The “Joint Statement by Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups on the Situation in Palestine,” published last week after Hamas ’s atrocious terrorist attack in Israel, was stunning for its open display of moral inversion. Blaming the massacred for their massacre is unconscionable.

As shocking as the content was, so too was the long list of more than 30 recognized student groups willing to endorse it. One might assume that the near-impossible admissions criteria at Harvard University would weed out the weak-minded ideologues and overt antisemites, or at least the ones foolish enough to announce their character failings and intellectual soft spots in an open letter.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be so shocked. As with most problems in academia today, identity politics and the Left’s diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda are partly to blame, and there is no shortage of either at Harvard University.

Among the signatories to the letter were the Kennedy School Bangladesh Caucus, the Bengali Association of Students at Harvard, the Arab Medical and Dental Student Association, and the Middle East and North African Graduate School of Design Student Society. The full list reads like a diversity officer’s dream.

The “About Us” pages of many of these clubs make general claims about promoting culture, fostering community, and exchanging ideas, all seemingly redundant efforts at a school that already says it is devoted to them. What they don’t make are persuasive arguments as to why these aims, as unobjectionable as they are, necessitate the formation of a recognized club eligible for school resources.

Nowhere in the more than 100 pages of Harvard’s “Recognized Student Organization Resource Guide” are students asked to justify a club’s reason for being. The message seems to be that “being” is reason enough. The more diversity, the merrier.

But not necessarily. Making diversity, as expressed by skin color and national origin, the criteria for status can lead to unhappy outcomes. Rather than learning about serious civic engagement and leadership, students end up learning how to divide themselves up into groups of “us versus them,” in Marxist fashion, and look for “allies” and “opponents.” That never ends well.

Clubs with no higher mission will fill their voids with imported ideologies that offer a false sense of righteous purpose. Outside influences love to leverage niche groups of 20-year-olds with access to Ivy League logos to advance their agendas, and this only deepens divisions further. The result will often look a lot like Harvard’s student club letter, and worse.

Some clubs which were signatories to the letter later disavowed it. They may have been inspired by CEOs across the country, led by Pershing Square’s Bill Ackman, who announced they wouldn’t hire members who had participated in it. Publicly, students cited lack of process and misuse of their names.

Perhaps these students should consider that the thin DEI foundations of their clubs lend themselves to weaponization and capture. There are consequences, not just benefits, to joining things without knowing the outlines of what one is joining. Harvard should have put that in its manual.

It should go without saying that ethnically, racially, and religiously organized student associations are often meaningful and enriching entities on campus. There is no argument for removing them all. But it is worth asking if all of the 400-plus independent student organizations with recognition at Harvard are serving the students or a corrupt agenda.

Rebecca Sugar is a writer living in New York. Her column, The Cocktail Party Contrarian, appears every other Friday in the New York Sun.