I Resigned From the IOP Because It Suppresses Speech About Palestine

Harvard has spent the past year suppressing speech about Palestine. Now, its Institute of Politics is doing the same.

I resigned Monday from my position leading the IOP’s Campaigns and Advocacy Program after IOP leadership spent weeks censoring my attempts to include Palestine in programming and effectively delaying the start of the program. As program chair, I felt there was no better way to teach advocacy than focusing on one of the most urgent issues on the ballot today. That IOP leadership prevented me from doing so at every turn is yet another example of the Palestine exception to free speech.

At the beginning of each semester, chairs of the IOP’s 16 subsidiary programs submit blueprints for the upcoming term for review by IOP leadership prior to the start of programming.

After a year in which the Israeli military had killed more than 40,000 Palestinians — a genocide funded by the U.S. and in part by Harvard — I knew that I could not in good conscience avoid addressing Israel and Palestine. Shifting public opinion, mass demonstrations, and the Uncommitted movement — the 700,000-plus voters who withheld their support from President Joe Biden in the Democratic primary in protest of his Israel policy — make obvious the relevance of this issue to campaigns.

So, before the school year began, I wrote to IOP student leadership asking to amend my fall 2024 blueprint — previously slated to cover the upcoming presidential election — to focus on campaigns and advocacy around Israel and Palestine.

Their response? A month of opaque communication, censorship, and blatant disrespect for my role as CAP chair and for my time invested in the IOP.

Over the course of six meetings with IOP student and staff leadership, I received staunch pushback on the proposal. In their words, Israel and Palestine was too narrow of a theme; supposedly, my plan wouldn’t teach students how to run a campaign. But it was clear to me that my proposal was repeatedly denied because it dealt with Palestine.

The blueprint I created for the previous semester’s programming was centered around campaigns and advocacy local to Cambridge and Boston — arguably a focus far narrower in scope — and included only a single week on key campaign skills.

My initial fall proposal, submitted after hearing IOP leadership’s concerns, was not solely focused on Palestine. It featured five full weeks of skills specific to electoral campaigns, including party conventions, fundraising, grassroots organizing, polling, and media.

In other words, if IOP leadership’s main problem with my fall 2024 blueprint was that it was too narrow, then my spring blueprint should have received the same pushback.

It didn’t. My spring blueprint was accepted with minimal feedback. Only when I tried centering programming around Israel and Palestine did I hear concerns about curriculum from IOP leadership.

I viewed the plan I submitted this fall as a sincere compromise. When I first approached IOP leadership, my hope was to discuss Israel and Palestine throughout the ten-week program. After hearing their initial concerns, the plan I submitted reserved only one week for a direct discussion of advocacy around Israel and Palestine. Just five other weeks even mentioned the topic. And yet, the IOP rejected it.

So I tried again. Following further concerns from IOP leadership, I submitted another plan, now with an added week on pro-Israel advocacy to ensure the revised plan engaged both sides of the issue.

This time, IOP leadership rejected it without explanation.

As the clearest evidence of the IOP’s Palestine exception, the IOP’s vice president wrote in texts to the executive team that he was “10000% opposed to any and all I/P talk as part of our programming.”

It is clear to me that conversation around Israel and Palestine is a non-starter at the IOP. Between leadership’s open aversion to mere discussion of the topic and the blatant inconsistency in its responses to my spring and fall blueprints, I can only conclude that my proposal was rejected because of its content — because it covered Israel and Palestine.

My experience with censorship at the IOP — one of the largest student organizations at Harvard — is a symptom of a larger problem. Already, administrators target any speech that is not wholly uncritical of Israel. The last thing we need is student organizations, especially political ones, further chilling speech around Palestine; the IOP’s censorship should concern anyone who cares about free speech on campus.

The Institute of Politics should be a space where students can not only learn political skills but engage with the key political issues of the day. By holding almost no programming on Israel and Palestine since Oct. 7 — and stonewalling my attempts to address that — it has totally and shamefully failed to uphold that mission.

Nuriel R. Vera-DeGraff ’26, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a double concentrator in Social Studies and Mathematics in Mather House, a former chair of the Harvard Institute of Politics’ Campaigns and Advocacy program, and an organizer with the Palestine Solidarity Committee.