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The removal of a weeklong exhibit by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee in the Science Center plaza led to a confrontation between former University President Lawrence H. Summers and College administrators on Thursday afternoon.
The “Wall of Resistance,” built of six painted wooden panels designed and installed by PSC members, was the latest iteration of the organization’s annual exhibit condemning Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. This year’s wall featured artwork and text condemning Israel’s killing of young children and aid seekers in Gaza and calling for Harvard to divest from Israel.
The exhibit was erected on Sunday and scheduled for removal by PSC members on Thursday at noon. Less than two hours before the planned removal, Harvard Chabad announced an address by Summers criticizing the wall, which coincided with its scheduled takedown. The removal was planned in advance in accordance with University guidelines preventing the installation from remaining in place for longer than five days.
According to Harvard Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi, it was Summers who had suggested holding an event at the wall in a phone call to him earlier that day, expressing his upset at the installation. The timing also conflicted with a class co-taught by Summers, Econ 1420: “American Economic Policy,” which he did not attend on Thursday.
During the event, attended by more than 50 Harvard affiliates, Summers condemned the installation as “antisemitic” and “the moral equivalent of racism.”
“I do not believe that if the doctrines of the Ku Klux Klan were proposed for installation in the Science Center, that that would be permitted and that would be enabled by those who lead us in this community,” Summers said. He urged attendees to reach out directly to University President Alan M. Garber ’76 and College Dean David Deming to express their disapproval.
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Several minutes after noon, Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh and Dean of Students Thomas G. Dunne briefly interrupted the event to ask Summers to move away from the wall so that the removal could continue safely.
Claybaugh told Summers the event could continue, but asked that he step away from the wall while it was being taken down.
Summers refused to move, saying “I am going to finish my remarks.”
Summers continued to speak for several minutes before ending his address.
Shortly after his speech, Summers and Claybaugh engaged in a heated exchange over her intervention in the event.
Claybaugh defended her decision to intervene, saying that she did not know how long the event would continue. She added that she was acting in line with content-neutral Harvard policy.
“I’m just defending the University rules,” she said.
But Summers contested the idea that Harvard had enforced the rules neutrally and expressed frustration with Claybaugh’s responses.
“Now I’m really angry,” he told Claybaugh. “I wasn’t angry before. Now I’m really angry.”
Harvard’s campus use rules were first adopted in summer 2024, shortly after the pro-Palestine Harvard Yard encampment. The rules limit several tactics favored by student protesters and require advance approval for certain activities, including putting up displays and holding gatherings on campus.
The campus use rules, which Harvard has used to remove a Black Lives Matter sign from two professors’ office windows and to cancel a pro-Palestine vigil at Harvard Medical School, have drawn criticism from some faculty and students who say the University has enforced them unevenly.
Use of the Science Center plaza is also governed by the Office of Common Spaces, whose website states that exhibits will only be approved for up to three days. It was unclear why the permit issued for the PSC’s wall, which included three full days and two partial days for setup and removal, appeared to exceed the limit.
In an email to a College official later Thursday, which was reviewed by The Crimson, Claybaugh wrote that she and Dunne were approached by a student in the PSC on Thursday morning near Memorial Hall. The student requested assistance because they were unsure how to dismantle the wall while a group had gathered beside it.
Claybaugh worried that someone could be hit by a falling panel if the address continued, so she asked the group to move, she wrote.
In previous years, the PSC has installed a similar wall in the spring semester as part of an annual “Israel Apartheid Week” protest. But they were unable to install the wall this spring after the College put the group on a semester-long probation due to their support of a Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine rally that Harvard said violated campus policies.
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Eva C. Frazier ’26, a PSC organizer, said that the wall was installed to “make students reflect on what it means to attend a university that is actively, materially, and morally complicit in the ongoing genocide and occupation in Palestine.”
The PSC has long protested Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and unequal treatment of Palestinians, but the group’s highest-profile activism in recent years has centered on condemnation of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack, which killed more than 1,000 people in Israel.
More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war, including more than 18,000 children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which is run by the Hamas administration controlling Gaza. An International Court of Justice inquiry into whether Israel has committed genocide in Gaza is expected to take years to issue a finding, though a United Nations inquiry concluded last month that Israel’s actions in the territory amounted to genocide.
Frazier said it was important that the PSC installed the exhibit to show that “occupation and genocide” were continuing despite Israel’s ceasefire deal with Hamas, reached earlier this month.
The deal allowed for the exchange of detainees and hostages and restarted the flow of aid into Gaza. But violence has persisted in the weeks since the agreement was signed.
Summers said in an interview shortly after his remarks that he believed Harvard had not adequately acted against antisemitism on campus. The University has not yet made enough of “an effort to distinguish between good and bad, legitimate and illegitimate ideas,” he said.
Asked for comment on Summers’ speech, PSC organizer Olivia G. Pasquerella ’26 said that “it is not antisemitic or racist to critique a state that is perpetrating a genocide that has killed tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Palestinians.”
“That’s what the wall talks about,” Pasquerella added.
— Staff Writer Sebastian B. Connolly can be reached at sebastian.connolly@thecrimson.com and on X @SebastianC4784.
—Staff writer Julia A. Karabolli can be reached at julia.karabolli@thecrimson.com.
