(TNND) — Harvard University issued final reports on antisemitism and Islamophobia on its campus, along with recommendations for improving the school's experiences for Jewish and Muslim students.

Harvard President Alan Garber apologized "for the moments when we failed" as simmering tensions reached a boil following the Hamas attack on Israel that ignited the Gaza war.

Already marginalized and vulnerable groups, Jewish and Muslim students felt unwelcome and unsafe during protests and heated debate over the war.

Harvard launched a pair of task forces last year to gauge the scope of the potential antisemitism and anti-Arab prejudice.

Preliminary recommendations were released last June, and the final reports were released Tuesday.

Garber said in an open letter that work has already begun on the preliminary recommendations, and work will continue with the new recommendations.

The reports – one that covers antisemitism and another that covers Islamophobia – are more than 500 pages combined.

They contain recommendations related to admissions, early student experiences, academic life and more.

And the reports come at a time that Harvard is suing the Trump administration over institutional oversight, independence and federal funding.

The Trump administration has accused Harvard and other universities of failing to stamp out antisemitic activity on their campuses.

Kevin Welner, the director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, said the Gaza war stirred up “a perfect storm” where impassioned expression could cross the line to hateful targeting of groups.

Welner noted that the Harvard task forces were busy long before President Donald Trump returned to office.

“Like college leaders in general right now, I think that those task force members were in a no-win situation. I think they wanted to respond to real problems and real struggles on the Harvard campus but didn't want to be doing so in a way that looked like they were capitulating to the pressure from the administration,” Welner said.

Harvard discovered that about 40% of its Jewish students, to some extent, don’t feel at home at the school.

And about a quarter of Jewish students, to some extent, don’t feel physically safe.

An overwhelming majority of Muslim students, 92%, said they believed they were likely to face academic or professional repercussions for expressing their opinions.

The task forces surveyed students and held listening sessions.

Muslim students felt “abandoned and silenced,” the report on anti-Arab sentiment stated.

“Especially disturbing is the reported willingness of some students to treat each other with disdain rather than sympathy, eager to criticize and ostracize, particularly when afforded the anonymity and distance that social media provides,” Garber said in his letter. “Some students reported being pushed by their peers to the periphery of campus life because of who they are or what they believe, eroding our shared sense of community in the process.”

Garber said Harvard won’t accept bigotry.

The Anti-Defamation League applauded Harvard’s "clear-eyed and brutally honest assessment" of antisemitism on its campus.

Antisemitism has been a persistent, systemic problem at many colleges, the ADL said. And the problem got exponentially worse after the Gaza war erupted.

“To be clear, more work needs to be done,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “Questions must be answered about the radicalism in some academic departments at Harvard. And the university must resist the temptation to equivocate and suggest that there are somehow two sides to a one-sided situation wherein Jewish students continuously, indisputably have suffered from a pattern of violative actions. Nonetheless, this report represents an important and overdue step in the right direction and can start the healing process that is so desperately needed, not just on campus, but across the country.”

Welner said universities deal with “very real and powerful tensions.”

They deal with tense interactions, tense feelings and tense issues.

But he said university leaders also deal with the tensions between the core values of academic freedom and a safe, welcoming campus environment.

“If you're running Harvard, the solution isn't to shut down freedom of expression or ... (it’s not) telling people that there's only one orthodox set of views to have,” Welner said. “And you also don't want to ignore the very real harms that hate speech and other types of attacks are creating for people in your community.”

Welner said it’s unrealistic for university admissions to weed out bigots or hateful people.

What they can try and look out for are potential students with a clear inclination to commit violence based on political ideology, he said.

Schools want to bring in people who have shown an ability to engage with others in a healthy and respectful way, even when they disagree with them.

And he said university leaders should be wary of micromanaging teachers or banning personal expression by teachers in the classroom.

There’s no reason a calculus teacher needs to wade into the debate over a Middle East conflict.

But someone teaching a course in world geography, sociology or political science should be free to infuse their lessons with their personal views, as long as they don’t demand conformity from their students, Welner said.

“If a professor is trying to demand ... viewpoint orthodoxy in a classroom, I think that's a real problem,” he said.

That's not a good learning environment, Welner said.

Instructors should foster a marketplace of ideas and make sure opposing viewpoints are addressed in class, he said.

Protests are part of college life.

And Welner said university leaders shouldn’t stifle free speech activity.

But they must also make their campuses safe.

And they must take reasonable steps to ensure protesters aren’t keeping other students from learning, studying and going about their pursuit of an education, Welner said.