, including those unable to gather public opinion.
“Punishing people for criticizing Israel is not for me alone,” he continued. “What will the Kennedy School, and Harvard more broadly, do to show that the department is making a new commitment to academic freedom, rather than just giving it to a celebrity?”
The incident was the latest flare-up in an ongoing debate about when criticism of Israel amounts to anti-Semitism, and when anti-Semitic accusations are used to stifle dissent.
In interviews (with on Twitter), Roth, a Jew whose father fled Nazi Germany as a child, said that Elmendorf’s first decision shows the influence of those who want to relegate Human Rights Watch, which monitors atrocities in more than 100 countries, as an impartial observer to Israel. And he has described it as a “donor-driven review,” although he said he has no evidence.
“It seems that this is the power of donors that is reducing intellectual freedom,” he said in an interview with The New York Times last week.
(A Harvard spokeswoman said the university and its president, Lawrence Bacow, had no comment.)
Donor influence can be a concern, with the details of the discussions that take place behind closed doors not visible. But Israel has become increasingly suspicious in recent years, as some donors concerned about what they see as anti-Israel or anti-Israel policies in school education have tried to return gifts or interfere with hiring decisions.
In 2020, the University of Toronto suspended Valentina Azarova as director of the human rights program at its law school, after a major funder contacted the dean to express concerns about her academic work criticizing Israel’s human rights record. (After public outcry, the university offered Azarova a job and academic freedom protection, but she refused.)
Last year, the University of Washington returned a $5 million gift, after a donor to its Israel Studies program was unhappy with a professor who joined other Israeli and Jewish studies experts in signing an open letter criticizing the behavior of the Israeli government towards Palestinians and Arabs. the land and territories of Palestine. The donor, according to the university, requested that the gift agreement be amended to prohibit scholars supported by the donation from making statements that “seem to be anti-Israel.”
The Kennedy School, a partnership of 12 campuses and more, is one of the nation’s leading public education institutions. He is also no stranger to controversy, which often comes not from his regular team but from the more than 750 friends he visits, which include prominent politicians, the government and the media.
In 2017, Elmendorf resigned from the fellowship given to Chelsea Manning, a former military intelligence expert who in 2010 released military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks, following criticism from Mike Pompeo, the former director of the CIA, and others in the intelligence community. In 2019, Rick Snyder, the former governor of Michigan, left the association after his nomination sparked controversy on social media and students who cited his actions in the Flint water crisis.
As for dissenting voices on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the school has housed various figures in recent years, including Amos Yadlin, a retired Israeli military officer, and Saeb Erekat, a former Palestinian leader and secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization. . .
Roth was recruited to the fellowship, which does not include teaching duties, by Mathias Risse, director of the Carr Center. In an email to Carr Center students, faculty members, colleagues, alumni and others following the Nation story, Risse called him “one of the most outstanding civil rights leaders of our time” and said the refusal to associate was “one of the lowest moments of human rights in our time”. my work life. “
In interviews and emails with The Times, Risse and another faculty member, Kathryn Sikkink, said that Elmendorf, in explaining his rejection of Roth, cited the idea that Human Rights Watch was “biased” against Israel. He told them he was aware of the matter following discussions with unnamed people at the university, he said.
The donors, they said, were not named. But they said a 2021 Human Rights Watch report, which said Israel’s policies toward Palestinians in the occupied territories met the legal definition of a “crime of discrimination,” was discussed.
Whether Human Rights Watch is fair to Israel has been a source of controversy, both inside and outside the organization. In a 2009 article in The Times, Robert Bernstein, one of the group’s founders, said that its criticism of Israel “helps those who want to turn Israel into a pagan state.”
In 2019, Israel expelled the head of the group on Israel and Palestine and the chief researcher and author of the 2021 report, Omar Shakir, under a law banning foreigners who support boycotts of Israel or its territories. At the time, Mr. Shakir denied that he or Human Rights Watch had called for boycotts of consumers in Israel or its territories.
With its 2021 report, titled “A Threshold Crossed,” Human Rights Watch became the first international human rights group to use the term “discrimination” in Israel’s actions. Six months later, Amnesty International followed suit in its report. (In 2022, Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic issued a similar, anonymous report.)
Sarah Leah Whitson, the former Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said the “discrimination” came after a “bitter” internal conflict.
“We had to work for years to build confidence among the organization’s senior leaders that this was the right place for us to go,” said Whitson, who is now the director of Democracy in the Arab World Now, or DAWN. There was a fear “that if you cross the red lines, they will try to decapitate you as a mob.”
The Human Rights Watch report was attacked by Israel, whose ambassador to the United States said it bordered on anti-Semitism. The American Jewish Committee called it a “shoddy work” and accused Roth of having “abominations against Israel.” Some progressive Jewish groups that expressed concern about the “vitriolic attack” on the report also expressed their opposition to the word “apartheid.”
The report does not refer to Israel, as some (including some Israeli groups) have done, as an “apartheid government.” He used the term not to refer to the state of Israel, but to the implementation of apartheid policies in the occupied territories, which he said was consistent with the definition of the “crime of apartheid” given in the internationally recognized laws of the United Nations and the United Nations it said. International Criminal Court.
Roth said the point of the report, which “he spent a lot of time preparing,” was not to equate Israel with the former apartheid regime in South Africa but to use legal definitions. And that showed the reality, he said, that the path to peace was “dead.”
He said: “There is no evidence that what is happening today will end. “This is what made us all realize that we need to change our thinking.”
For some on campus, the issue is less about Roth or Human Rights Watch than it is about the school.
“From a free speech perspective, yes, they should have the right to associate” if the Carr Center saw fit to invite him, said Natalie Kahn, senior at Harvard College and president of Harvard Students for Israel. “I think, however, that there are a lot of people at Harvard who promote the anti-Israel sentiment that we don’t need another one.”
Ahmed Moor, a 2013 graduate of the Kennedy school who helped organize an open letter from Palestinian alumni protesting Elmendorf’s decision, said the school housed Yadlin, the Israeli head, and had “people like me.”
“It is right and proper for such an organization,” because representing the majority of opinions is part of the goal of “the best public policy.”
With the original decision, he added, “That’s where the current dean messed things up.”
