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Except by the Christian Science Monitor, the Cambridge outbreaks went almost unnoticed by Boston's ostrich press. But what shocked Freshmen Poor and Gilbert most was the reaction of Harvard University. They submitted a letter to the Harvard Service News (wartime substitute for the Crimson) asking "intelligent citizens" to join in a campaign against anti-Semitism in Cambridge. The News refused to publish it, explaining that Dr. Alfred Chester Hanford, Dean of the College, had asked them not to. The dean feared it would only provoke further trouble.
Further trouble was just what most Harvard men expected. In Boston, mild-mannered Julian D. Steele, local head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, warned: "The time has come when the public officials of Greater Boston have got to take strong action to prevent the spread of these youthful riots." Cantabrigians, not so sure that the organized Cambridge incidents were entirely youthful in inspiration, feared that they were portents of bigger explosions to come.