Revealed: Harvard publisher cancels entire journal issue on Palestine shortly before publication

Tue 22 Jul 2025 07.10 EDT
by Alice Speri

As Harvard’s feud with Trump escalated, so did tensions over an ‘education and Palestine’ issue of a prestigious journal. Scholars blame the ‘Palestine exception’ to academic freedom

In March 2024, six months into Israel’s war in Gaza, education in the territory was decimated. Schools were closed – most had been turned into shelters – and all 12 of the strip’s universities were partially or fully destroyed. Against that backdrop, a prestigious American education journal decided to dedicate a special issue to “education and Palestine”. The Harvard Educational Review (HER) put out a call for submissions, asking academics around the world for ideas for articles grappling with the education of Palestinians, education about Palestine and Palestinians, and related debates in schools and colleges in the US.

“The field of education has an important role to play in supporting students, educators, and policymakers in contextualizing what has been happening in Gaza with histories and continuing impacts of occupation, genocide, and political contestations,” the journal’s editors wrote in their call for abstracts. A little more than a year later, the scale of destruction in Gaza was exponentially larger. The special issue, which was slated to be published this summer, was just about ready – contracts with most authors were finalized and articles were edited. They covered topics from the annihilation of Gaza’s schools to the challenges of teaching about Israel and Palestine in the US.

But on 9 June, the Harvard Education Publishing Group, the journal’s publisher, abruptly canceled the release. In an email to the issue’s contributors, the publisher cited “a number of complex issues”, shocking authors and editors alike, the Guardian has learned. US universities have come under intensifying attacks from the Trump administration over accusations of tolerating antisemitism on campuses. Many have responded by restricting protest, punishing students and faculty outspoken about Palestinian rights, and scrutinizing academic programmes home to scholarship about Palestine.

But the cancellation of an entire issue of an academic journal, which has not been previously reported, is a remarkable new development in a mounting list of examples of censorship of pro-Palestinian speech. The Guardian spoke with four scholars who had written for the issue, and one of the journal’s editors. It also reviewed internal emails that capture how enthusiasm about a special issue intended to promote “scholarly conversation on education and Palestine amid repression, occupation, and genocide” was derailed by fears of legal liability and devolved into recriminations about censorship, integrity and what many scholars have come to refer to as the “Palestine exception” to academic freedom.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/jul/22/harvard-educational-review-palestine-issue-cancelled