AN INNOCENT bureaucratic mix-up or sharp-elbowed payback?

Those are among the competing explanations being offered for a chain of events that forced a Harvard student group to scramble at the eleventh hour last week to find an off-campus location for an event with US Rep. Jake Auchincloss. Word that the event could not take place at Harvard came a day after Auchincloss released a statement sharply critical of Harvard president Claudine Gay’s controversial testimony at a congressional committee on antisemitism on US campuses. 

More than a month ago, the John Adams Society, a conservative undergraduate group, scheduled a session for December 8 on US-China relations and industrial policy with Auchincloss, a Newton Democrat, and Rep. Ro Khanna, a fellow Democrat from California. 

The student group received an email from the university on November 6 confirming their booking of a room for the event in Sever Hall, a stately Romanesque Revival building in Harvard Yard, designed by famed architect H.H. Richardson. In the ensuing weeks, there were emails back and forth that included communication with the Harvard University Police Department, which was to arrange security for the event with two members of Congress. On December 6, said David Vega, a Harvard senior and member of the John Adams Society, there was a further email confirming the room booking in Sever 103. 

But then on December 7, the day before the event, Vega got an email from Harvard’s associate director of student organizations, JonRobert Bagley, saying because of “multiple policy violations” the December 8 event “is not permitted.” Bagley’s email said all events with high-profile guests need to be registered and approved through a Harvard office that had not been contacted. He also said co-sponsorship of the event by American Affairs, a Boston-based policy journal, and a student-focused nonprofit entrepreneurship group, Discipulus Ventures, violated the university’s policy against non-Harvard organizations co-sponsoring campus events. 

The last-minute notice “upset a lot of people involved,” said Vega. But with the two congressmen confirmed to appear the following day, the organizers decided to push ahead and found space to hold the event in the off-campus offices of a conservative Harvard undergraduate magazine. Vega said about 40 students attended the session last Friday. 

Last Tuesday, Harvard president Claudine Gay was one of three university presidents who set off an uproar when they offered equivocal answers at a congressional hearing to questions asking whether calls for genocide against Jews would violate policies at their campuses. The three leaders all referenced support for principles of free speech, even in cases of highly offensive views. 

The questioning was clearly a trap being set by Rep. Elise Stefanik, the MAGA-fueled Republican who questioned them, but Gay and the leaders of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania walked right in. 

While some tore at the idea that such statements could ever be permissible, a lot of the blowback centered on charges of a double standard on US campuses like Harvard, where critics say there has been a stifling of speech that might offend those on the left. 

The day after Gay’s testimony, Auchincloss and Rep. Seth Moulton, a Salem Democrat and fellow Harvard graduate, channeled that sentiment in a statement criticizing her remarks. In it, they referenced Harvard’s last-place ranking in a report by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression that graded US campuses on support for free speech policies. 

“Harvard ranks last out of 248 universities for support of free speech,” they said. “But when it comes to denouncing antisemitism, suddenly the university has anxieties about the First Amendment. It rings hollow.”

As for any connection between Auchincloss’s comments and word the next day that the session on US-China policy could not go forward, as scheduled, on Friday in Sever Hall, Vega said he has no insight. “It could be coincidence. It could be purposeful,” he said. 

Auchincloss declined to comment. 

Harvard officials say the decision was based solely on university event policies, and that they offered to help the Adams Society reschedule the session under terms that comply with those rules. They said Harvard undergraduate administrators only became aware of plans for the event at the last minute when campus police contacted them about security planning issues. 

Julius Krein, editor of American Affairs and a Harvard grad, isn’t buying the bureaucratic mix-up explanation. 

“The idea they didn’t know what was going on until December 7 doesn’t hold water,” he said of university officials. Like Vega, Krein said he doesn’t know what happened behind the scenes, but he said pulling the plug on the event at the last minute, right after “the congressman issued a critical statement, is pretty bad timing.”