Harvard Divinity School refused to publish this year’s commencement speech after one of its speakers went off-script to acknowledge the genocide in Gaza, as The Intercept reported last month. Now, The Intercept is publishing recent Divinity School graduate Zehra Imam’s part of the speech for the first time.

The suppression of the speech came as Harvard University received public praise for refusing to abide with demands from the Trump administration in its stated crusade against antisemitism at the nation’s universities, which the administration has used to justify a crackdown on speech advocating for Palestinian rights. Earlier this week, Trump again threatened to cut Harvard’s federal funding — this time, all of it — after the administration found that the school had violated the Civil Rights Act and tolerated antisemitism on campus.

The school had “been in some cases deliberately indifferent, and in others has been a willful participant in anti-Semitic harassment of Jewish students, faculty, and staff,” Trump’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism argued in a letter to Harvard President Alan Garber on Monday. Harvard said it disagreed with the administration’s findings and took allegations of antisemitism on campus seriously.

It was the latest development in a monthslong, multiagency battle between President Donald Trump and Harvard over his sweeping demands for changes at the school, including an end to all practices designed to address diversity and equity, censorship of its curriculum, and punishment of pro-Palestine student protesters. The school has been hailed for its proclaimed resistance to these efforts and for its lawsuit against the Trump administration over the president’s order to bar would-be international students, which a judge indefinitely blocked earlier this week.

In private, however, Harvard has quietly capitulated to Trump’s threats. Students and staff at the Divinity School who spoke to The Intercept connected the school’s refusal to publish the commencement speech to its efforts to dismantle a program that offered a trip to the West Bank and coursework........

© The Intercept