Program Director at HKS Nonviolent Action Lab To Resign Over Antisemitism Settlements

Jay Ulfelder, the program director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Nonviolent Action Lab, gave Harvard his two-weeks notice on Wednesday in protest of the University’s decision to define certain criticisms of Israel as antisemitic in its nondiscrimination policies.

Harvard adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s widely-used but polarizing definition of antisemitism in its Tuesday settlement of two Title VI discrimination lawsuits. The agreements drew swift pushback from some free speech advocates.

In his resignation letter, which he made public on the social media platform Bluesky, Ulfelder slammed Harvard’s new guidelines in fiery terms, arguing they would make it impossible for him to discuss areas of his professional expertise — like civil resistance and mass violence.

“In Gaza, I am witnessing one of the worst humanitarian and human-rights catastrophes in my 55-year lifetime,” Ulfelder wrote. “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.”

The Nonviolent Action Lab, which is housed at the HKS Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, studies nonviolent movements against authoritarianism. Ulfelder, a political scientist, manages the Lab’s Crowd Counting Consortium, working with colleagues to collect and analyze data on protest activity in the United States.

In the early 2010s, Ulfelder developed an early warning system to predict mass atrocities for the United States Holocaust Remembrance Museum. His work at the Nonviolent Action Lab, which he joined in 2020, has involved recording and analyzing political protests — like student activism in the wake of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

But Ulfelder wrote Wednesday that he no longer felt comfortable espousing his personal and professional beliefs for fear of “running afoul of the university’s anti-discrimination policies and harming the work of the Lab and the Ash Center.”

He addressed his letter to Erica Chenoweth, the faculty sponsor of the Nonviolent Action Lab; Archon Fung, the Ash Center director; and Tim Glynn-Burke, the executive director for programs at the Ash Center.

Ulfelder wrote that he had long been angered at Harvard’s response to student protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, which he described as “a genocide punctuating a 76-year history of violent dispossession and subordination of the Palestinian people,” but Tuesday’s settlement was the tipping point.

“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,” he wrote.

A Harvard spokesperson declined to comment on Ulfelder’s resignation and criticisms, citing University policy against speaking on personnel matters.

The IHRA definition is accompanied by examples that describe it as antisemitic to consider Israel’s existence a “racist endeavor” or compare Israeli policies to Nazi ones. But “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic” under the examples.

In a Tuesday interview, Harvard Law School professor Noah R. Feldman said he thought the new guidelines would not restrict speech. To run afoul of Harvard’s rules, speech would have to “come in the context of an act of harassment or bullying” — not just be offensive.

But Ulfelder said in an interview Friday that he thought Harvard’s guidelines would make scholars censor themselves for fear of professional reprisals — and could restrict his own speech.

“There are things that I’ve been writing and saying over the past year and a half that are important to write and say that would clearly fall outside of that and be construed as discriminatory behavior,” Ulfelder said. “Which seems like a gross misunderstanding of freedom of speech to me.”

Harvard settled the two lawsuits less than a day after Donald Trump’s inauguration as U.S. president, making it one of a slew of colleges to resolve Title VI actions before an anticipated crackdown from the White House. In his resignation letter, Ulfelder described the settlements as a capitulation.

“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,” he wrote. “Instead, I am seeing the opposite.”

Correction: January 25, 2025

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Jay Ulfelder develops models to forecast political instability. In fact, his current work no longer involves forecasting.

—Staff writer Elise A. Spenner can be reached at elise.spenner@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @EliseSpenner.