Will
Harvard Bend or Break?
Free-speech battles and
pressure from Washington threaten America’s oldest university—and the soul of
higher education.
March 3, 2025
There would be debate about who struck the match that lit
the fuse that spiralled around campus, but the sequence of events was plain
enough to everyone who saw it burn. On October 9, 2023, two days after
Hamas-led fighters from Gaza invaded Israel, killing twelve hundred people and
taking more than two hundred hostages, Claudine Gay, the new president of
Harvard University, exchanged e-mails with a small group of colleagues to draft
a suitable response. Should they call the attacks “violent”? (Too charged, they
decided.) Should they denounce a letter, signed by more than thirty student
groups, which called Israel “the only one to blame”? The matter seemed
delicate, and the administrators took time to work over their language. That
night, they published a statement so widely dismissed as anodyne that Gay
released another one, taking a stand against the violence, the next day. By
then, Larry Summers, a former president of the university, had broken the norms
of that role to blast the current leadership for inaction; Bill Ackman, an
alumnus with a hedge fund, had picked up the criticism; and Elise Stefanik, a
Republican in Congress, had condemned students’ “vile anti-Semitic statements.”
Two months later, Gay was at the Capitol, addressing the House Committee on
Education and the Workforce. It was the start of what one professor described
to me as “an endlessly metastatic sense of crisis over the course of the whole
year.”
Gay, who appeared on Capitol Hill in thick-rimmed glasses
and a jacket that resembled gessoed canvas, sat beside the presidents of the
University of Pennsylvania and M.I.T., who had also been summoned to give
testimony. The questions that the committee posed, on alleged antisemitism on
campus, had an air of ritualistic repetition. At one point, Stefanik asked
whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated the schools’ rules of
bullying and harassment. Gay joined the other presidents in saying that her administration
allowed freedom of speech but would take action over anything more.
“Antisemitic rhetoric, when it crosses into conduct that
amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation—that is actionable conduct,” she
said. Stefanik pressed her. “Again,” Gay answered, “it depends on the context.”
Across the country, campuses were undergoing paroxysms of
protest and counter-protest, pulled between the Palestinian and Israeli causes.
At the University of Texas at Austin, police in riot gear dismantled tents,
deployed pepper spray and stun grenades, and arrested more than a hundred
students. At Columbia, “doxing trucks”—vehicles that broadcast purportedly
pro-Palestinian students’ names and faces while labelling them
antisemites—circled the campus, and student protesters were arrested by the New
York Police Department. Harvard, too, roiled—there were tents in Harvard Yard
and doxing trucks in Harvard Square—and a range of voices, including those of
congresspeople and donors, questioned Gay’s capacity for leadership.
Then other complaints surfaced. In December, the press
began publishing allegations of plagiarism in Gay’s scholarly work, in the
field of political behavior. The Harvard Corporation, the more powerful of
Harvard’s two governing boards, brought an inquiry to a close with Gay’s
coöperation. All the same, Gay was out of her office by the first week of
January—the fastest presidential exit in Harvard’s history. Alan Garber, the
university’s longtime provost, took her place.
And yet what should have been the end of a tempestuous
season wasn’t. More than a year later, the campus remains in a state of
bewildered unease. Harvard is the flagship of American higher education—the
oldest, the wealthiest, and, by many measures, the most selective university in
the country—and what started as a crisis of speech and authority on campus has
grown into a fear that internal conflict, amplified by outside pressures, can
run it and the whole fleet of American universities aground. Polls show trust
in higher education falling. In December, Garber appeared at a faculty meeting
after speaking with about forty members of Congress, and was alarmed, he said,
by the frustration he sensed toward the institution. The worry was that, in
2025, with a new regime in the White House and a sympathetic Congress, the
struggles of the previous year could be not an anomaly but a template for the
time ahead.
Last fiscal year, two-thirds of Harvard’s sponsored
research funding—nearly seven hundred million dollars, or more than the growth
in the university’s unrestricted endowment assets—came from the federal
government, which supports everything from cancer studies to art instruction in
museums. The figure isn’t unusual: federal funding also supports three-quarters
of Stanford’s research projects and half of all research at both the University
of Wisconsin–Madison and U.C. Berkeley. “There’s no university in the country
that could survive the loss of federal money,” Brian Leiter, a professor of law
and philosophy at the University of Chicago, who writes a popular blog on
philosophy and the academy, told me. When the second Trump Administration,
during its first week, feinted toward freezing federal funding programs,
universities were among the institutions whose blood ran cold.
During its first term, the Administration had levied a
1.4-per-cent endowment-earnings tax on wealthy schools. In 2023, in the Senate,
J. D. Vance sought to increase that tax to thirty-five per cent. (The measure
failed, but similar legislation has already been introduced in this year’s
Congress.) Donald Trump has threatened to oust accreditors who focus on
diversity—not an imminent threat to the accreditation system as a whole, but a
step toward potentially devastating consequences. If a school were to lose its
status, it couldn’t offer the federal loans and aid needed to attract students,
and the nature of the institution would change overnight.
Under President Trump, who sees universities, in the main,
as enemies in the political culture wars, this pressure on élite higher
education could always be expected. But the protests of the past year have
given the offensive a special edge. In 2019, Trump used an executive order to
formalize antisemitism protections in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, a
nondiscrimination law from 1964. If the government can show that a university
failed to act to discipline antisemitic or other discriminatory speech and that
the school refuses to implement a remedy, it may have grounds to cut funding.
