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A HARVARD SCHOLAR’S OUSTER EXPOSES A CRISIS OF INSTITUTIONAL
INTEGRITY  
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Eric Reinhart
December 17, 2025
The Guardian
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_ The dismissal of a a renowned health leader who refused to ignore
Palestine highlights false claims of universality in human rights,
global health and academia. Mary Bassett’s removal is an act of
cowardice amid fascist pressure. _

Mary Bassett’s ouster from the center is not an isolated
institutional failure.’, Photograph: Rick Friedman/Agence
France-Presse (AFP) // The Guardian

 

Last Tuesday afternoon, Dean Andrea Baccarelli at the Harvard School
of Public Health sent out a brief message
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that one of the country’s most experienced and accomplished public
health leaders, Dr Mary T Bassett, would “step down”
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as director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and
Human Rights. The email struck a polite, bureaucratic tone, thanking
her for her service and offering an upbeat rationale for a new
“focus on children’s health”.

It omitted the fact that, according to a Harvard Crimson source
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Bassett had been asked to resign just two hours earlier and instructed
to vacate her office by the end of the year. The decision was not a
routine administrative transition. It was the culmination of a year of
escalating pressure on the Center for Health and Human Rights for its
work on the health and human rights of Palestinians. Powerful figures
inside and outside Harvard, including the former Harvard president and
now thoroughly
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disgraced
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economist Larry Summers, condemned this work and claimed
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antisemitism”. A leading public health scholar whose career has been
defined by work on racial justice, poverty, HIV, and global inequality
appears to have been removed not because her commitments shifted, but
because the political costs of applying those commitments to
Palestinians became too great for Harvard to tolerate.

Bassett’s ouster from the center, since denounced
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by hundreds of Harvard faculty and students, is not an isolated
institutional failure. It exposes a deeper crisis in three intertwined
domains often treated as guardians of modern moral universalism: human
rights institutions, global public health organizations, and American
universities. All have long claimed to speak for everyone. All have
repeatedly insisted that their missions transcend partisanship,
borders, racial and gender differences, class, and interest groups.
And all – when confronted with the political pressures surrounding
Palestine – have shown how conditional their commitments have always
been.

Universalism that never was

Global public health and human rights institutions often present
themselves as frameworks rooted in the simple idea that every life
holds equal value. But as historians such as Samuel Moyn
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have shown, the modern concept of universal human rights emerged in a
geopolitical landscape dominated by powerful Euro-American states and
has been regularly used to launder, rather than confront, the
inequalities of the postcolonial order. Their universalism was – and
remains – in fact thoroughly selective and particular in practice.
Countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, France and
Germany – all of which have styled themselves as leaders of “the
free world” and beacons of the Enlightenment – have often
condemned abuses by geopolitical rivals while overlooking or
rationalizing atrocities committed by their own leaders, citizens and
allies.

Global health bears a similar imprint. Its modern institutions
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grew from colonial medicine, cold war politics, and philanthropic
ventures – think the Gates Foundation
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which today dominates global public health – that position wealthy
countries as benevolent benefactors and poorer countries as recipients
of their expertise and good will. Still today, global health
initiatives operate primarily by extending the reach of
profit-oriented medical technologies
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redistributing
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political or economic power that determines who becomes ill and who
receives care. For decades, they have treated structural violence as a
technical problem and obscured the asymmetries
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structure ill health around the world.

Elite universities have played an integral role in sustaining these
contradictions. They call for universal access to knowledge and the
fearless pursuit of truth, yet their political horizons have always
been tightly circumscribed by their relationships to donors,
governments, and the economic order they help reproduce. American
universities market themselves as neutral spaces above conflict, even
as such claims to neutrality are quite clearly deployed as a strategy
for protecting the status quo. Harvard has cultivated a reputation as
a steward of global leadership and moral seriousness while
consistently deferring to the sensitivities of powerful constituencies
– from billionaire donors to political leaders like Donald Trump and
Benjamin Netanyahu – at the expense of vulnerable ones.

In each of these realms – human rights, global health, and elite
academia – universalism has been not a historical reality or even a
genuinely motivating ideal but instead a self-flattering,
inequality-obscuring and power-reproducing story.

These frameworks nonetheless remain valuable – not because they tell
the truth, but because they express a demand and a dream to expand the
circle of concern and rights-bearing groups beyond their inherited
boundaries. Their ethical force is in their capacity to enable
critique, to expose oppressive power, and to insist that exclusions be
acknowledged, dissected and corrected.

The danger today is not that these projects have been revealed as
imperfect – that has long been known to any who cared to see past
the veneer of Ivy-League claims. The danger is that, confronted with
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these institutions and their leaders are increasingly retreating from
even the pretense of or aspiration to universality.

The Palestine exception and the collapse of credibility

Under Bassett’s leadership, the FXB Center for Health and Human
Rights actually did what human rights and global health institutions
routinely only claim to do: it examined the health consequences of
political violence and structural inequality, regardless of whether it
pleased donors, administrators, or government officials. Its
partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank produced research
on early childhood development under occupation and documented the
public health effects of Israel’s decades-long policies in
Palestine.

After 7 October 2023, however, the Center became a target for those
seeking to obscure, rationalize and enable Israeli war crimes against
Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Larry Summers denounced
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Birzeit partnership and called for its immediate dissolution
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administration demanded an external audit
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and froze federal funding
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when Harvard refused its list of demands
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An internal sham antisemitism taskforce
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criticized
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the center’s programming_. _By spring, Harvard had suspended the
Birzeit partnership entirely.

