Last Tuesday afternoon, Dean Andrea Baccarelli at the Harvard School of Public Health sent out a brief message announcing that one of the country’s most experienced and accomplished public health leaders, Dr Mary T Bassett, would “step down” 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, 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 disgraced economist Larry Summers, condemned this work and claimed it “foments 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 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 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 grew from colonial medicine, cold war politics, and philanthropic ventures – think the Gates Foundation, 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 without redistributing the 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 that 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 Palestine, these institutions and their leaders are increasingly retreating from even the pretense of or aspiration to universality.
The Palestinian 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 the Birzeit partnership and called for its immediate dissolution. The Trump administration demanded an external audit and froze federal funding when Harvard refused its list of demands. An internal sham antisemitism taskforce criticized 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 the administration after the government froze over $2.2bn in federal research funding. But as critics – including hundreds of faculty signatories 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, Harvard has increasingly simply capitulated to power.
Bassett’s removal, which comes after she personally published essays (including two with me), peer-reviewed scientific research, and made courageous public statements 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 “Palestinian 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. Hospitals have fired clinicians for naming genocide or simply stating that Palestinians should live. Non-profits have avoided public statements 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. Medical workers have been killed in vast numbers. 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.
