The Wall and the Wound: How a Harvard Protest Reopened the Campus’s Deepest Divides 

The removal of the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee’s (PSC) “Wall of Resistance” exhibit sparked a public confrontation that highlights the university’s deep ongoing divisions over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and free speech. The installation, which condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza and called for divestment, was being dismantled per university rules when former President Lawrence Summers staged a counter-protest, condemning the wall as “antisemitic” and the “moral equivalent of racism.”

This led to a heated exchange with deans who intervened to enforce the scheduled, safe removal, a move Summers criticized as selectively applying neutral campus policies. The incident encapsulates the core conflict at Harvard: the struggle to balance protest and safety, criticism and hate speech, and procedural neutrality with taking a substantive moral stand, revealing an institution still grappling with how to manage one of the world’s most polarizing issues on campus.

The Wall and the Wound: How a Harvard Protest Reopened the Campus’s Deepest Divides 

In the storied courtyards of Harvard University, a space meant for scholarly exchange and quiet contemplation often transforms into a theater for the world’s most intractable conflicts. This week, the stage was the Science Center Plaza, the props were six painted wooden panels called the “Wall of Resistance,” and the players included student activists, deans, and one of the most formidable figures in modern academia: former University President Lawrence H. Summers. What unfolded was more than a routine protest takedown; it was a raw, public dissection of the ongoing crises over free speech, institutional neutrality, and the very definition of antisemitism that continues to grip Harvard and elite institutions across the nation. 

The Installation: More Than Just a Wall 

Erected by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC), the “Wall of Resistance” was an annual exhibit given new, urgent life by the ongoing war in Gaza. Its panels, adorned with artwork and text, did not mince words. They condemned Israel’s military actions, highlighted the deaths of children and aid seekers, and called for the university to divest its finances from Israel. For the PSC, this was a necessary, disruptive act of education. 

“The wall was installed to ‘make students reflect on what it means to attend a university that is actively, materially, and morally complicit in the ongoing genocide and occupation in Palestine,’” said PSC organizer Eva C. Frazier ’26. 

This language—specifically the use of “genocide”—is not incidental. It is the crux of the conflict. To the PSC and its supporters, it is a legally and morally defensible description of the reality in Gaza, citing figures from the Hamas-run Health Ministry and a recent, though not conclusive, UN inquiry. To critics like Summers, this very rhetoric crosses a line from political criticism into antisemitic demonization. 

The wall’s scheduled five-day display, permitted under the university’s relatively new campus use rules, was a testament to Harvard’s attempt to manage protest through bureaucratic process. But process, as the events of Thursday proved, is often no match for passion. 

The Counter: Summers and the Spectacle of Protest 

The planned, orderly removal of the wall was upended by a classic Harvard power move. Harvard Chabad, at the suggestion of Summers himself, announced an address by the former president to be delivered at the foot of the controversial installation, timed precisely for its scheduled takedown. 

Summers, a former U.S. Treasury Secretary who remains a professor at the university, did not come to offer a nuanced academic lecture. He came to condemn. In front of more than 50 affiliates, he labeled the wall “antisemitic” and “the moral equivalent of racism.” His most potent rhetorical flourish was a comparison to the Ku Klux Klan, implying that the university would never permit such a display of hate, yet had allowed this. 

His speech was a direct challenge to the administration of President Alan Garber and Dean David Deming, whom he urged the crowd to pressure. It was also a direct challenge to the PSC’s narrative, reframing their protest not as a cry for human rights, but as an expression of hatred that made Jewish students feel unsafe and vilified. 

This is the core of the debate that Harvard has been unable to resolve: When does criticism of Israel become antisemitism? For Summers and a significant portion of the Jewish community, the wall’s singular focus on Israeli culpability, its use of charged terms like “genocide,” and its placement in a central student plaza creates an environment of intimidation. For the PSC, as organizer Olivia G. Pasquerella ’26 stated, “it is not antisemitic or racist to critique a state that is perpetrating a genocide.” 

The Confrontation: A Clash of Authority and Rules 

The drama peaked when Deans Amanda Claybaugh and Thomas G. Dunne arrived to oversee the wall’s removal. In a moment rich with symbolic tension, they approached Summers—a former president interrupting a current dean—and asked him to step aside so the work could be done safely. 

Summers’ refusal—“I am going to finish my remarks”—was a stunning assertion of moral authority over administrative authority. He was, in effect, declaring that his protest against the protest took precedence over the university’s schedule. 

The subsequent, heated exchange between Summers and Claybaugh laid bare the entire controversy. Claybaugh, defending her intervention, fell back on the sanctuary of “content-neutral University rules.” She was, as she stated, “just defending the University rules,” a claim rooted in the procedural response to a student request for help with a potentially unsafe takedown. 

Summers’ retort—“Now I’m really angry. I wasn’t angry before. Now I’m really angry”—was not just personal pique. It was the fury of someone who believes the university hides behind a veneer of neutrality to avoid making difficult moral judgments. He contested the very idea that Harvard enforces its rules neutrally, a charge given weight by the article’s own mention of the rules being used to remove a Black Lives Matter sign and cancel a pro-Palestine vigil. 

In this moment, the “Wall of Resistance” became a metaphor for Harvard’s own impasse. The administration seeks to manage conflict through procedure. Its critics, from both sides, demand that it take a substantive stand. 

The Unhealed Wound: What the Wall Leaves Behind 

The removal of the physical wall took only minutes. The philosophical and political divisions it represents will likely endure for years. 

For the PSC, the incident is part of a longer struggle. The group was already on probation this spring for previous protest activities, and the swift, high-profile condemnation of their exhibit reinforces their narrative of a university seeking to silence dissent against powerful interests. The presence of deans at the removal, while procedural, could easily be perceived as an enforcement action against their speech. 

For Summers and those aligned with his view, the event is evidence of a continuing failure of moral leadership. His decision to bypass official channels and stage a public counter-protest suggests a deep lack of faith in the current administration’s ability to confront what he sees as a pervasive antisemitism. 

And for the university as a whole, the confrontation is a management nightmare. The carefully crafted campus use rules, designed to prevent the chaotic encampments of the previous spring, proved fragile when confronted with the determined activism of a former president. The quest for a content-neutral, process-driven approach to campus conflict is revealed as perhaps impossible when the content is, by its very nature, among the most polarizing on earth. 

The “Wall of Resistance” is gone from the Science Center Plaza. But the questions it raised remain, etched not in wood and paint, but in the deeply held convictions of a community struggling to define the boundaries between hate and criticism, between safety and censorship, and between the right to protest and the responsibility of a university to hold its community together. The real wall at Harvard was never just made of wood; it is built on a foundation of historical grievance, moral certainty, and a fundamental disagreement over the meaning of justice itself.