Over the last year, Harvard has publicly positioned itself as the
nation’s chief defender of academic freedom against the Trump
administration’s unprecedented demands that universities restructure
governance and hiring, perform program audits, and curb campus speech,
including by suing
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the administration after the government froze over $2.2bn in federal
research funding. But as critics – including hundreds of faculty
signatories
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to criticism’s of Harvard’s preemptive concessions and
self-censorship – have noted, Harvard’s public “resistance”
has coincided with myriad quiet changes that have curtailed
programming on Palestine, censored faculty and students, suspended key
partnerships and academic initiatives, and reflected a systematic
erasure of scholarship critical of Israeli state violence and US
support for it. On the issues where academic freedom and institutional
integrity are most under attack and where genuine resistance matters
most
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Harvard has increasingly simply capitulated to power.

Bassett’s removal, which comes after she personally published essays
(including
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two
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with me), peer-reviewed scientific research
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and made courageous public statements
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in which she named and condemned Israeli crimes against Gaza’s
health systems, medical workers, and patients, is the clearest
concession yet to growing reactionary forces at Harvard. It signals
that the university’s celebrated commitments to academic freedom and
human rights evaporate when the political costs rise and when
oppressive power is challenged and named for what it is. The same
institution that teaches students to interrogate structures of
domination and to analyze the social determinants of health has
apparently demoted a scholar for doing precisely that when and where
it is most urgent. (Bassett will, for the time being, remain a
professor in the School of Public Health’s behavioral and social
sciences department.)

This “Palestine exception” is not unique to Harvard. Across the
US, medical and public health professionals who speak about Gaza’s
devastation face institutional reprimand, social ostracism, and
threats to their employment
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Hospitals have fired clinicians
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for naming genocide or simply stating that Palestinians should live
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Non-profits have avoided public statements
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in support of Palestinians. Universities that long invoked analysis of
decolonization and apartheid in their course catalogues now police
speech about Israeli state violence against Palestinians and the
history of illegal Israeli settlements and land theft with
extraordinary zeal.

These responses are not simply inconsistencies. They expose how much
of the universalist rhetoric surrounding human rights, global health
and elite academia has depended on a tacit understanding: the
universal holds unless it threatens powerful interests. Palestine has
become the defining site where that understanding is most violently
enforced, presenting a microcosm of a much broader reality.

But what is unfolding in Gaza cannot be made to fit within these
institutional silences. More than 90% of Gaza’s hospitals have been
damaged or destroyed
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have been killed in vast numbers
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Famine and disease now spread through a trapped population deprived of
electricity, clean water and basic medical care. These conditions are
not incidental to war; they are the architecture of a genocide via a
deliberately constructed public health catastrophe. To forbid scholars
of health and human rights from naming these realities is to demand
that global public health and human rights efforts abandon their
foundational premises and offer themselves as nothing but instruments
for whitewashing imperial violence.

What makes this moment particularly stark is that human rights and
global health initiatives have long been criticized – correctly –
for their selective morality. Yet now, rather than confronting this
history and expanding their commitments, US institutions appear
determined to contract them further. The choice is no longer between a
flawed universalism and a more honest one; it is between flawed
universalism and none at all.

What must survive this moment

Given the histories at play, some might argue that human rights and
global health projects do not deserve rescue. If these frameworks have
always served the interests of powerful states and individuals at the
expense of those they have dispossessed and exploited, why defend them
now? Why mourn their erosion at Harvard, of all places?

Because even a compromised universalism provides a vocabulary for
demanding equality that authoritarian politics cannot tolerate.
Because institutions that acknowledge their failures can correct them,
while institutions that deny their obligations altogether cannot. And
because abandoning universalism under pressure from governments,
donors and political actors would confirm the most cynical assessment
of American power: that our ethical commitments from within US
institutions can only ever extend as far as strategic alliances allow.

Bassett’s removal demonstrates what happens when institutions choose
short-term protection over intellectual and ethical integrity. But it
also clarifies what remains worth fighting for. A public health field
that cannot describe the destruction of Gaza’s health system
forfeits its credibility on every other question of justice and claim
to truth. A human rights discourse that excludes Palestinians cannot
credibly defend anyone. And a university that punishes scholars for
naming political violence does not merely betray its ideals; it
becomes a malign force in the world it claims to seek to redeem and to
carry forward into a better future.

Human rights, global health and elite universities have never lived up
to their universalist claims. But their value has always depended on
the possibility of doing better. Their legitimacy requires the courage
to widen their moral horizon, not shrink it. That work begins by
refusing to treat Palestinians as an exception and, in recognition of
the pressure to do so, to instead insist upon fighting for Palestinian
rights as the vanguard of any genuine claim to ethical legitimacy.

Mary Bassett’s removal is an act of cowardice amid fascist pressure.
It also provides what should be a galvanizing moment of reckoning. It
underlines that universal rights to health, freedom and safety are not
a stable inheritance but are instead necessarily practices that must
be chosen, fought for, defended, and continually repaired against the
violence enacted in the interests of powerful actors and by their
functionaries like university deans, presidents and board members. The
power of ideals of universality lies not in their origins, which have
never been pure, but in their potential to expose their own limits and
the malign forces behind them while propelling us to condemn their
hypocrisy, depose them, and build something new in their place.

_[ERIC REINHART is a political anthropologist, psychiatrist and
psychoanalyst.]_

* Mary Bassett
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* Harvard
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* Harvard University
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* Palestinian rights
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* Human Rights
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* global health
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* academia
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* Academic Freedom
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* universal human rights
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* Trump 2.0
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* Trump Administration
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* Donald Trump
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* universities
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* Palestinian exception
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