Harvard Rescinds Fellowship to Controversial Ex-Columbia Lecturer Kayum Ahmed Amid Outcry Over Anti-Zionist Indoctrination, Ties to Hamas-Linked Institution

By: Fern Sidman

In yet another episode highlighting the intensifying clash between elite academic institutions and mounting scrutiny over antisemitism on campus, Harvard University has revoked a prestigious fellowship it had quietly extended to Kayum Ahmed, a former Columbia University lecturer with a controversial history of anti-Israel activism and ties to George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.

As The Washington Free Beacon revealed in a report on Thursday, the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy offered Ahmed a one-year fellowship for the 2025–2026 academic year, only to rescind the offer days later following press inquiries about his background. The abrupt reversal came without detailed explanation, but not without consequence: the episode has intensified questions about academic oversight, ideological extremism, and Harvard’s political allegiances.

On April 3, Ahmed announced on LinkedIn that he had been appointed a fellow at the Carr Center, posting a screenshot of the official offer letter, complete with Harvard letterhead and the signature of Executive Director Maggie Gates.

“I’m pleased to share that I’ve been appointed as a Fellow at the Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, for the 2025–2026 academic year,” he wrote.

But after The Washington Free Beacon reached out to Harvard on Monday for comment regarding the appointment—given Ahmed’s widely reported pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel classroom conduct—a spokesman quickly clarified that the offer had been issued “prematurely.”

“The offer was made prematurely and without going through the proper vetting process,” a Harvard Kennedy School spokesperson told The Washington Free Beacon. A day later, the university confirmed it had formally revoked the offer.

“After completing our standard review and vetting process, Harvard Kennedy School has decided not to move forward with this fellowship,” the spokesperson said.

Ahmed previously served as a director at the Open Society Foundations, the philanthropic network founded by George Soros. But he rose to wider national attention in March 2024, when The Wall Street Journal published a scathing exposé detailing how Ahmed used his teaching position at Columbia University to indoctrinate students with anti-Israel ideology, as was indicated in The Washington Free Beacon report.

According to that report, Ahmed’s lectures portrayed Israel as a “colonial settler state” that “displaced indigenous populations” and inflicted “health consequences” on Palestinians—narratives deeply criticized by pro-Israel organizations and Jewish students as factually distorted and ideologically militant.

The Washington Free Beacon report said that the WSJ’s findings prompted Columbia to cut ties with Ahmed, but the controversy did not end there. Harvard’s decision to bring him on as a fellow—however briefly—rekindled the debate over whether elite universities are providing safe harbor for radical anti-Zionist figures whose rhetoric flirts with antisemitism, a concern The Washington Free Beacon has been tracking amid rising tensions on college campuses.

In its public statement, Harvard Kennedy School claimed the revocation was not about ideology, but rather about “suitability,” “integrity,” and “ability to add to the intellectual life of the school.” The university also emphasized that it remains “committed to free speech and ideological diversity” and “does not disqualify candidates because of their views or because they are controversial.”

However, Ahmed has publicly rejected that narrative.

In a follow-up LinkedIn post, the former lecturer accused Harvard of succumbing to political pressure and retaliating against him for refusing to “remain silent in the face of genocide”—a clear reference to Israel’s military operations against Hamas following the October 7 massacre, as was explained in The Washington Free Beacon report.

“So let’s be honest: the real error—according to those pulling the strings—was that I refused to remain silent in the face of genocide,” Ahmed wrote. “They want obedience. I want resistance.”

The Free Beacon noted that Ahmed’s framing echoes hardline activist rhetoric in which accusations of Israeli “genocide” and apartheid are weaponized to delegitimize the Jewish state and vilify its defenders.

“After completing our standard review and vetting process, Harvard Kennedy School has decided not to move forward with this fellowship,” a spokesperson told The Washington Free Beacon. Though the university denied the revocation was due to Ahmed’s controversial views, many observers remain unconvinced.

Ahmed’s teaching at Columbia became the subject of national controversy in March 2024 after The Wall Street Journal published an exposé detailing his aggressive promotion of anti-Israel narratives in his public health classes, The Washington Free Beacon reported.

“He puts the idea into everyone’s head that the Jews stole the land and it should belong to the indigenous people,” one graduate student told the WSJ.

Others accused Ahmed of abandoning scholarly neutrality in favor of pro-Palestinian indoctrination, disseminating disinformation, and demanding ideological conformity to anti-Zionism, a movement that explicitly opposes the existence of the State of Israel.

Within a month of the article’s publication, Columbia University declined to renew Ahmed’s contract. But by July 2024, he had relocated to the West Bank and accepted a visiting scholar position at Birzeit University, a Palestinian institution that has openly celebrated Hamas through military parades and political events. The Washington Free Beacon report noted that until recently, Birzeit maintained an academic partnership with a Harvard college that currently employs several faculty members who have defended Hamas’s October 7 massacre and accused Israel of genocide and terrorism.

Despite this track record, Harvard’s Carr Center described itself in Ahmed’s acceptance letter as looking “forward to supporting your ongoing research and scholarship.” The center’s fellowship application materials state that it prioritizes scholars “whose research and practice are aligned with the Center’s priorities,” as per The Washington Free Beacon report.

Critics—including former Trump administration officials—have cited the Carr Center as a nexus of ideological capture within Harvard, specifically calling out its programs as “fueling antisemitic harassment” and distorting human rights discourse to suit anti-Western political agendas.

Ahmed, in turn, had planned to collaborate with Professor Mathias Risse, an academic at the Kennedy School who has also drawn controversy for statements framing Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel as “not coming out of nowhere” and for describing Israel’s military response as “ruthless.”

“I was especially looking forward to working with Professor Risse to examine some of the existential questions facing the human rights movement,” Ahmed wrote before the offer was rescinded.

The Washington Free Beacon also resurfaced previous remarks Ahmed made while leading the Open Society Foundations’ public health program, including a 2019 address at the elite Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York. There, Ahmed argued that Jews had become perpetrators of oppression following the Holocaust, drawing a moral equivalence between Nazi atrocities and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“The Jews who suffered in the Holocaust and established the State of Israel today perpetuate violences against Palestinians that are unthinkable,” Ahmed said, echoing a narrative long criticized for bordering on Holocaust inversion—a rhetorical technique that trivializes the Shoah by weaponizing its memory against Jews.

This episode comes as Harvard finds itself embroiled in a broader legal and cultural battle. As The Washington Free Beacon reported earlier this week, the university filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over its decision to freeze billions in federal funding as part of a crackdown on campus antisemitism. Harvard’s move signals the escalating standoff between elite academia and federal authorities over how antisemitism is defined—and addressed—in today’s polarized political environment.

The Ahmed controversy is now being interpreted in that broader context, with critics arguing that Harvard is desperately trying to balance appeasing progressive faculty and donors with avoiding further backlash from Washington and the Jewish community.

Though Harvard maintains that it retracted Ahmed’s appointment due to procedural irregularities and not political views, the timing of the decision—and the Carr Center’s past statements of support—suggest mounting institutional panic as elite universities come under federal and public scrutiny for enabling campus antisemitism, as was noted in The Washington Free Beacon report.

With Ahmed now portraying himself as a martyr of free speech, declaring in a defiant LinkedIn post that “they want obedience; I want resistance,” the episode speaks volumes about the deepening ideological battle over the future of academia—and whether institutions such as Harvard can, or will, draw a clear line between academic inquiry and activist indoctrination.

 As The Washington Free Beacon report concluded, the Ahmed affair is not merely about one scholar, but about the values, priorities, and blind spots of America’s most powerful academic institutions.