Part Two: Harvard’s Performative Solidarity and Selective Silencing
When Black Memory and Palestinian Struggle Are Inconvenient to Power
Only months ago, Harvard dismissed the entire team of its Slavery Remembrance Program - the very group tasked with charting the university's entanglement with enslavement and its moral debt to the descendants of those who were exploited to establish Harvard's achievement. Publicly hailed as a reparative justice landmark, the $100 million project was dissolved overnight. The project was subcontracted. The remembrance was managed. The descendants remained at arm's length.
And now, Harvard Divinity School has cancelled the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative (RCPI) - one of the only academic initiatives on campus (or in the entire nation) to take seriously Palestinian descriptions of occupation, displacement, and resistance. Staff were let go. Courses were eliminated.
The silence was deafening.
These are not isolated decisions. They are in line with a pattern of selective solidarity - where Black memory and Palestinian struggle are honored in theory, but erased in practice. Where elite institutions perform public gestures of equity, but in private, suppress any work that resists their complicity in imperialism, settler colonialism, or racial capitalism.
These are not gaffes. They are conscious acts of disavowal, of erasure disguised as policy review, of freedom become liability.
In Part Two, we trace the trail of how Harvard's dismantling of these two significant initiatives reflects a broader truth: that where justice is politically inconvenient, the university does not protect it - it evacuates it.
I. The Pattern Has a Purpose
In elite higher education, contradiction isn't an oversight - it's dogma. Institutions like Harvard construct a legend of forward momentum while keeping quite still the forms of power.
Part One examined how the performativity of Harvard in defending DEI coincided with the dismemberment of its Slavery Remembrance Program - an endeavor once promoted as characteristic of institutional courage. Fired. Contracted out. Forgotten.
In Part Two, we now encounter the second iteration of that betrayal: the low-profile dismantling of RCPI, an effort which had the audacity to present Palestinian struggle not as airy "conflict," but as lived colonization.
These decisions are linked by more than timing.
They are joined by a common strategy:
Remove the staff.
Cut the funding.
Blame the budget.
Avoid the headlines.
Protect the donors.
Control the narrative.
This is how Technocratic Neo-Apartheid (TNA) functions within the university. It doesn’t reject justice outright - it manages, delays, absorbs, and finally deletes it when it begins to expose the institution’s foundational contradictions.
And in this moment, those contradictions are not just being exposed. They are being enforced.
II. The Silencing of RCPI
The Harvard Divinity School's Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative (RCPI) was not a course - it was a reckoning space. It did not simply teach about power, empire, and violence. It spoke them. It challenged them. It gave students the words and lived experiences to understand that what is happening in Palestine isn't metaphor, isn't a "conflict," isn't a classroom case study - but an ongoing project of displacement, apartheid, and colonial rule.
And now, it's lost. Not lost. Forsaken under the guise of resistance of state coercion.
Harvard has called off the program in the comfortable and evasive language of "curricular review." But anyone who observes can see this for what it is: a political retreat. A dismantling. An act of institutional self-preservation.
The quiet departure of Palestinian American program director Hilary Rantisi was met without comment. The death of long-time program ally Associate Dean Diane Moore raised alarm. And finally, the silent burial of RCPI itself - faculty-less, travel-module-less, fieldwork-related-less, and with nary a peep of so much as an official statement as to what was lost.
“I am deeply grateful for what the program me... but deeply grieved by what the institution’s silence now enables.” - Ciara S. Moezidis, RCPI alumni.
The grief is not just for the program. It is for what the erasure reveals.
Just like the Slavery Remembrance layoffs, RCPI’s suspension followed a familiar arc:
An initiative is praised publicly for its innovation, courage, or commitment.
It grows in impact and begins to challenge institutional comfort.
It receives backlash - quietly, then structurally.
And then it’s erased.
What links these two acts is not coincidence. It is Harvard’s deep discomfort with programs that refuse to flatten liberation into digestible soundbites.
RCPI wasn’t offering neutral “dialogue.” It was teaching students to engage with the settler-colonial nature of the Israeli state, with the violence of occupation, and with the theological frameworks that sustain resistance and belonging.
“That kind of clarity - especially from Palestinian voices - doesn’t fit the university’s DEI brand. It threatens the sanitized pluralism that elite institutions prefer. And so, it was cut off at the root.”
There was no mass statement. No faculty forum. No public-facing explanation. Just silence.
And in that silence, Harvard made clear what it cannot say out loud:
Palestinian freedom is not institutionally protected. It is politically expendable.
Just like Black memory, it is tolerated until it demands repair. Then it is quietly removed.
III. Technocratic Neo-Apartheid in Academia
What happened to RCPI at Harvard isn’t an anomaly - it’s an institutional reflex. It’s how modern universities police the boundaries of permissible justice work under the guise of policy, budget, and administrative review.
We call this system Technocratic Neo-Apartheid (TNA™) - a structure in which the language of neutrality and efficiency becomes a weapon against liberation. Under TNA, justice is not openly opposed. It is gradually disassembled, professionalized, repackaged, or erased.
