The Sun’s stand on gun control has been that we will not support a single tightening of the rules until Craig Whitney can carry a pistol in New York City. Mr. Whitney, a retired executive of the Times and a Harvard guy, is a law abiding citizen who wants to be licensed to carry a gun and can’t. Our position on the controversy at Harvard is analogous. We will not support an iota of relief from government pressure until Harvard steps up on antisemitism.

This is coming into focus with the question of whether Harvard should lose its tax exempt status. President Trump floated that idea in April. On Friday he doubled down. “We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status. It’s what they deserve!” he wrote on Truth Social. Before that question can be resolved in Harvard’s favor, in our view, Harvard needs to make a success of its campaign against antisemitism on campus. 

Otherwise, after all, Harvard would be receiving a tax exemption though it has been unable to enforce civil rights law on campus. Why would the government want to give not for profit status to a school whose campus is riddled with antisemitism? Particularly when the Ivy League school’s failure to  protect its Jewish students was recently put on full display in its own long-awaited report from the university’s antisemitism task force. 

Harvard delayed releasing those findings for months and only delivered on its promise to publish after the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights demanded to see it and the shadow of federal civil rights enforcement fell across its tax status. It showed that hostility to Jews had permeated nearly every aspect of university life — following Jewish students to the classroom, to their social circles, and everywhere in between. 

Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, responded to the report by telling the students that he was “sorry for the moments when we failed to meet the high expectations we rightfully set for our community.” He promised to adopt some of the task force’s proposals and said the university’s deans were “reviewing” the recommendations “concerning admissions, appointments, curriculum and orientation and training programs.”

This fails to fill us — or a number of others watching this story — with confidence. New York Representative Elise Stefanik, a Harvard alumna herself, puts it this way: “Harvard’s own task force reveals longtime, deep-rooted, dangerous, and rampant antisemitism embedded in coursework, campus life, and faculty hiring.” Adds she: “There must be accountability and real reform to save American higher education — not just reports.”

It took a federal lawsuit, after all, to gain Harvard’s agreement to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. That definition, among other things, acknowledges the true motivations of those who deny the Jewish people their right to self-determination. It was one of the demands of the six students who sued the school for failing to protect them from “severe and pervasive” antisemitism. 

Yet Harvard also joined its fellow university presidents in signing a letter that condemned the government for “endangering American higher education.” The school heads, for all their criticisms of the administration, fail to mention in their petition the campus hostility that got their schools into this very predicament. The omission was obvious enough for the president of Dartmouth college to refuse to add her name. 

Which brings us back to Craig Whitney. Just as he is the ultimate reasonable man on guns, the reasonable man on Harvard’s antisemitism problem is Ira Stoll, another Harvard guy. He has been way out in front on this story, most recently in a series of devastating dispatches from his Substack, “The Editors.” These columns are not going to plump for easing up on Harvard until Mr. Stoll is satisfied that it has addressed the antisemitism on campus.