Harvard Removes Another Leader for Their Palestine Work

Harvard is removing Mary T. Bassett as director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights amid sustained political pressure over the center’s work on Israel and Palestine, the Harvard Crimson reports.

FXB became a flashpoint after Oct. 7 for its Palestine Program and an academic partnership with Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank, which critics including Republican lawmakers and former Harvard president Larry Summers falsely framed as Hamas-linked. The Trump administration later demanded an external audit and froze federal funding after Harvard refused. Harvard then suspended the Birzeit partnership and placed FXB under review, while an internal antisemitism task force accused its work of “demonizing” Israel.

Bassett, a physician and former NYC health commissioner whose work centered humanitarian public health and global inequality, is the latest leader pushed out as Harvard has also removed or sidelined leaders at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Divinity School’s Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative.