‘While we cannot comment on the specifics of personnel matters, all fellowship candidates are evaluated on many factors,’ Harvard tells Free Beacon
Harvard University quietly extended a fellowship offer to a former Columbia University professor who was let go after a Wall Street Journal exposé accused him of “pro-Palestinian indoctrination”—then revoked it without explanation, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.
Kayum Ahmed, a former director at George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, posted a screenshot last week of his April 3 acceptance letter as a fellow with Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights Policy, complete with official letterhead and executive director Maggie Gates’s name and title.
“I’m pleased to share that I’ve been appointed as a Fellow at the Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, for the 2025–2026 academic year,” Ahmed wrote in a caption accompanying the screenshot.
When the Free Beacon reached out about the offer on Monday, a Harvard Kennedy School spokesman said it was “made prematurely” without going through the proper “vetting process” and was “under review.” The next day, the spokesman said Harvard had revoked Ahmed’s fellowship.
“After completing our standard review and vetting process, Harvard Kennedy School has decided not to move forward with this fellowship,” the spokesman said. “While we cannot comment on the specifics of personnel matters, all fellowship candidates are evaluated on many factors—including their suitability to the role, commitment to free and open inquiry, integrity, and ability to add to the intellectual life of the school.” Though the spokesman did not explain what caused the decision, he did suggest that it was not based on Ahmed’s controversial past at Columbia, saying, “As a school committed to free speech and ideological diversity, we do not disqualify candidates because of their views or because they are controversial.”
The reversal comes as Harvard engages in an escalating battle with President Donald Trump, having sued his administration Monday over its decision to freeze billions of dollars in federal funding in an attempt to quell campus anti-Semitism. For Ahmed, that battle—not a mistake in “process”—explains the school’s fellowship offer U-turn.
“So let’s be honest: the real error—according to those pulling the strings—was that I refused to remain silent in the face of genocide,” Ahmed wrote in a Wednesday LinkedIn post. “They want obedience. I want resistance.”
That “resistance” was the focus of the March 2024 Journal report, which said Ahmed indoctrinated his students to hate Israel through lectures that labeled the country a “colonial settler state” that has “oppressed indigenous populations” and “displaced” Palestinians, leading to “health consequences.”
“He puts the idea into everyone’s head that the Jews stole the land and it should belong to the indigenous people,” a graduate student who took the class told the Journal. That rhetoric, some students and faculty members said, showed Ahmed was “abandoning context, advocating a pro-Palestinian bias, spreading disinformation and expecting an adherence to anti-Zionism.”
A month after the Journal report, in April 2024, Columbia told Ahmed it would not renew his appointment. By July, Ahmed had begun a six-month stint as a visiting scholar with Birzeit University, a West Bank school that has hosted military parades in honor of Hamas. Until last month, the university partnered with a Harvard college that houses at least a half-dozen faculty members and affiliates who have defended Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack and accused Israel of “genocide” and “terrorism” remain at the school, the Free Beacon reported.
Harvard’s Carr-Ryan Center nonetheless told Ahmed it was looking “forward to supporting your ongoing research and scholarship” in the since-rescinded acceptance letter. The fellowship’s application page also notes that the center seeks scholars “whose research and practice are aligned with the Center’s priorities.” The Trump administration has explicitly named the center as one of Harvard’s programs “that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture.”
Ahmed, for his part, said he was “especially looking forward to working with Prof. Mathias Risse to examine some of the existential questions facing the human rights movement.” Risse wrote that Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack “did not come out of nowhere,” described the Jewish state’s response as “ruthless,” and urged people to recognize “the moral complexity of the situation in and around Gaza.”
Ahmed’s lessons at Columbia weren’t the first time he made controversial remarks. While heading the Open Society Foundations’ public health portfolio, Ahmed accused Jews of becoming oppressors following the Holocaust.
“Xenophobic attacks are a shameful part of South African history, but in some ways it reflects the fluidity between those who are victims becoming perpetrators,” Ahmed said during a 2019 address at Ethical Culture Fieldston School, an elite New York City private school. “I use the same example in talking about the Holocaust. The Jews who suffered in the Holocaust and established the State of Israel today perpetuate violences against Palestinians that are unthinkable.”
Ahmed did not return a request for comment.
This article was originally published at freebeacon.com
