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A Harvard education journal’s publisher abruptly canceled a planned special issue on Palestine and education last month, sparking accusations from authors and editors that the journal’s publisher made a “Palestine exception” to academic freedom.
The publisher, the Harvard Education Publishing Group, emailed contributors on June 9 saying that the issue would be canceled over “copy-editing issues” and disagreements between editors and the publisher.
But authors and editors for the journal, the Harvard Educational Review, instead accused HEPG of nixing the special issue because it focused on Palestine. They also speculated that the move was prompted by the Trump administration’s onslaught against Harvard, which has targeted the University over antisemitism and pro-Palestine activism on its campus.
“It’s hard to disassociate this cancellation from the broader context and the related pressure that Harvard is being placed under by the Trump administration,” Jo Kelcey, an education professor at the Lebanese American University in Beirut and co-author of one of the issue’s articles, wrote in a statement.
“It seems to be a classic case of the Palestine exception,” she added.
The cancellation, first reported by The Guardian, comes at a tense moment for Harvard and its treatment of pro-Palestine speech. The University has come under a relentless assault from the Trump administration, in large part over pro-Palestine advocacy on campus that the White House claims has contributed to an antisemitic environment at Harvard.
A settlement to the dispute hasn’t been reached yet. But Harvard has already begun making changes at several academic centers and programs that have focused on Palestine. The University dismissed the two leaders at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies over allegedly imbalanced programming on Palestine; temporarily shuttered the Harvard Divinity School’s Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative; and severed ties with Birzeit University in the West Bank.
Most of those decisions have been defended and even advertised by Harvard administrators, who have cited management issues and a need to “enable different perspectives.” A report by the University’s task force on antisemitism accused several of the programs of representing skewed views on the Israel-Palestine conflict and suggested shifting their control toward senior faculty.
Authors and editors said that the cancellation of the issue by HER, which is housed within the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is just the latest example of censorship of scholarship on Palestine.
In a statement to The Crimson, HGSE spokesperson Paul Belsito denied that the OGC cancelled the special issue over its focus on Palestine. He said the move was made because of “an overall lack of internal alignment” and “an inadequate editorial review process.”
“HEPG is committed to collaborative, rigorous editorial standards; those standards were not met in this instance,” Belsito wrote.
The special issue began to take shape more than a year ago in March 2024. At that time, six months into the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, HER began calling for submissions for a special issue that aimed to prompt “scholarly conversation on education and Palestine amid repression, occupation, and genocide”
Work on the special issue began quickly. Most articles were submitted for review by August 2024, and several were accepted for publication by early 2025. Authors signed publishing agreements shortly thereafter.
HER editors conducted a first round of edits in January 2025, and a second round the following month. In March, the issue was promoted on the back cover of the journal’s Spring 2025 issue and at an academic conference on education in Chicago.
But as early as January, HEPG seemed to be growing hesitant about publishing the special issue.
The publisher told the journal’s editors that month that there would be an “institutional review” of the articles slated for publication, according to the Guardian. And in February, HEPG attempted to remove an article from the back cover of the journal’s Spring 2025 issue without the editors’ knowledge. (The article focused on “scholasticide” in Gaza, according to a statement by the contributing authors, and was returned to the promotional materials after the editors were made aware of the change.)
In early May, the publisher told HER editors that it wanted a legal “risk assessment” by Harvard’s Office of the General Counsel out of concern that the issue would draw accusations of antisemitism, according to the authors. The editors told writers about the potential review later that month.
Though legal reviews are not uncommon for publications, the authors wrote in their statement that announcing one so close to publication was an “extraordinary move.” Alarmed, 21 writers penned a May 15 letter to HER and HEPG condemning the legal review.
“It is incredibly shameful to see a university such as Harvard, its school of Education and HEPG so explicitly betraying its mission and rejecting a clause on protecting academic freedom,” the authors wrote in a later statement. “Academic freedom must not be contingent on political expedience.”
Jessica Fiorillo, the publisher’s executive editor, responded to the authors’ letter in an email obtained by the Guardian, claiming the issue’s cancellation was not “due to censorship of a particular viewpoint nor does it connect to matters of academic freedom.”
Instead, she pointed to the resignation of a copy editor. She wrote that the editor had been hamstrung by “highly restrictive editing guidelines,” which barred them from making edits that addressed anything beyond grammatical errors.
Belsito, the HGSE spokesperson, wrote in a statement to The Crimson that the OGC never reviewed draft articles and asserted that Harvard’s counsel does not “make or direct editorial decisions” for HEGC or the Graduate School of Education.
As HEPG moved closer to canceling the issue, Harvard Law School student Rabea Eghbariah said he also faced pushback from the publisher over academic freedom concerns.
Eghbariah, a Palestinian Ph.D. candidate at HLS, had previously encountered challenges publishing a controversial article about the legal regimes governing Palestinians in the Harvard Law Review and Columbia Law Review in 2023. So when the HER asked him to write an afterward for the special issue, he asked on March 6 to amend his contract to include a clause explicitly protecting his academic freedom.
But on April 10, the publisher rejected his request and provided no explanation, he said.
The series of events have left both HER’s editors and contributing authors concerned that their work had been targeted for its focus on Palestine.
The HER’s editorial board wrote in a statement that they felt “deep disappointment” with the issue’s cancellation and that the decision was “out of alignment with the values that have guided HER for nearly a century.”
“Despite our best efforts to advance this work amidst a climate of repression and institutional accommodation, we were ultimately met with the ‘Palestinian exception to academic freedom’,” the group wrote.
The contributing authors wrote in their statement that the cancellation was worrisome not just for scholarship on Palestine but for academic freedom writ large, calling the move “a warning across all fields of critical inquiry.”
Eghbariah argued that the fierce debates over academic freedom for scholarship on Palestine that have roiled university campuses, especially at Harvard, distract from the content of the research: Palestinian people and the ongoing war in Gaza.
“The issue here is not only censorship,” Eghbariah wrote. “The issue is that this type of academic silencing serves to manufacture consent to the Israeli genocide and starvation, climaxing as we speak.”
—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.
