Harvard Hires Divinity School Graduate Who Assaulted Israeli Classmate
The Harvard University student who faced criminal charges for assaulting an Israeli classmate during an anti-Israel “die-in” protest, Elom Tettey-Tamaklo, has a new job: He is a teaching fellow at… Harvard.
Tettey-Tamaklo, who was removed from his position as a proctor overseeing freshmen in the wake of the incident, began work as a “Graduate Teaching Fellow” at Harvard in August, according to his LinkedIn profile. He says he works to “advise faculty on curriculum design.”
Tettey-Tamaklo was the subject of intense scrutiny after he was caught on camera accosting a first-year Israeli business school student at an October 2023 “die-in” protest held outside of Harvard Business School. He was slapped with a misdemeanor assault and battery charge last May and ordered by a Suffolk County judge to take an anger management class and perform 80 hours of community service roughly a year later.
As that legal process played out, the Trump administration demanded Harvard expel Tettey-Tamaklo over the assault. Instead, Harvard hired him. Throughout the ordeal, the school never disciplined Tettey-Tamaklo or his compadre, Ibrahim Bharmal, and refused to cooperate with prosecutors in the case.
Teaching fellows at Harvard are typically paid a minimum salary that ranges from $3,400 to $11,040, according to Harvard’s graduate student union. They assist with courses, leading “sections,” grading exams, and offering office hours. The positions are generally awarded to Harvard-enrolled graduate students, meaning Tettey-Tamaklo may be pursuing a Ph.D. Tettey-Tamaklo graduated with a master’s degree from the divinity school in May, just weeks after he agreed to the pretrial diversion program in his assault case.
It’s unclear in which school Tettey-Tamaklo is serving as a teaching fellow; his LinkedIn profile only says the job is a “full-time” and “on-site” position at Harvard. It’s also unclear if he’s pursuing a Ph.D. at the divinity school.
Neither Harvard nor Tettey-Tamaklo responded to requests for comment.
Tettey-Tamaklo’s status as a Harvard employee is sure to raise eyebrows among the school’s critics. In addition to the Trump administration—which said in an April letter outlining its demands for the restoration of federal funds that Harvard must permanently expel “the students involved in the Oct. 18 assault of an Israeli Harvard Business School student”—a group of prominent business school alumni hammered the school in the wake of the assault. Harvard’s leaders, Sen. Mitt Romney (R., Utah) and billionaire investor Seth Klarman wrote, failed to address “expressions of hate and vitriol against Jews.”
Harvard briefly appeared to take the criticism seriously. It removed Tettey-Tamaklo as a proctor—a role that tasked him with living among freshmen to support their “adjustment to Harvard”—in November 2023, reportedly citing “student discomfort.” It was the only action Harvard took against Tettey-Tamaklo, who remained in good standing with the school throughout his criminal trial.
Harvard has also embraced the second student charged with assault in connection with the protest, law school graduate Ibrahim Bharmal. The school published a blog in which Bharmal fondly reminisced on his time at the school before the conclusion of his criminal case. Shortly after Bharmal entered into the same diversion program as Tettey-Tamaklo, he was awarded a $65,000 Harvard Law Review fellowship meant to serve the “public interest.” The money funds the fellow’s work at a government agency or nonprofit; in Bharmal’s case, that means a stint at the Council on American-Islamic Relations’s Los Angeles office.
Harvard’s handling of Tettey-Tamaklo’s and Bharmal’s cases prompted the Israeli student assaulted at the protest, Yoav Segev, to sue the school in July, accusing it of “misleading tactics, obfuscation, and misrepresentations” that “prevented him from ever obtaining administrative remedies.” He’s not the only one to make such accusations—the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office said Harvard refused to cooperate with its investigation into the assault, delaying the criminal cases against Tettey-Tamaklo and Bharmal and preventing the office from identifying additional perpetrators.
Text messages released by the House Education and Workforce Committee provided a window into Harvard’s view of the assault, which came as Segev attempted to walk through the protest while filming it.
“Another complication is that, although [the Israeli student] was technically within his rights … [t]he way he was taking videos appears provocative,” Harvard University president Alan Garber wrote in a series of texts urging Harvard Business School dean Srikant Datar not to send a community message about the “die-in.”
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