Posted on 08/06/24
| News Source: The Harvard Crimson
A U.S. district judge denied Harvard’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by six Jewish students alleging that the University failed to address “severe and pervasive” campus antisemitism.
The 25-page ruling on Tuesday will allow the lawsuit against Harvard to proceed to discovery, dragging out the case for months if not years. The process will also likely force the University to provide greater evidence that it has taken measures to protect Jewish students on its campus.
U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns wrote in the ruling that “in many instances” Harvard did not respond to “an eruption of antisemitism” on campus, citing its failure to take disciplinary measures against “offending students and faculty.”
“In other words, the facts as pled show that Harvard failed its Jewish students,” Stearns wrote.
The ruling comes more than one week after the judge heard arguments in the suit from the attorneys representing the six Jewish students and Harvard lawyer Seth P. Waxman ’73. After the two-hour hearing, the judge declined to immediately rule on the motion to dismiss the suit.
Alexander “Shabbos” Kestenbaum, a recent Harvard Divinity School graduate and the only named plaintiff in the lawsuit, wrote on Tuesday that “Jewish students will continue to speak up.”
“We are delighted that the judge recognizes what we have been saying for months now: Harvard has enabled, normalized, and celebrated a culture of antisemitism on its campus,” he wrote.
The decision is particularly notable because Stearns ruled last week to dismiss a lawsuit against MIT that similarly alleged it had failed to combat antisemitism on campus. Stears wrote in his ruling on Harvard’s motion that “despite MIT’s failure of clairvoyance, it did respond with a perhaps overly measured but nonetheless consistent sense of purpose in returning civil order and discourse to its campus.”
The initial lawsuit against Harvard, filed in January, stated that the University violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin – through its “deliberate indifference” and “enabling” of antisemitism.
In his ruling on Tuesday, Stearns wrote that the plaintiffs “plausibly establish that Harvard’s response failed Title VI’s commands.”