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Harvard students will vote this week on whether the University should disclose ties to and divest from “companies and institutions operating in Israel” following more than 18 months of back-and-forth between student activists and the Harvard Undergraduate Association.
The HUA’s fall undergraduate survey, sent to the student body Monday night, features three questions submitted by student groups: two by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and one by the Harvard Undergraduate Jews for Peace.
The PSC’s questions ask, “should Harvard disclose its investments in companies and institutions operating in Israel?” and “should Harvard divest from companies and institutions operating in Israel?” The Jews for Peace question asks whether Harvard should have adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s antisemitism definition. Respondents have the option to answer “yes,” “no,” “uncertain,” or skip the question entirely. Students can vote until Tuesday at midnight.
The Election Commission sent a Nov. 11 email to the student body primarily calling students to run for Sports Team Officer, a vacant position after no students ran in the spring. The email also advertised “the opportunity to submit survey questions to receive feedback from their peers.”
But PSC and Jews for Peace members said the process of submitting their survey questions was obfuscated by the Election Commission’s failure to publicize its rules. The Nov. 11 email announcing fall elections did not include a PDF of Election Commission guidelines — though the spring election announcement attached an extensive regulations document.
Donahue wrote in a Monday email to The Crimson that the Election Commission operated this semester under its 2024-25 guidelines.
“To make participation easier for student organizations, we invited interested groups to email the Election Commission directly rather than reissuing the full guidelines to the student body,” the Commission wrote in a Tuesday morning statement to The Crimson. “We plan to revise and reissue updated regulations in the spring.”
The questions ultimately posed to Harvard students Monday night also underwent wording changes based on feedback from the Election Commission, according to Violet T.M. Barron ’26, a Crimson Editorial editor and the student who submitted the PSC’s survey question.
The PSC’s original submission, which was one question instead of two, asked, “should Harvard divest from institutions that profit from and/or aid Israel’s human rights abuses, including the genocide in Gaza and ongoing illegal occupation of Palestine?”
The Election Commission told both the PSC and Jews for Peace that their questions were in violation of election survey guidelines because they were “leading.”
Barron said the PSC did not receive further specification on which aspects of their question was leading, but revised their submission’s wording and split it into two parts.
In their Tuesday statement, the Election Commission wrote that while they “did not specify particular revisions, the submitting organizations made edits that addressed the concerns.”
Barron added that the Election Commission notified the PSC that they would not be allowed to publicize the survey question on its social media accounts, a policy that the Election Commission did not share in advance and is not specified in its 2024-25 guidelines.
The HUA Election Commission operates separately from the body’s executive leadership. It is composed of five undergraduates — Tucker Coombs ’28, David E. Daniel ’28, Crimson Editorial editor Joshua A. Kaplan ’26, Crimson News editor Neeraja S. Kumar ’27, and Christopher B. Ruiz ’26 — and is overseen by Assistant Dean of Student Engagement and Leadership Andy Donahue.
“Our goal throughout this process has been to ensure that students can share their perspectives freely and respectfully, without external pressure or influence,” the Commission wrote in their Tuesday morning statement.
“The Commission emphasizes that the survey process is designed to foster an environment where students can share their perspectives freely and without pressure,” they added. “It is not intended to serve as a platform for activism or advocacy by any particular group.”
When Coombs emailed the student body on Monday announcing that voting was live, the link to the survey read “Click Here to Vote for HUA Sports Officer.” Barron emailed the Election Commission Monday requesting a follow up email to students “clarifying that it’s not just sports officers who we can vote for by clicking on the link.”
“I just asked that there be a follow-up email because to me it was rather misleading, and if I didn’t know any better — frankly, I don’t really care about who the HUA sports officers are— I might not have clicked on that question,” Barron said in an interview with The Crimson.
The Election Commission denied Barron’s request Monday morning, citing the survey questions’ optional nature.
“These questions do not require an answer, nor do they have any impact on campus policies and procedures,” they wrote. “Campaigning for survey questions is not allowed. These questions are specifically to solicit feedback from the student body.”
“The primary purpose of the fall election is to elect the HUA Sports Officer,” the Commission wrote in a Tuesday morning statement to The Crimson. “Because these survey questions are informational only and have no impact on campus policies or procedures, the Commission decided not to alter the ballot button wording.”
The ballot also includes a disclaimer that the “views, opinions, and content expressed in these questions do not reflect” those of the HUA, the College, or the University. The disclaimer continues that “responses to these questions have no impact” on the HUA’s or Harvard’s decisions.
The PSC initially attempted to submit a divestment referendum in April 2024, but the HUA indefinitely postponed the ballot measure, prompting a wave of backlash and the creation of a fruitless problem solving team.
In October 2024, the body passed a resolution limiting student referenda to questions related to the HUA and establishing a semesterly undergraduate survey, through which student groups could submit questions. But last semester, zero student groups submitted survey questions.
Barron said the PSC would have submitted a ballot question on divestment last semester but missed the deadline.
“All of our energy was focused on kind of what was happening on the ground here, and just somehow all of us managed to miss the fact that, like, the HUA spring elections were happening,” she said.
The PSC also changed their ballot question wording since their April 2024 referendum attempt, when they filed a petition to ask students whether Harvard should divest from institutions supporting “Israel’s occupation of Palestine.”
Barron said the decision to change wording from 2024 was focused on including the term “genocide.”
“If language around what Israel is doing would be a reason that people would not vote yes on a divestment question, then we would strategically, I think, decide not to use that language, which is what we did in the spring of 2024,” she said. “Now we are at the point where we feel like we can call this thing – which is a genocide – a genocide, so we did that.”
Jews for Palestine’s survey question references Harvard’s decision to adopt the definition as part of a January Title VI settlement in a lawsuit that accused the University of tolerating antisemitism on campus.
The adoption of the IHRA definition — which has drawn controversy because it is accompanied by examples that state that it is antisemitic to describe Israel’s existence as a “racist endeavor” or compare its policies to those of Nazi Germany — sparked outrage from pro-Palestine groups on campus who feared its enforcement would hinder students’ ability to freely criticize Israel.
The Election Commission also did not adhere to their 2024-25 regulations for naming students in connection with undergraduate survey questions, which state that the names of club members “who are authorized to and have submitted said petition” will be posted publicly alongside the final question.
The regulations state that the policy “ensures transparency and allows students to understand which groups are advocating for particular issues.” The names of the submitting members from the PSC and Jews for Peace, however, were omitted from the final survey that went out to students Monday night.
The Election Commission wrote in a Monday statement to The Crimson that the omission “was an oversight on the part of the election commission for when the survey was created.”
The fall survey also includes eight referendum questions posed by the HUA that poll students on a variety of topics, including their experience with the College’s recently established Office of Culture and Community, campus transportation, and Harvard’s recent grade inflation report.
Voting for the fall election opened on Monday and will close Tuesday at 11:59 pm.
—Staff writer Summer E. Rose can be reached at summer.rose@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @summerellenrose.
—Staff writer Claire L. Simon can be reached at claire.simon@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @ClaireSimon.
