Mary Bassett is a legend in public health. From her student years at Radcliffe College where she volunteered with the Black Panthers to provide sickle cell disease screening in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, to her work on HIV prevention when she was on the faculty of the University of Zimbabwe, to her pioneering role on AIDS care in Africa as the Rockefeller Foundation’s point person on health equity, to her tenure as the commissioner of health for both New York City and New York State, Bassett has been a visionary, sought after for her commitment to the health of the most vulnerable people in the US and around the planet.

In 2018, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health scored a coup by getting Bassett to lead the François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights. Let me be clear—Dr. Bassett elevated Harvard by taking up this role, not the other way around.

Yet in mid-December of last year, the school’s dean, Andrea Baccarelli—more on him later—suddenly told Bassett that he was removing her as director of FXB. It was abrupt, unceremonious, and cruel. But cruelty is the point nowadays, isn’t it?

Harvard’s decision has sent shock waves through the international public health and academic communities. Over 2,000 colleagues have signed a petition calling for Bassett’s reinstatement. Leaders like Jocalyn Clark, international editor of The BMJ, one of the world’s most influential medical journals, called it “a shocking move,” while Martin McKee at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine was appalled at what happened, asking, “What were they thinking?”

Well, what were they thinking? It’s clear that Bassett was pushed out for one reason only—her insistence on highlighting the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Her leadership of the FXB Center was singled out in a report on campus antisemitism as focused “heavily on Palestinians”—an apparent cardinal sin.

Let’s be frank about a few things. By now, many people have come to see what is happening in Gaza as an abomination—including people from within Israel and the Jewish diaspora. It is those who have refused to condemn the atrocities in Gaza—including noted Harvard bigwig and sex pest Larry Summers, who has been critical of FXB for months and months—who came gunning for Bassett.

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And the charges of antisemitism are, bluntly, bullshit. The massacres by Hamas on October 7 were abhorrent in their own right, but the response from the Netanyahu government has been indefensible—his government means to wipe Gaza off the map and has taken 70,000 lives in this quest to date. The genocide has also caused one of the gravest public health crises of the 21st century, with Gaza’s entire medical system virtually wiped out and hunger and disease running rampant. In other words, the situation in Gaza couldn’t be more relevant to the work of an institution focused on health and human rights like the one Bassett ran.

To categorically frame Bassett and every single other person who refuses to give the Israeli government carte blanche and justify Netanyahu’s actions as antisemitic is just not right. Of course, there are antisemites among Israel’s critics, but plenty of Jewish people, inside and outside of Israel, are appalled by what is happening—they don’t give up claims to their Jewishness because they oppose Likud and its coalition partners’ actions. In fact, what is happening is simply a political move to crush dissent against a country’s foreign policy and military decisions. It also is a move to silence the voices of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis trying to bridge divides in their home country.

But on college campuses, Bassett’s firing is about something more. Antisemitism has been mobilized by antisemites to assert control over higher education in America. Elise Stefanik, a key architect of the ouster of Harvard’s former President Claudine Gay and others on the basis of their response to campus antisemitism, was called out by her own hometown newspaper in 2021 for her invocation of the Great Replacement theory (“How low, Ms. Stefanik?”)—she is clearly no friend to the Jews. Far-right activist Christopher Rufo willingly exposed his strategy in his use of antisemitism in an interview with Politico in January 2024, gleefully admitting he used it to bring down university presidents by cultivating allies among the liberal press who were credulous enough to take the charges he was making at face value.

And more and more influential figures among American Jews are calling all this out. In December, a letter from Joe Berman, a former top litigator for the Anti-Defamation League put it succinctly, “Jews and the fight against antisemitism are being cynically used to advance an authoritarian, anti-democratic agenda.… Make no mistake: this will not end well, especially for Jewish Americans.” And an Ipsos poll last September of over 1,000 Americans who self-identified as Jewish found that “a wide majority—by nearly a three-to-one margin—report that President Trump uses allegations of antisemitism as an ‘excuse’ to pause or cut university funding, rather than saying he ‘truly cares’ about the well-being of Jewish students.” Clearly, the game is up for many Jewish Americans. But not for Harvard.

