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Updated March 24, 2025, at 2:34 p.m.

Nearly 80 Jewish Harvard affiliates — including at least three dozen faculty members — signed a Sunday statement urging universities to denounce the arrest of Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil and condemn President Donald Trump’s administration for using “Jews as a shield” in justifying attacks on campus free speech.

The statement, which was drafted by the Boston chapter of Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff and first circulated on March 11, was signed by nearly 3,000 faculty, staff, and students from universities across the United States.

The statement was written in response to the March 8 arrest of Khalil, a permanent legal U.S. resident who now faces deportation for leading pro-Palestine organizing at Columbia.

His arrest came as part of a wider crackdown that Trump administration officials describe as an effort to root out antisemitism. The arrest has sparked consternation at universities nationwide among faculty and students who argue it represents a threat to international students’ freedom of speech.

“We are united in denouncing, without equivocation, anyone who invokes our name — and cynical claims of antisemitism — to harass, expel, arrest, or deport members of our campus communities,” read the statement, which called for universities to “reject the dangerous narrative” that pro-Palestine advocacy is necessarily antisemitic.

The statement outlined several additional demands for university leaders, including ceasing collaboration with federal immigration enforcement, allocating “institutional resources” to free Khalil, and protecting affiliates from being punished by the Trump administration for speaking out.

A University spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on Sunday evening.

Though University President Alan M. Garber ’76 slammed the Trump administration’s cuts to federal research funding, Harvard has been otherwise quiet on Trump’s actions. The University did not issue statements responding to the arrest of Khalil, Trump’s $400 million cut to Columbia’s funding over its response to campus protests, or his $175 million penalty for the University of Pennsylvania for allowing transgender women to compete for the school’s athletic teams.

Harvard Medical School lecturer Aaron D.A. Shakow, who drafted the statement with Boston University associate professor Jonathan Feingold, said in an interview that universities should support ongoing litigation aimed at freeing Khalil and protect their affiliates’ abilities to “speak and debate and learn and think together.”

“One of the things that Mahmoud Khalil represents is a federal government that is intervening in almost every city in the country to use its power to make immigrants unsafe and increase their precarity,” Shakow said.

The statement also demanded that universities terminate collaborations with organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, that it claimed “smear” students and “applaud the lawless targeting of political opponents.”

The ADL — a pro-Israel organization dedicated to combating antisemitism — issued a statement on March 9 praising the Trump administration for its efforts to counter campus antisemitism, including Khalil’s deportation.

Last May, Garber met with the head of the ADL, Jonathan Greenblatt, to discuss campus antisemitism during the pro-Palestine Harvard Yard encampment. The meeting drew criticism from pro-Palestine student organizations, including Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine, which called Greenblatt a “notable anti-Palestinian racist & president of the widely-discredited ADL” at the time.

English professor Derek Miller, one of the statement’s signatories, criticized the ADL in a Sunday interview, saying “they have grown into an organization that is more interested in defending fascist authority in the United States and Israel than they are in the welfare of Jews.”

The letter also urged university leaders to “democratize university governance” by providing opportunities for faculty, staff, and students to collaborate on institutional responses to Trump’s actions.

“In faculty meetings over the past year, faculty have been begging the administration to do more organizing work, to help us get a message out there — to help us develop a strong message we can deliver as a community,” Miller said. “And they’ve consistently refused to do that.”

Harvard Graduate School of Education lecturer Gretchen A. Brion-Meisels ’99, another signatory, said that “any action Harvard takes should be taken in partnership with the faculty and with its own students.”

The demand comes as Harvard faculty push for the formation of a faculty senate that would grant professors more influence in the University’s governance. The effort began as professors’ faith in Harvard’s governing boards and administration cratered after the University botched its response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israel.

Harvard Medical School lecturer James “Jim” Recht blasted Trump and his allies for justifying their crackdowns on universities with the claim that they are protecting Jewish students against antisemitism, saying that they “have no compassion for actual Jews, either Israeli Jews or American Jews” like himself.

“They believe that the only way to engage with us is to deceitfully suggest that our actions are, in fact, are antisemitic,” Recht said.

“But it’s these liars and these crooks who are the antisemites,” he added.

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.

—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.