Haverford College is in the news this month after reaching a settlement with the Deborah Project, a public interest law firm that sued the College on behalf of Jewish students who reported horrific abuse and harassment which was repeatedly ignored by campus administrators.
The small liberal arts college located in Pennsylvania never received the same degree of public scrutiny for its failure to protect Jewish students as did larger Ivy League institutions such as Columbia and Harvard, but the physical and verbal abuse those students suffered was just as extreme.
The Deborah Project’s case filing paints a grim picture of students who were terrorized for their Jewish faith and their belief in the importance of maintaining a Jewish homeland in Israel. When these students complained to college authorities about their mistreatment, they were met with at best, indifference, and at worst, further hostility and abuse.
“Throughout most of its nearly 200-year history, Haverford College has been a highly respected institution devoted to providing a liberal arts education to its students,” the filing states. “Haverford has now abandoned that mission in one central respect: by adopting a single unifocal definition of justice, which excludes, and is resolutely hostile to, Jews who are committed to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state or even insufficiently committed to its elimination.”
In an article for MS Now, Journalist Michael Cohen summarizes some of the most pernicious incidents recounted in the court filing:
Posters for a Shabbat dinner on campus and events discussing Jewish identity were torn down by protesters. When Jewish students complained to the Haverford administration, the lawsuit said, they were told “the wind had blown down the posters.” Student leaders actively sought to block “Zionists” from conducting school tours and, according to [Barak] Mendelsohn, [an Israeli American professor of political science at Haverford College], an official complaint was lodged when a Haverford alum overheard students responsible for distributing funds to school clubs discuss how they could prevent money from going to Jewish organizations. (The administration brought no action in the case.)
Ally Landau, a Haverford basketball player, proposed holding an antisemitism awareness event at a women’s basketball game. But according to the Deborah Project’s lawsuit, administrators pushed her to cancel it because of fears that anticipated violence from pro-Palestinian activists would cause the team to forfeit the game.
When a film about the massacre at the Nova Music Festival was screened on campus, the lawsuit alleged that demonstrators “carried signs and stood in formation” themselves at the entrance in an effort to block students from attending. Similar disruptions occurred at numerous other events with Jewish speakers. Even though Wendy Raymond, Haverford’s president, attended one of these events (and later criticized the protesters in May 2025 congressional testimony), she took no action in response, Mendelsohn claimed. In fact, it took more than two years for her to meet with Club Chai, an on-campus Jewish organization formed after Oct. 7.
When Jewish students pushed the college’s diversity, equity and inclusion coordinator to address the rising wave of antisemitism, she told them that racial minorities have never felt safe at Haverford and Jewish students should not expect anything different. If they wanted acceptance on campus, they must condemn genocide.
To add insult to injury, the Haverford Honor Code, a highly esteemed internal document that purports to be “the foundation of shared values and expectations” that guide the lives of students, creates an explicit two-tiered justice system wherein students who are deemed to belong to “marginalized” groups are afforded greater latitude in exercising their free speech and protest rights than those who are considered “privileged.”
Journalist Michael Cohen describes how “even though Jews were facing constant and often violent discrimination, they were placed in the privileged category” adding that “In effect, Haverford’s honor code created a hierarchy that treated some students and their free speech rights as more equal than others.”
The agreement reached between Haverford College and The Deborah Project this week finally amends this egregious and likely unconstitutional policy.
The agreement also firmly and undeniably asserts that “Zionism” is not a valid reason for discrimination or exclusion in any area of campus life.
In a letter to the campus community, Haverford President Wendy Raymond wrote:
“Acts of discrimination, harassment, and bias against students who identify as Jewish, and/or Israeli, and those who support Zionism, the right of the Jewish people to self-determination and statehood in the land of Israel, violate College policy and are antithetical to Haverford’s mission, values, and standards… Because of these basic principles, no Haverford professor may discriminate against any student, or any other member of the Haverford community, on the basis of that person’s commitment to Judaism, Israel or Zionism, and the College will not tolerate any faculty or staff member refusing to support or engage with a student on the basis of such commitments or treating a student differently on the basis of such commitments.”
In specifically recognizing the essentialism of Zionism and Israel to the Jewish community and forbidding discrimination based on these grounds, the Haverford College agreement goes farther than many universities have to uphold the essential civil liberties of Jewish students and close the absurd loophole by which activist students and professors alike have abused and hounded Jews while claiming to be protesting “genocide.” Journalist Michael Cohen calls it “a model for other schools” and “an important first step in righting the wrongs that have been done.”
While the agreement is indeed a step in the right direction, let us hold our celebrations. The Haverford administration—like those at numerous other schools including Columbia and UCLA—only changed their policies when it was clear that their legal position was crumbling beneath them. The College’s willful blindness to the abuse of Jewish students and its obvious contempt for Zionists will not suddenly melt away. It will take continued vigilance accompanied by appropriate skepticism to ensure that Jews remain safe at Haverford.
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