Two heads of Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies were let go from their roles on Wednesday amid intensive scrutiny of the field from congressional leaders and the Trump administration. 

The center’s director and professor of Turkish studies Cemal Kafadar, and its associate director, history professor Rosie Bsheer, were both removed from their posts, The Harvard Crimson reported on Friday. Global health professor Salmaan Keshavjee — the center’s interim director while Kafadar was on leave — will remain in his position. 

A 2024 report from the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance took aim at the center for broadcasting the view that “the Palestinian people are innocent victims of Jewish (white) oppression and that known terrorist groups are simply ‘political movements.’” 

The report stated that Kafadar and Bsheer, who both will remain in their faculty positions, curated a list of roughly 60 resources for students with the expressed purpose to “offer analyses and histories of expulsion, occupation, settler colonialism, forced evictions, home demolitions, and annexation that situate the current struggle as part of the ongoing Nakba of 1948 and in relation to the Naksa of 1967.” An anonymous student quoted in the report singled out Kafadar for allegedly telling his students to attend pro-Palestinian teach-ins. 

Derek Penslar, a historian and the director of Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies — who shortly after Oct. 7 sparked controversy for comments he made minimizing concerns over antisemitism at Harvard and accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing — has remained a faculty affiliate of the Center for Middle Eastern studies. 

Before the firings were announced, Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi, who leads Harvard Chabad, told Jewish Insider on Thursday: “Heading an academic center is a privilege and responsibility which they have demonstrated by their own actions and rhetoric that they are simply unworthy of or qualified for.” 

Zarchi went on: “The individuals heading these centers have betrayed every standard and academic principle in their roles; thus, completely disqualifying themselves from the ability to advance scholarship, and most certainly, the qualifications to advance human rights broadly.”

The center also came under fire from former Harvard President Lawrence Summers, who wrote on X earlier this month that a February panel billed as “Israel’s war in Lebanon” was “very likely” antisemitic under the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, which Harvard agreed to implement as part of a resolution to two Title VI lawsuits in January. 

The crackdown on Middle Eastern studies at Harvard comes just days after Columbia University agreed to a set of demands from the Trump administration — including putting the school’s Middle Eastern studies department under a “receivership,” which would involve closer oversight from an external body. Columbia agreed to the supervision as a first step to beginning talks for the federal government to restore $400 million in grants and contracts that were pulled due to Columbia’s alleged failure to respond to rising antisemitism. 

As the Trump administration’s pressure campaign on elite universities continues, Columbia and Yale also saw significant employee changes on Friday. 

Columbia University’s interim President Katrina Armstrong stepped down after seven months in the role — having replaced former President Minouche Shafik, who faced calls to resign in part due to her responses to questions about antisemitism during a congressional hearing last year. 

Armstrong will return to her previous position as chief executive of Columbia’s Irving Medical Center. Board of trustees co-chair Claire Shipman, a former ABC News correspondent, has been appointed acting president. 

Yale Law School, meanwhile, said it terminated Helyeh Doutaghi, an associate research scholar and deputy director of the law and political economy project at Yale since 2023, for her membership in the designated terrorist network Samidoun, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s fundraising arm in North America.