Forbes, Michael Nietzel, November 3, 2023
A group of Harvard University alumni have launched a “one dollar pledge” as a protest against what they believe has been the university’s inadequate response to the terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel on October 7.
The pledge comes in the form of an open letter to the Harvard Corporation. The signers, which at this point number more than 80 names, commit “to donate one dollar, and no more, to the University for the foreseeable future —not in anger, but in sadness and in hope.”
The statement claims that “Harvard has changed in ways that have made it unrecognizable to us,” and it charges that the university’s response to the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7th reveals that it “has lost its way.”
The pledge continues:
It should not require three statements (the latter two following a faculty protest) for this University and its leadership to condemn these evils. Still more, University leaders, while giving proper due to the demands of free speech and robust debate, should have the moral courage to tell their students who support evil that those students are wrong.
Harvard’s initial silence and its ongoing failure to condemn the abhorrent statement endorsed by 30 of its student groups is part of a larger problem. A campus culture has developed in which Jews feel unsafe, and there have been several instances of intimidation and even violence leveled at Jewish students. And those who do not adhere to an increasingly militant ideological line are unwelcome.