'Censorship and Discrimination': 200+ Scholars Slam Canceling of Harvard Journal Issue on Palestine

As Israel continues its U.S.-backed annihilation of the Gaza Strip and Harvard University weighs a deal with the Trump administration, the Ivy League institution came under fire by more than 200 scholars on Thursday for recently canceling a journal issue on Palestine.

"We, the undersigned scholars, educators, and education practitioners, write to express our alarm at the Harvard Education Publishing Group's (HEPG) cancellation of a special issue on Palestine and Education in the Harvard Educational Review (HER)," says the open letter. "Such censorship is an attempt to silence the academic examination of the genocide, starvation, and dehumanization of Palestinian people by the state of Israel and its allies."

Last month, The Guardian revealed how, after over a year of seeking, collecting, and editing submissions for a special issue on "education and Palestine" in preparation for a summer release, HEPG scrapped plans for the publication in June.

"The Guardian spoke with four scholars who had written for the issue, and one of the journal's editors," the newspaper detailed. "It also reviewed internal emails that capture how enthusiasm about a special issue intended to promote 'scholarly conversation on education and Palestine amid repression, occupation, and genocide' was derailed by fears of legal liability and devolved into recriminations about censorship, integrity, and what many scholars have come to refer to as the 'Palestine exception' to academic freedom."

The new letter also uses that language:

Contributing authors of the special issue were informed late into the process that the publisher intended to subject all articles to a legal review by Harvard University's Office of General Counsel. In response to this extraordinary move, the 21 contributing authors submitted a joint letter to both HEPG and HER, protesting this process as a contractual breach that violated their academic freedom. They also underscored the publisher's actions would set a dangerous precedent not only for the study of Palestine, but for academic publishing as a whole. The authors demanded that HEPG honour the original terms of their contractual agreements, uphold the integrity of the existing HER review process, and ensure that the special issue proceed to publication without interference. However, just prior to its release, HEPG unilaterally canceled the entire special issue and revoked the signed author contracts, in what The Guardian notes as "a remarkable new development in a mounting list of examples of censorship of pro-Palestinian speech."

These events reflect what scholars have termed the "Palestine exception" to free speech and academic freedom. It exemplifies anti-Palestinian discrimination, obstructing the dissemination of knowledge on Palestine at the height of the genocide in Gaza—precisely when Palestinian educators and students are enduring the most severe forms of "scholasticide" in modern history.

In a lengthy online statement about the cancellation, HEPG executive director Jessica Fiorillo said that "we decided not to move forward with the special issue because it did not meet our established standards for scholarly publishing. Of the 12 proposed pieces, three were research-based articles, two were reprints of previously published HER articles, and seven were opinion pieces."

"As a student-edited, non-peer-reviewed publication, HER manuscripts, nonetheless, undergo internal review by experienced, professional staff," she continued. "During this review, we determined that the submissions required substantial editorial work to meet our publication criteria. We concluded that the best recourse for all involved was to revert the rights to the pieces to authors so that they could seek publication elsewhere."

The scholars wrote Thursday that "it is unconscionable that HEPG have chosen to publicly frame their cancellation of the special issue as a matter of academic quality, while omitting key publicly reported facts that point to censorship. Perhaps most disturbingly, HEPG leadership has sought to displace responsibility for their actions onto the authors and graduate student editors of the journal, calling into question the integrity of the journal's long-standing review processes, and dismissing the articles as 'opinion pieces' unfit for publication."

"The latter claim ignores that HER explicitly welcomes 'experiential knowledge' and 'reflective accounts' through their Voices submission format," they noted. "When genocide is ongoing, personal reflections and testimonies are not only valid but vital. Dismissing such contributions as lacking scholarly merit reflects an exclusionary view of 'whose knowledge counts'—valuing Western and external academic perspectives over lived experiences of violence and oppression."

The scholars—whose letter remains open to signatures—said that they "stand in solidarity with the authors and graduate student editors of the special issue, who are facing and confronting censorship and discrimination," and concluded by calling for "HEPG to be held accountable."

HEPG is a division of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. While a spokesperson for the latter did not respond to The Guardian's request for comment on the new letter, signatory and University of Oxford professor Arathi Sriprakash told the newspaper that the cancellation mobilized scholars "precisely because we recognize the grave consequences of such threats to academic freedom and academic integrity."

"The ongoing genocidal violence in Gaza has involved the physical destruction of the entire higher education system there, and now in many education institutions around the world there are active attempts to shut down learning about what's happening altogether," Sriprakash said. "As educationalists, we have to remain steadfast in our commitment to the pursuit of knowledge and learning without fear or threat."

HEPG's cancellation has been blasted as yet another example of higher education institutions capitulating as President Donald Trump's administration cracks down on schools where policies and speech on campus don't align with the White House agenda—including students' and educators' condemnation of the Israeli assault on Gaza and U.S. complicity in it. The Trump administration is also targeting individual critics, trying to deport foreign scholars who have spoken out or protested on campus over the past 22 months.

Harvard won praise in April for suing the federal government over a multibillion-dollar funding freeze. However, last month, the university "quietly dismantled its undergraduate school's offices for diversity, equity, and inclusion," and reportedly "signaled a willingness to meet the Trump administration's demand to spend as much as $500 million to end its dispute with the White House."

Amid fears of what a settlement, like those reached by other Ivy League institutions, might involve, Harvard faculty argued in a July letter that "the university must not directly or indirectly cede to governmental or other outside authorities the right to install or reject leading personnel—that is, to dictate who can be the officials who lead the university or its component schools, departments, and centers."

While the HER issue was canceled during Harvard's battle with Trump, outrage over how scholarship on Palestine is handled on campus predates the president's return to power in January. In November 2023, The Nation published a piece about Israel's war on Gaza that the Harvard Law Review commissioned from a Palestinian scholar but then refused to run after an internal debate.

At the time, the author of that essay, human rights attorney Rabea Eghbariah, wrote in an email to a Law Review editor: "This is discrimination. Let's not dance around it—this is also outright censorship. It is dangerous and alarming."