The crowd of demonstrators quickly swelled to more than 200 as chants started up, and many student protesters wore masks.
Mark Eisenberg, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, joined the protest because he doesn’t think that “universities should be capitulating to the demands of the Trump administration.”
He said he wasn’t surprised to learn about the Trump administration’s review of Harvard’s federal funding, but he was disappointed that president Alan Garber’s response Monday evening did not more strongly emphasize the importance of academic freedom.
“Universities all have to get together and say, ‘No we won’t capitulate,‘” Eisenberg said.
Noah Kassis, a senior at Harvard, said he participated in the demonstration because he was “terrified” to learn about the recent detainment of Tufts graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, a native of Turkey.
The Trump administration’s announcement that it would review Harvard’s federal funding is “scary for this institution” and “also scary for academic freedom and for universities’ role in American society,” Kassis said.
“This is just an excuse to discipline universities, to force universities more in line with how they see the world, and to crack down on what they see as liberal excesses of universities,” he said.
As the demonstrators gathered, a masked man clad in all black blared “The Star-Spangled Banner” from speakers set up near the demonstrators; a woman’s voice was heard saying, “Organizers of this event are lying to you.”
A handful of additional counterprotesters were located near the masked man, setting up signs defending Israel, including one that said in part, “Israel is not an apartheid state!”
But the demonstrators remained focused, chanting repeatedly, “Who’s got the power?/We got the power/What kind of power?/People power!”
They also carried signs bearing slogans including “Peace not genocide,” ”ICE off campus,” and “Free Palestine Free Our Scholars,” while calling for the release of Öztürk, who was detained last week by masked ICE agents outside her apartment in Somerville.
The man in black continued playing a female voice from his speakers that said in part: “We support the right to free speech as much as anyone. But speech has certain commonsense restrictions.” The man declined to comment to the Globe.
Demonstrators later marched to Harvard Yard, which was only open to people with university identification cards. Around 4 p.m., the protest ended.
Among the protesters was Cambridge native Jane Sullivan. She said she fears for the country’s direction, saying it was moving toward white supremacy and xenophobia and that civil rights were being eroded.
“The country’s going fascist,” she said as she trailed the main group of marchers on a sidewalk.
The Trump administration said Monday that it will “review” nearly $9 billion in federal funding for Harvard University and its affiliates, such as area hospitals, in an effort to “root out antisemitism,” according to the federal government’s antisemitism task force.
The announcement came 10 days after the task force secured extraordinary concessions from Columbia University in a similar review that placed nearly $5 billion of that school’s federal funding at risk.
Directly targeting Harvard is a significant escalation in the Trump administration’s crackdown on elite universities and what it describes as their failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitism and harassment. That campaign also includes arresting and threatening to deport international students linked to the pro-Palestinian campus movement, such as Öztürk.
In a message to the campus community Monday night, Harvard president Garber said the government’s review targets “almost $9 billion in support of research.”
“If this funding is stopped, it will halt life-saving research and imperil important scientific research and innovation,” he said.
The task force said it will review more than $255 million in federal contracts with Harvard and its affiliated institutions, as well as more than $8.7 billion in multiyear grant commitments.
Harvard’s affiliates include hospitals such as Mass General Brigham and Boston Children’s Hospital.
The Trump administration said that elite universities’ alleged failure to protect Jewish students from harassment amounts to a violation of federal civil rights law, which the government can punish by withholding funding.
Some Jewish advocacy groups have applauded the administration’s efforts. Roni Brunn, a spokesperson for the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance, said the government’s review is an effort to ensure “antisemitism isn’t created at Harvard, isn’t platformed at Harvard, isn’t elevated at Harvard.”
But many academics and other Jewish groups have condemned the Trump administration’s efforts as a weaponization of antisemitism to prosecute its wider crackdown on universities, which has included federal research funding cuts, investigations over diversity programs, and a threatened endowment tax hike.
Last week, hundreds of Harvard professors in an open letter demanded a more confrontational approach.
At Tuesday’s demonstration, Greg Smith, a 61-year-old Jewish man, said he drove an hour and a half from his home in Ashburnham to participate, carrying a sign that read “Peace Not Genocide.”
Ashley Dionne, 34, of Boston, who works as a librarian at Harvard, expressed outrage over her employer’s recent dismissal of two faculty leaders at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, as well as Harvard’s suspension of ties with Birzeit University in the West Bank.
“How they’re using antisemitism is another form of antisemitism. They’re using the Jewish people, many of whom do not agree with the State of Israel,” Dionne said.
Globe correspondent Nathan Metcalf contributed to this report. Material from prior Globe stories was used in this report. This breaking news story will be updated.
Hilary Burns can be reached at hilary.burns@globe.com. Follow her @Hilarysburns. Danny McDonald can be reached at daniel.mcdonald@globe.com. Follow him @Danny__McDonald. Travis Andersen can be reached at travis.andersen@globe.com.