It’s not just Harvard.
This is how TNA operates in universities nationwide:
At MIT, the administration abolished diversity statements in faculty hiring, citing “freedom of expression.” But as Palestinian, Black, and Indigenous scholars know all too well, that “freedom” has never protected the marginalized from silencing - only shielded the powerful from critique. ([NY Post, 2024](https://nypost.com/2024/05/06/mit-bans-controversial-diversity-statement-hiring-requirement-they-dont-work/)
At UNC, the Board of Governors eliminated all DEI policy language and dissolved diversity offices across the system. At Chapel Hill alone, 20 staff were laid off - erasing decades of equity work in a single fiscal decision. ([Axios, 2024](https://www.axios.com/local/raleigh/2024/09/11/new-unc-system-policy-leads-closing-dei-offices-59-jobs-eliminated)
At SFSU, the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies program led by Professor Rabab Abdulhadi - one of the only programs in the country rooted in Palestinian and decolonial frameworks - has faced years of administrative sabotage, underfunding, and political harassment. Abdulhadi has written and testified extensively about the coordinated institutional suppression of Palestine-centered teaching.
Across the CSU system, ethnic studies programs, despite being state-mandated, remain under-resourced, understaffed, and at constant risk of marginalization
Black studies programs, too, face structural neglect, despite decades of student-led struggle. Faculty are hired to signal progress, then boxed into symbolic roles or left without meaningful institutional support.
Pro-Palestinian faculty and students are surveilled, doxxed, blacklisted, or subjected to Title VI complaints - despite (or because of) their engagement with international law, human rights, and decolonial theory.
This isn’t budget trimming. It’s institutional counterinsurgency.
The logic is always the same:
Make it sound administrative.
Frame it as apolitical.
Manage it through delay, review, and attrition.
But beneath the spreadsheets and silence, the real work is happening:
Universities are disabling the very programs that might hold them accountable to their histories, their complicities, and their futures.
In this system, liberation is not debated - it is depersonalized, delayed, and eventually deleted.
What RCPI and the Slavery Remembrance Program shared was not just vulnerability - it was clarity. They named structures. They offered students a language to speak truth to power. And in doing so, they crossed a line elite institutions rarely tolerate:
They became too real to manage. To threatening to tolerate.
IV. The Palestine Exception and the Fear of Liberation Narratives
If there is one place where the hypocrisy of “free speech” and “academic freedom” is consistently laid bare, it is in the treatment of Palestinian scholarship.
In 2015, Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights released their report on what they called the Palestine Exception to Free Speech. The findings were staggering: faculty censured, speaking engagements canceled, students surveilled, and entire programs quietly buried - not because of misconduct or inaccuracy, but because they told the truth about occupation, apartheid, and resistance.
“There is one test of whether academic freedom is real: Can you say ‘Palestine’ and stay employed?” Anonymous tenured professor
That test is failing - again and again.
Consider just a few recent examples:
Rabea Eghbariah, a Palestinian human rights attorney and Harvard SJD candidate, was asked to contribute a legal essay on the Nakba for the Harvard Law Review. After unanimous editorial approval, it was quietly pulled by senior leadership. The reason? His framing of the Nakba as ongoing - as a structure of apartheid. The essay was later published by the Columbia Law Review to critical acclaim.
Its title: “The Ongoing Nakba.”
Its message: This isn’t about opinion. It’s about what institutions refuse to allow said.
Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi, founder of SFSU’s AMED Studies program, has faced a decade of administrative undermining, blocked hiring lines, travel denials, and security threats - all for building a program centered on Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian diaspora experience. She has described this as “academic Zionism” - a campaign not just of silencing, but of strategic erasure under the guise of neutrality.
Student groups at universities like Columbia, NYU, UCLA, and UC Berkeley have been targeted with Title VI complaints, accusations of antisemitism, and donor pressure for merely organizing teach-ins, exhibits, or guest lectures on Palestinian life under occupation.
None of this happens in isolation. It is a system of deterrence designed to send a message:
You can study power. Just don’t name it.
You can mourn the past. Just don’t challenge the present.
You can be critical - until you’re effective.
And that’s what makes Palestine so threatening. Not because it’s polarizing. But because it’s clarifying. Because it reveals the border where academic tolerance ends and political allegiance begins.
Academic institutions don’t fear protest. They fear precision and persistence.
They fear that if students learn the vocabulary of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and imperial governance, they may begin to see the university itself - not as neutral - but as a node of that very structure.
They fear that if Palestine becomes legible, so too will the architecture of erasure they’ve built around it.
And so, they treat Palestinian liberation not as a field of study, but as a threat vector. Not as a justice issue, but a liability.
That’s not academic freedom. That’s institutional cowardice.
V. Parallel Patterns of Erasure: Black and Palestinian Knowledge Under Siege
The institutional betrayal of RCPI is not an isolated injustice. It mirrors, almost precisely, Harvard’s quiet dismantling of its Slavery Remembrance Program.
