Dissent & Resigning from Harvard

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In this episode of Occupied Thoughts, FMEP Fellow Ahmed Moor speaks with Jay Ulfelder, a political scientist and former Program Director of the Nonviolent Action Lab at Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. The two discuss Jay’s decision to resign from Harvard Kennedy School after the school adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which would cause Jay to, as he wrote in his resignation letter, “risk running afoul of the university’s anti-discrimination policies and harming the work of the Lab and the Ash Center” if he were to continue to speak publicly about Israel, Gaza, and Zionism. (You can read the full resignation letter below.) Additionally, the two discuss modeling practices for predicting genocide and political violence as well as the relationship between suppression of dissent and growing authoritarianism.

Occupied Thoughts by FMEP · Dissent & Resigning from Harvard

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Recorded on February 13, 2025

Ahmed Moor is a Palestinian-American writer born in Gaza. He is an advisory board member of the US Campaign for Palestinian rights, co-editor of After Zionism (Saqi Books) and is currently writing a book about Palestine. He also currently serves on the board of the Independence Media Foundation. His work has been published in The Guardian, The London Review of Books, The Nation, and elsewhere. He earned a BA at the University of Pennsylvania and an MPP at Harvard University.

Jay Ulfelder is a political scientist and former Program Director of the Nonviolent Action Lab at Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Stanford University and BA in Comparative Area Studies (USSR and Eastern Europe) from Duke University. He is the author of Dilemmas of Democratic Consolidation (Lynne Rienner 2010) and has published numerous articles on democratic transitions and breakdowns, protest, and political forecasting.

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Jay Ulfelder’s Resignation Letter: 

January 22, 2025

Dear Erica, Tim, and Archon:

In protest of the university’s response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza and deepening repression of student activism opposing it, I have decided to quit my role as program director of the Nonviolent Action Lab at Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. Unless you wish to end my employment sooner, Friday, February 7, 2025, will be my last day on the job.

The university’s recent decision to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism gave me the final push, but I have been considering this choice for some time now. Over the past 16 months, as Israel has escalated its genocide in Gaza, students, staff, faculty, and all kinds of other people at Harvard, across the country, and around the world have mobilized to decry those atrocities, to demonstrate their solidarity with Palestinians, and to push for structural changes that would finally diminish or end international support for Israeli occupation and apartheid. Harvard’s administration has responded to that activism by ignoring or rejecting students’ demands, punishing student protesters, and adopting rules and definitions that increasingly restrict political speech at the university, particularly but not exclusively around Israel and Palestine. At each fork in the road, Harvard’s leadership seems to have chosen the path that prioritizes the university’s funds and reputation over its students and its stated values. As the GOP retook control of the federal government this month, I had hoped to see signs that the university would rediscover its moral voice and start pushing back against the resurgence of openly bigoted authoritarianism in the U.S., including but not limited to support for the genocide in Palestine. Instead, I am seeing the opposite.

I am a staff member, not a faculty member, but I am political scientist by training, with professional expertise and decades of experience on ethnonationalism, social movements, democratization, and genocide. I know that Zionism is an ethnonationalist project, and that ethnonationalist projects inevitably involve racism and authoritarian governance and violent boundary maintenance. I know that Israel’s brutal campaign in Gaza over the past 16 months is a genocide punctuating a 76-year history of violent dispossession and subordination of the Palestinian people. I know that political and material support for Israel from the U.S. government, corporations, and cultural and educational institutions has been and remains fundamental to that endeavor. And I know that mass mobilization in the U.S. can play an important supporting role in ending that genocide and helping to create space for real Palestinian liberation.

These are all things I know, and yet I now risk running afoul of the university’s anti-discrimination policies and harming the work of the Lab and the Ash Center if I say them in public. In Gaza, I am witnessing one of the worst humanitarian and human-rights catastrophes in my 55-year lifetime; I help lead a program that studies civil resistance at a research center committed to advancing democracy; and my employer, an internationally renowned institution ostensibly committed to academic freedom, will not allow me or my colleagues or its own students to speak freely about these things, lest we offend people who support them, or who misunderstand or intentionally misconstrue principled criticism of Israeli apartheid and genocide and the ideology underpinning them as antisemitic.

In response, I have decided to leave the institution. This choice was not easy to make. I respect and admire so many of my colleagues. I know that many of them share my basic values and are trying hard to embody them as well, and that there is not just one way to do that. Lots of people can’t afford to quit their jobs; I’m very lucky that I can. It’s really hard to find work in our political economy that doesn’t feature some version of these dilemmas, and people are often quite clever at finding sources of leverage and other means of resistance from within their existing roles.

For better or for worse, though, the chief asset associated with my role as program director of the Nonviolent Action Lab was the opportunity to speak frankly and authoritatively about mobilization in the U.S. and elsewhere against authoritarianism and other catastrophes, and the university administration’s deepening repression of activism against the genocide in Palestine has now devalued and degraded that asset to an extent that I personally can no longer tolerate.

Respectfully,

Jay Ulfelder, Ph.D.