Student activists want to change the world while expecting campus authorities to protect them from the world’s pushback. But should campus activism have no adverse consequences for the activist?
The April 29, 2025, Final Report of Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias treats public criticism of student, faculty, and staff public or publicly visible actions as “doxxing.” Most notably, the report’s authors and their informants are distressed by the repeated appearance on the public streets of Harvard Square of what they call “doxxing trucks”: trucks funded by outside pro-Israel entities that displayed the photos and names of campus anti-Israel activists. The report includes just eight photos—one a tranquil spring cover photo of students crossing a Charles River bridge. Three others show student “doxxing trucks” with the students’ images and names blurred.
The report repeatedly quotes student, staff, and faculty demands for Harvard to do something about the “doxxing trucks.” The report never explains what Harvard should or could have done about the trucks, apart from condemning them. It also never explains exactly what the legal or ethical problem is about the trucks—though their intimidating intention is obvious enough if we take the perspective of those who thought they could support Hamas or condemn Israel’s efforts to fight it while assuming they would face no repercussions. And while the report refers to Harvard’s statements deploring doxxing, in the sense of the publication of private information or communications intended to harm the subject, the report never notes that the so-called doxxing trucks are not in fact doxxing within the meaning of those statements but rather First-Amendment-protected public comment on the public statements and actions of others on matters of manifest public concern.
The Harvard “Values Statement,” as revised in 2018, calls for “accountability for actions and conduct in the community.” Some of that accountability is enforced by the Harvard community itself, as when a student offers a bad argument in class for a Palestinian (or Israeli) demand is challenged by a fellow student—and invited by the instructor to respond to the challenge by coming up with a better argument.
Yet some of the accountability Harvard needs is outside the Harvard community’s proper scope. Unlike its models, early modern Cambridge and Oxford Universities, Harvard does not claim criminal jurisdiction over its students, staff, or faculty members, and Harvard has to obey the same civil rights laws as other US educational institutions. Thus the accountability that Harvard owes is or can be enforced by outside entities via social or legal pressure, as when alumni announce they will not hire activist students whose activism they find wicked or obnoxious, or when the Secretary of Education cancels Harvard’s grants because of Harvard’s failure to prevent the emergence of a “hostile environment” for Jewish or Israeli students. That hostile environment is, one should note, vividly depicted in the Final Report of Harvard’s own Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, published the same day as the anti-Muslim bias report.
Academic freedom means that lawful political activities will not face academic sanctions as long as those activities comply with Harvard’s rules and meet the relevant academic standards. But it is no more Harvard’s job to protect its political activists from public criticism than it is to protect its Romance literature professors from bad book reviews.
Both Harvard reports offer constructive suggestions about how Harvard can foster richer, better, more grounded, and more inclusive conversations about the most difficult issues of our day. In particular, the two reports offer ways that Harvard can guide its students not only to be more effective as public advocates and thicker-skinned in response to public criticism but also to be more reflective—not only about how to change the world but also about what in the world needs changing and in what directions it should be changed.
Yes, the “doxxing trucks” are upsetting, but Harvard students should be intelligent and flexible enough to understand that when people attack the messenger, that is sometimes the fault of the message. The great and terrifying thing about a liberal arts education—still offered at its finest at Harvard—is that it can be used to hone and refine any message, even those messages the outside world rejects wrongly due to the world’s own ignorance and biases—or rightly due to the messages’ own prejudices or wickedness. The doxxing trucks were intended to label rather than teach, but those trucks still offered a teachable moment to those Harvard students, staff, and faculty wise enough to seize it.