BUZZ
Says school officials did so to appease Trump
The former director of a health research center is now speaking out after being fired, reportedly over criticism she focused too much on Israel.
As previously reported by The College Fix, critics said the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights under Mary Bassett slanted its programming too heavily against Israel. The university announced the center would refocus on pediatrics.
The university dismissed her as director in January, but she remains a public health professor at the school.
While she previously did not comment on the decision, she is now speaking out in The Harvard Crimson, accusing the school of focusing too much on “appeasing” the Trump administration.
Writing on June 8, Bassett accused the school of hypocrisy for reportedly seeking to expand “viewpoint diversity” through endowed professorships while at the same time removing her for what she says was valid criticism of Israel’s actions against Palestinians.
She wrote:
In December 2025, as reported deaths in Gaza exceeded 71,000 (mostly women and children), I was removed from my position as the director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, a University-wide center based at the Harvard School of Public Health. Dean Andrea Baccarelli framed this as part of a new strategic direction for the center, but it was apparent that my removal was the result of calling attention to this carnage.
Bassett also criticized the university for undermining the program, saying that officials should have defended her center when it was accused of antisemitism. Republican Congressional leaders included the center’s programming in its report on alleged antisemitism on campus, while praising the firing of Bassett.
“Harvard’s guiding imperative is defending the restoration of $3 billion in federal grants, which apparently means appeasing those in the Trump administration who have decreed that any discussion of Palestinian rights is by definition antisemitic,” Bassett wrote. She says the university’s actions have not stopped the threats to the school’s funding.
Meanwhile critics accuse the university of “faithfully parroting Hamas talking points.”
“The Center, like Harvard broadly, seems to have lost sight of veritas,” Ian Kingsbury with Do No Harm told The Fix in January.
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