The Harvard graduating students denied their degrees over Palestine protest

More than two weeks have passed since the graduates’ commencement ceremony for 2024 at Harvard University, but Asmer Asrar Safi is still waiting to receive the degree for which he spent four years studying. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Besides Safi, who is originally from Lahore, Pakistan, another 12 students find themselves in the same situation: they are all graduating students at one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the world but will not be awarded their degrees for at least one year.

Harvard Corporation, the university’s top governing body, barred these students from receiving their degrees during this year’s graduation ceremony on May 23 on account of their involvement in the three-week pro-Palestine encampment at the university last month.

“I am waiting for my appeals decision to come out,” 23-year-old Safi, an international student of social studies and ethnicity, migration and rights at Harvard College, says.

“I am a Rhodes Scholar and trying to ascertain if I can matriculate at the University of Oxford given that my Harvard degree has been withheld for a year, even though I have met all the academic conditions for my programme and have completed my degree requirements.”

Shraddha Joshi is another student who will not be able to receive her degree, despite having the backing of her faculty at Harvard College, where she was studying in the same programme as Safi.

“After having completed the appeal application on my end, we seem to be in a limbo as we wait for communication from the university. Students and faculty members are all quite confused by the ambiguity of the process, and the timeline for appeals is unclear,” she told Al Jazeera.

Born and raised in Texas, Joshi had been planning to pursue a master’s degree in sociology in the United Kingdom, but says her future is now uncertain.

“I was supposed to go to the University of Cambridge with the Harvard-UK Fellowship, but my plans are now in flux due to my degree status. The lack of transparency and poor communication from administrators make it difficult to predict what our next steps will look like,” she says.

Like many other academic institutions in the US, Harvard University has found itself caught up in an increasingly angry debate about academic freedom and the right to protest over Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.

Having served as Harvard’s president for just six months, Claudine Gay resigned from the position in January this year, following her appearance at a congressional testimony about “rising anti-Semitism” on the college campus in December 2023.

In her resignation letter, Gay, the university’s first Black president and only the second woman to take the role in its 388-year history, cited personal attacks “fuelled by racial animus”.

Her resignation came following pressure on her to step down as she also faced allegations of plagiarism about her academic work which surfaced soon after the congressional hearing.

In April, students at Columbia University, an Ivy League college in New York, began an encampment on their campus grounds in protest against the Israeli war on Gaza. They demanded that their university divest from companies linked to or doing business with Israel.

The protest movement grew rapidly across the country, with encampments appearing at more than 30 other universities, including Harvard, where the student protest encampment began on April 24.

The demand by students at the Harvard encampment, much like the rest of the college campuses in the US, was for a full disclosure of Harvard’s investments in companies linked to Israel and divestment from those companies.

Following negotiations between the university administration and the Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine (HOOP) coalition, which was leading the protest, the encampment was disbanded on May 14.

To reach an agreement to end the encampment, Harvard, which had placed more than 20 students on “involuntary leave”, agreed to begin the process of reinstating those students and offered protesters a meeting with members of the university’s governing boards about divestment.

On May 14, Harvard interim president Alan Garber said: “With the disruption to the educational environment caused by the encampment now abated, I will ask that the schools promptly initiate applicable reinstatement proceedings for all individuals who have been placed on involuntary leaves of absence. I will also ask disciplinary boards within each school to evaluate expeditiously, according to their existing practices and precedents, the cases of those who participated in the encampment.” acv acv acv acv acv acv acv acv acv acv acv acv acv acv acv acv acv acv acv acv

The post The Harvard graduating students denied their degrees over Palestine protest appeared first on The Muslim News.