Harvard University to Offer Segregated Graduation Ceremonies Based on Race, Class, Sexuality By Zach Kessel
Harvard University’s Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging will once again host “affinity celebrations” at its 2024 commencement, according to documents obtained by National Review.
Harvard plans to hold a “Disability Celebration,” a “Global Indigenous Celebration,” an “Asian American, Pacific Islander, Desi-American (APIDA) Celebration,” a “First Generation-Low Income Celebration,” a “Jewish Celebration,” a “Latinx Celebration,” a “Lavender Celebration” — which refers to LGBT students — a “Black Celebration,” a “Veterans Celebration,” and an “Arab Celebration.” The university will also hold a central commencement ceremony for students of all backgrounds.
A note on the sign-up form shared with NR by a current student informs registrants that the “Celebration Recognizing Arab Graduates, the Celebration Recognizing Jewish Graduates, and the Celebration Recognizing Veteran Graduates are being planned in collaboration with student groups and campus partners.”
The only publicly available mention of affinity celebrations on any Harvard website is published on the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ page. The note does not mention the specific events or groups recognized, simply describing them as “student-led, staff-supported events that recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of graduates from marginalized and underrepresented communities.”
Harvard’s affinity-group celebrations came under fire in 2023 after the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo posted the schedule on his X account and noted that the university had deleted the page from its website. He also mentioned in his post that white and Jewish students were the only two groups without their own events, though Harvard has now added Jews to the list.
For some, like Harvard Divinity School student Shabbos Kestenbaum — who spoke about the situation on the ground at his school during a House Education and Workforce Committee roundtable in late February — the addition of a separate celebration for Jewish students simply perpetuates the underlying dynamics driving antisemitism at Harvard.
“Rather than acknowledge the harmful ways in which Harvard DEI has contributed to campus antisemitism, the university further marginalizes individuals into groups of race, ethnicity, and religion,” Kestenbaum told National Review. “Harvard DEI is simply out of control.”
And since the spike in antisemitism on the Harvard campus, featuring rhetoric imbued with DEI-inspired dichotomies of oppressor versus oppressed, early admission applications to the university fell by nearly 20 percent in 2023 compared to the previous year. Total applications to the university fell by roughly 5 percent.
Some examples of that antisemitism at Harvard, Kestenbaum told the House Education and Workforce Committee in February, include personal threats, blood libels, arguments that “too many damn Jews run this country,” and in one case, a Harvard employee posting a video on a social-media account with a machete and a picture of Kestenbaum’s face.
When he contacted Harvard’s DEI office, Kestenbaum said, administrators told him everything he has experienced “falls outside their purview.”
Harvard’s DEI office has made news this year for other reasons as well. Sherri Ann Charleston, the university’s chief DEI officer, appears to have engaged in plagiarism in her published academic work — much like former president Claudine Gay — according to a Washington Free Beacon investigation.
DEI ideology is so deeply ingrained in the university’s culture that Harvard requires applicants for professorship positions to submit descriptions of their “orientation toward diversity, equity, and inclusion practices,” Harvard Law School professor Randall L. Kennedy wrote in an op-ed in the Harvard Crimson.
Gabriel Kelvin, a student at the Harvard Kennedy School, told NR that he believes there is a difference between people of shared backgrounds congregating and discrimination. He said what Harvard has planned is closer to the latter than the former.
“If I were an American going to school overseas, at a school that did not speak my native language and there were a few other American students, I would probably like to get together and celebrate my graduation with my fellow American students,” Kelvin said. “When it gets to identity-based groups, that’s where I get a little confused — especially when you’re segregating groups along racial lines. If it’s led and initiated by what’s perceived as the majority, it’s discriminatory, whereas if it’s organized and initiated by the minority group, it’s considered ‘affirmative’ and ‘affinity-based’ and all those nice buzzwords.”
Because many of the “affinity celebrations” are indeed divided along racial lines, Kelvin said there is no question that they will be highly politicized.
“There’s no secret that Harvard has an extraordinarily liberal student body, and I am a hundred percent confident that ideology is going to permeate through every single aspect of those ceremonies,” he told NR. “It’s kind of frustrating that you’ll get a similar narrative at each one of those and then the graduation ceremony itself.”
Representative Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), the chairwoman of the Education and Workforce Committee, told NR she thinks the affinity celebrations are simply divisive.
“Graduation ceremonies should unite students,” Foxx said. “Instead, Harvard is dividing its student body even further by playing into identity politics and radical DEI ideologies.”
NR reached out to Harvard’s media-relations department for comment multiple times but did not receive a response by press time.
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