Different communities. Different historical traumas.
But the administrative response? Identical.
Liberation-oriented programs that move beyond symbolism into structural critique are quickly deemed unsustainable, too politicized, or “misaligned with institutional priorities.”
The Bureaucratic Pattern Repeats:
Fund the program under public pressure.
Elevate it as a PR asset.
Politely restrict it behind closed doors.
Quietly gut it once it names what must not be named.
Black Studies: Symbolically Tokenized, Then Starved
Black Studies programs are often tolerated as symbolic fixtures - proof that universities have “learned” from the past. But their survival is usually tethered to cyclical visibility, not long-term investment.
Departments remain underfunded, overburdened, and rhetorically embraced but materially abandoned.
Even celebrated Black scholars face marginalization inside their own institutions.
As Diverse Issues in Higher Education starkly put it:
“Only within their own institutions are Black scholars without honor.” - Diverse Education, 2023 (https://www.diverseeducation.com/opinion/article/15659455/only-within-their-own-institutions-are-black-scholars-without-honor)
Black faculty are disproportionately overrepresented in contingent roles, cut off from tenure protections, institutional power, and curricular autonomy.
Palestine Studies: Criminalized by Design
Whereas Black studies is often co-opted and underfunded, Palestine-focused scholarship is actively repressed. It is treated not as a field of study, but as a political threat.
Palestine Legal’s 2023 report *The Palestine Exception to Free Speech* documented that:
“Over 70% of documented cases involved administrative censorship, threats to employment, or the cancellation of events solely because they addressed Palestinian rights.” - Palestine Legal, 2023 (https://palestinelegal.org/the-palestine-exception)
Faculty have been denied tenure, uninvited from panels, or subjected to coordinated smear campaigns for simply using words like “apartheid” or referencing U.N. resolutions.
As Professor Rabab Abdulhadi of SFSU puts it:
“Palestine is not an exception - it is the rule by which academic freedom is measured and found lacking.
Her own program, AMED Studies, has been chronically underfunded, structurally sabotaged, and targeted by far-right campaigns - all while the university deflects responsibility behind procedural language.
A Shared Reality of Risk and Removal
Both Black and Palestinian academic work share a dangerous truth:
They are welcomed when symbolic. Expelled when system-critical.
They are included when they serve the optics of progress. They are erased when they start to build frameworks of power, accountability, and repair.
This isn’t accidental. This is institutional behavior - measured, maintained, and politically policed.
Universities don’t fear protest.
They fear persistent, purposeful truth telling.
They fear clarity.
They fear epistemologies that hold a mirror to the institution itself.
Programs like RCPI and Black Studies are not erased because they’re ineffective.
They’re erased because they are effective - at generating consciousness, solidarity, and challenge.
And that makes them incompatible with the myth of academic neutrality.
VI. Mourning the Work, Building Beyond
We will remember the names - not just of the programs, but of the people who carried them.
We remember Hilary Rantisi, who brought Palestinian voices into the walls of Harvard Divinity School with humility, rigor, and courage.
We remember the enslaved stripped of recognition and remembrance and staff of Harvard’s Slavery Remembrance Program, who traced genealogies of exploitation that the university was built on - and were laid off for doing it too well.
We remember Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi, fighting not only for AMED Studies to exist, but for it to matter.
We remember the students who slept in hallways, the faculty who risked tenure, and the organizers who made Black Studies possible not through invitation, but through occupation.
And we mourn what is lost when these programs are dismantled - not just courses or credits, but infrastructure for memory, truth, and resistance.
We mourn the radical pedagogies, the lineages cut short, the knowledge not passed down.
But mourning is not the end.
If the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that liberation cannot be left in the hands of institutions afraid of it. We must stop treating the university as a sanctuary - and start treating it as a contested site, whose protection of truth is always conditional, always reversible, always compromised.
We cannot build the future of Black and Palestinian freedom on terrain this fragile.
Instead, we begin again - on our own terms
What does that mean?
It means creating autonomous archives, independent digital repositories, and oral history networks outside the control of university servers and boards of trustees.
It means founding decolonial research centers that don’t ask for permission to exist, and don’t rely on symbolic endowments.
It means investing in community-grounded knowledge networks, where Black, Palestinian, Indigenous, and diasporic scholars work in coalition - not competition - for liberation.
It means building scholarship that doesn’t fear clarity.
Harvard will not protect RCPI.
Higher Education will not protect any but it’s own interests.
It will not protect its own students, faculties or their communities.
It will not remember unless we do the remembering.
So we do.
We carry the memory forward - not as a grievance, but as a blueprint.
Because mourning is only half the work. The other half is refusal: Refusal to forget. Refusal to wait for approval. Refusal to keep asking institutions to steward justice when they have proven they will only sanitize, subcontract, or suppress it.
And so we move - with memory, without permission but with purpose.