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Last week, Harvard Medical School administrators canceled a pro-Palestine vigil run by recognized student organizations. Why? The school accused the organizers of breaking vague rules — rules they don’t seem to have broken.

HMS claims the event was promoted to non-Harvard students and advertised with an unrecognized student group. These allegations are tenuous at best. The only instance of cross-promotion with an unrecognized student group was virtual — on social media, which is not explicitly prohibited by Harvard Medical School’s policies. Moreover, physical HMS-approved flyers and virtual Instagram posts explicitly stated the event was limited to Harvard affiliates. HMS should not wield rules that do not exist against students who did not break them.

HMS administration was aware and supportive of the event for nearly two weeks. The students organizing the vigil seem to have followed HMS’s guidelines in good faith and even complied when administrators decided the day before the event to move it from the HMS Quad lawn to an indoor amphitheater. Then the event was abruptly canceled — just five hours before it was scheduled to start. To the extent HMS worked with student groups prior to the event, an abrupt cancellation after apparent compliance on the part of students leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

We’ve criticized Harvard’s campus use rules in the past for being vague and onerous. Now, they are being selectively enforced as part of a pattern of repressing pro-Palestine speech — especially at HMS.

In 2024, the medical school removed a potential graduation speaker from consideration over her past pro-Palestine statements. And in January, the school cancelled a panel with Gazan patients over inane concerns that it would be one-sided. In canceling this vigil, HMS administrators found another excuse to continue a worrisome pattern of avoidance at anything referencing the war in Gaza.

If students are punished even when they seemingly follow Harvard’s rules and burdensome processes, it is effectively impossible for them to exercise their right to free speech. If history teaches us anything, vague rules enable selective enforcement that is as dangerous as any number of clauses of explicit repression.

This problem is fixable: When it wants to, Harvard administration has the ability to establish clear, specific policies — just look at the College’s policy on social media co-sponsorship with unrecognized orgs. The Medical School, it seems, has work to do.

And whatever you think of Harvard’s rules, canceling this vigil was cruel. We can debate the acceptable limits of campus protests, but vigils — like the one the University allowed students to host in Harvard Yard after Charlie Kirk’s murder — are not disruptive. Yet somehow, HMS administrators claimed that the vigil for killed Palestinians would have “introduced substantial risks to the safety of [the] community.” If there were genuine security concerns — a spurious claim based on the facts of the matter — HMS should have worked with students to move the event rather than cancel it outright.

The fact remains that since Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has killed over 60,000 Palestinians in Gaza, and by sheer scale, this tragedy certainly affects many Harvard affiliates in deeply personal ways. It is blatantly wrong to restrict their ability to silently mourn what many human rights organizations have called a genocide.

When discomfort discussing Palestine extends to a disallowance of grief, Harvard descends into a true den of iniquity.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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