Harvard University’s long-awaited twin reports on campus antisemitism and Islamophobia, which depicted an academic year marked by strife for Jewish and Muslim students in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and the ensuing war in Gaza, was largely praised by Jewish leaders — both on and off campus — as an “overdue and important step.” But when comparing the two reports side-by-side, some raised concern that there are “major holes” and “asymmetry.” 

“My general take is that they did a good job in detailing what happened and in making recommendations about how to fix the immediate problems,” Rabbi David Wolpe, a former visiting scholar at Harvard’s Divinity School, told Jewish Insider of the more than 300-page antisemitism report released on Tuesday, authored by the 15-member task force which was formed in January 2024. Wolpe was a former member of a separate antisemitism advisory group that the elite university formed last year as a response to record-high levels of antisemitism that roiled the campus. 

But after reading the nearly as lengthy 200-page Islamophobia report, Wolpe noticed a “a real difference in tone” between how the two were written, calling the report on Muslim students “more disparaging and negative about Harvard than the antisemitism report.”

The Islamophobia report did not “acknowledge that Jews weren’t protesting, breaking into classrooms and preventing people from getting where they wanted to go,” Wolpe said. “There was a real asymmetry in the responsibility of the unrest on campus to start with.” 

“A major hole in their analysis,” Wolpe said, was that the Islamophobia report “complained about [Jewish] donors and the antisemitism report does not talk about the tremendous contributions of Middle Eastern countries and I think that’s a crucial variable.” 

The antisemitism report was made public amid alumni frustration and pressure from the Trump administration, which gave the university a May 2 deadline to release the findings. In the report, Harvard committed  to partner with an Israeli university; provide additional resources for the study of Hebrew and Judaic studies; host an annual academic symposium on antisemitism; ask the leadership of Sidechat, a social media app that allows college students to post anonymously, to enforce its content moderation policies; and launch a pilot program in the business school addressing contemporary antisemitism.

Many of the recommendations in both the antisemitism and Islamophobia reports are the same: working to create a pluralistic campus environment where differing opinions are respected, committing additional resources to the university’s Title VI office, providing greater halal and kosher food options and shoring up university policy around protests and activism. 

“This report represents an important and overdue step in the right direction and can start the healing process that is so desperately needed, not just on campus, but across the country,” Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a statement.  

Greenblatt called for Harvard to “take meaningful steps and meet the milestones outlined in its whole-of-campus approach to eliminating antisemitism.” 

Jason Rubenstein, executive director of Harvard Hillel, echoed that the antisemitism report was “overdue” and called its release a “critical step in Harvard’s long reckoning with antisemitism.”

Rubenstein praised Harvard President Alan Garber for his commitment to “addressing the deeper causes of this intolerable state of affairs and not merely their headline-grabbing manifestations over the past nineteen months.”  

Also on Tuesday, Garber released a letter publicizing the reports, in which he called the 2023-2024 academic year following the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks “disappointing and painful,” and said the reports “reveal aspects of a charged period in our recent history.” He condemned both antisemitism and Islamophobia, and pledged that the university will take action to counter both forms of hatred.  

Jacob Miller, a senior studying mathematics and economics who served as Harvard Hillel president in 2023, questioned the need for the antisemitism task force report to begin with in an op-ed published Wednesday in the Harvard Crimson.

“Harvard should actually set up task forces to investigate all the different failings of Harvard’s Pro-Palestine coalition, or even to convince you that their other actions deserve the same level of condemnation as outright identity-based hatred,” Miller wrote. “In reality, opposition to pro-Palestine organizing at Harvard should be based on more than its antisemitism. Our excoriation of the movement should be based on protesters’ simplistic thinking, extremist rhetoric, implicit justification and support of violence, and denial of Jewish religious teaching and history.” 

The reports come as Harvard, the world’s wealthiest university, finds itself embroiled in a high-stakes legal battle with the White House. The university is suing the Trump administration in protest of a series of demands issued by President Donald Trump earlier this month, aimed at reforming Harvard’s handling of antisemitism, as well as its governance structure, admissions policies and teaching practices. 

Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee, said in a statement that the report shows that “antisemitism is running rampant on Harvard’s campus” and that he’s “delighted we finally have an ally in the White House who is willing to hold schools accountable for their abject failure to protect students, as required by law.”