Harvard Public Health School Offers Class on ‘Settler Colonialism’ in US, Israel

The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health has decided the best way it can educate the future generation of public health professionals is by offering a course that characterizes the United States and Israel as engaged in “settler colonialism.”

The Spring 2025 course features readings from radical racial ideologues and is taught by an activist who openly pushes for racially discriminatory policies in the name of “antiracism” and health equity. 

Per the Legal Information Institute, “settler colonialism” is “a system of oppression based on genocide and colonialism, that aims to displace a population of a nation … and replace it with a new settler population.”

The course is taught by Dr. Bram Wispelwey, an activist who openly advocates for increasing the role of “critical race theory” in medicine.

Wispelwey’s “Antiracist Agenda for Medicine” calls for a federal reparations program to ameliorate health disparities between races, and calls for health institutions to engage in active “antiracism” policies, such as by providing restitution to “harmed” populations.

Reparations are, of course, themselves a form of racial discrimination in which the public’s wealth is redistributed to recipients of the favored racial background.

Wispelwey also mentions the notion that racial concordance – when patients are treated by physicians of the same race – improves health outcomes.

As Do No Harm has shown, this argument lacks evidence. Four out of five systematic reviews of racial concordance have shown no positive impact on health outcomes.

The course asks students to understand “settler colonialism and its health impacts, as well as the remaining knowledge gaps in linking settler impact to current burdens of disease among indigenous, arrivant, and settler communities,” and draws upon “case studies from the United States and Palestine/Israel.”

A look at the course reading list reveals a number of radical activists: for instance, authors like Frantz Fanon, who advocated for violence against those deemed to be “colonizers” and deemed the “Western bourgeoisie” fundamentally racist. 

Harvard is an educational institution, and it can be argued that part of education involves interacting with and confronting ideas that may seem repugnant and morally odious.

But rather than simply exposing its students to these ideas as part of a wide array of perspectives, Harvard is instead actively inculcating future public health professionals into a very specific set of beliefs based on the premise that the United States and Israel are fundamentally evil. The course description makes clear that these ideas are presented as authoritative narratives that explain health disparities between certain groups.

This is plainly not the purpose of public health education. All the more troubling is that the course invokes characterizations of Israel frequently employed by antisemites to justify anti-Israel violence.

It’s clear that Harvard is more concerned with advancing a particular political ideology than with educating students in public health. Harvard’s public health school should not be a vessel for political activism.