The only reason Bassett was fired is that Harvard donors, trustees, HSPH dean Andrea Baccarelli, and President Alan Garber wanted it to happen. There are two possible reasons for this, and both are alarming at this terrible political moment in American history. One scenario is simple: they agree with the policies of the current Israeli government, and the charges hurled against colleges by the Trump administration, and are gladly squelching any dissent. That is, they are collaborators.

The second, and more likely, reason is that the leaders at Harvard are cowards. Under pressure from the White House and the far right, they thought the sacrifice of Bassett was simply worth it to appease their critics, even bad-faith ones. The quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates above is from a longer speech he gave recently, where he explicitly calls out civic leaders, including those at universities, who speak forthrightly about the importance of institutions of higher education, but yet shrink back at the moment of truth: “These institutions, rich, prestigious, cower rather than confront. They compromise their principles instead of defending justice.”

“Tell your children who the cowards were.”

Baccarelli and Garber have sacrificed one of the leading public health figures of our time out of deep moral cowardice. They’ll go down with those who turned in their friends and colleagues during the blacklist in the 1950s, substituting a dubious expediency for any self-respect. And one might also ask, where is the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard on all of this? While these faculty have been noisily clamoring for free speech and viewpoint diversity on campus for years, they’ve been noticeably silent on what is clearly a purge of a fellow academic. I guess it’s free speech for me, not for thee when it comes to viewpoints they may disagree with. Cowards all.

Why does all this matter? The Trump administration is trying to reshape higher education for an authoritarian era, as has been done in other countries, at other times. You need cowards to do this: people who will sell out their colleagues and their principles to promote their own safety or advancement, even as they claim they are doing it because they have no choice. I am sure Baccarelli and Garber have also told themselves they are saving their school by making these concessions, but what is left in capitulation and collaboration’s wake?

Universities are no longer about open inquiry and debate if they are willing to close programs, shutter departments, shift away from priorities that arouse the ire of the state, and purge those who run afoul of those in power. Rebuilding academia in the image of the far right is the goal. For an example of where that leads, just look at New College of Florida. But even there, Governor Ron DeSantis forced New College’s hand. Baccarelli and Garber are lending their own hands to this project.

As for public health and medicine? This move is part of the campaign to reshape our fields as well. Bassett was fired because she spoke up on Gaza, but it is clear that her seminal work on racism and health, and her willingness to speak up about these issues, also put her on the wrong side of the Trump administration, as well as those on campus who see current discussions on race and social justice in medical school curriculums as overly woke, “promot[ing] extensive and dangerous misinformation,” and representing a form of “pedagogical malpractice.”

Baccarelli has said the “new” version of FXB will emphasize children’s health as its focus (even though FXB already has a program on this topic). One has to wonder which children will count in this new cramped vision of human rights at Harvard. If I were at Harvard, I’d also be worried about the future of FXB’s other programs on climate change and public health emergencies, on racial justice, on migrants and refugees, and the Roma program for health and human rights. This is what Baccarelli and Garber are willing to leave behind.

At this moment, the rise of authoritarianism and the backlash to Me Too, Black Lives Matter, and the fight for trans equality have begun to converge. Those on campus who want to make university life safe for misogyny, racism, and transphobia again are feeling empowered. The academics among Epstein’s men, like Larry Summers, who yearn for a past in which we all knew our place in the pecking order, see their fortunes rising. (It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that the two most prominent terminations at Harvard in this era—Mary Bassett and Claudine Gay—have been two Black women.)

Making an example of Mary Bassett was a very bad move. We know who the cowards (and collaborators) are now. Bassett was at the forefront of a new public health, grounded in science and justice for all. And even as they may say they are doing no such thing, we need to realize that these men have declared war on an entire field, because their quest was not just to remove a single leader but to extirpate a set of ideas and principles fundamental to public health that their patrons find objectionable.

At least, though, we know where we stand. The contours of the struggle ahead are coming into clearer relief every day. It is bad medicine to carve out discussions of gross human rights violations, like the carnage in Gaza, of race, sexuality, and gender, and the entire panoply of social determinants of health out of our work to satisfy this regressive politics. Because in the end, it is not viruses and rogue cells alone that kill us—it is what we inflict on each other that makes us sick, leaves us dead.