Between October, 2023, and February, 2024, the number of Title VI complaints
submitted to the Department of Education increased fifteenfold. Legally
speaking, Leiter told me, Gay and the other university presidents who appeared
before the congressional committee had erred in letting their examiners shift
the focus from speech rights to the Title VI question of campus discipline.
“The starting point should have been: ‘This speech, even if
I did not agree with it, is lawful political speech under the First Amendment
of the United States Constitution,’ ” he said. (According to the student
newspaper the Harvard Crimson, Gay was coached for her appearance
by the law firm WilmerHale; Leiter, like many others, thought that she had
received poor legal and political advice.) Leiter says that Title VI suits are
likely to ramp up among many identity groups, producing a crossfire of
discriminatory-speech complaints that will keep universities on the line and
beholden to the Administration’s mercy.
“I think it’s great!” Bill Ackman, who likened President
Trump to God in a recent tweet, told me. “The government withdrawing funding
will cause Harvard, and the Harvards of the world, to reform themselves.” It is
an irony, sweet to the universities’ critics, that schools have been made
vulnerable by the speech-and-sensitivity debates that have swirled around
campuses for years. And yet conceding those messy parochial disputes to powers
outside the university seems to some to represent no less of a crisis.
“There is a nearly impossible choice being put to
university leaders at this point,” Andrew Crespo, a professor at Harvard Law
School, told me. “On the one hand, you have outside funders, including the
federal government, who have the ability to threaten the university’s ability
to operate. On the other, you have the mission of the institution.” Caught in
the middle is the influence of universities on fields as disparate as medicine
and art. “This is not about any one institution,” Crespo said. “It’s about higher
education in the United States, and whether it is going to survive and thrive
or fade away.”
I visited Harvard this past autumn, during a period when
two dozen professors were barred from entering the main library on campus—a
punishment meant to show that the university penalized all unsanctioned speech
comparably. Earlier that year, pro-Palestinian student activists had undertaken
a “study-in” there: wearing kaffiyeh scarves, they had studied together
silently with messages such as “Israel Bombs, Harvard Pays” (a call for
divestment) taped to their open laptops.
After those students were banned from the library,
sympathetic professors organized a study-in of their own. They wore black
scarves instead of kaffiyehs, and their signs said nonspecific things such as
“Embrace Diverse Perspectives,” a phrase from the library system’s mission
statement. Security guards appeared and collected their I.D. cards. “The mood
of the faculty at Harvard right now is pretty ugly,” a professor told me. “The
idea that they would be punished for their speech by their university is outrageous—though,
after last year, it doesn’t surprise me.”
That spring, Harvard had moved toward a standard often
called “institutional neutrality”: an idea, also adopted by Stanford and
several other campuses, that a university as a whole ought not to take
positions on the issues of the day. (The policy, a former dean wryly noted,
would forbid statements like the one that Gay and her colleagues put out on
October 9th.) Neutrality is meant in part to support those who might not agree
with an “official” position, and in part to ward off comparisons: in the congressional
hearing, Stefanik asked why the Israeli flag had not been flown in Harvard Yard
as, under a previous president, the Ukrainian flag had been. Harvard’s new
institutional policy suggests: no flags.
Adopting such policies is easy. Applying them to discipline
is hard. One way to be institutionally neutral is not to discipline anyone for
anything they say. Yet few people want to live and work in a ruleless
environment, and the culture on campus has gone in the other direction. A
decade ago, concepts like “microaggressions” and “trigger warnings”
proliferated to correct for language that, although not illegal, had a way of
making specific populations feel unwelcome—creating hidden inequalities, the notion
went. The idea that speech can do damage is also the premise of many Title VI
and Title IX, or sexual-harassment, lawsuits. But the war in Gaza “is a special
case, and an especially difficult set of issues,” Tomiko Brown-Nagin, a law and
history professor and the dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, a research
center, told me. Last year, she co-chaired a working group on campus
communication which, after collecting responses from more than five thousand
students, identified a “chill” that caused them to “self-censor rather than
debate charged issues.”
Critics of discipline for harmful speech often cast it as a
restriction of free-speech norms on campus. But there’s no era in the history
of the American university when such norms reigned. The Berkeley Free Speech
Movement of 1964 was a movement precisely because it went against the standards
of the place, which included a ban on much political organizing. More than
eight hundred students were arrested. In 1975, Yale adopted a famous set of
free-speech standards from a committee chaired by the historian C. Vann
Woodward, but that regime had come into question by 1986, when a student was
disciplined for mocking Gay and Lesbian Awareness Days. (The punishment was
later rescinded.) Advocates of free expression today often point to the
so-called Chicago principles, standards supporting even speech believed to be
“offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed,” which were originated by the
University of Chicago and adopted by schools from Purdue to Princeton (but not,
so far, by Harvard). Those principles are ten years old.
A more
accurate claim is that the norm for campus speech is to live in a tug-of-war
between expression and protection. “I do not understand why the university
spokesman keeps saying that antisemitism will not be tolerated on the Harvard
campus—part of a commitment to free speech is tolerating prejudiced speech,”
Larry Summers told me. He also suggested that the university should have taken
steps to disassociate itself from the student groups that signed the letter
about October 7th. (Summers resigned from the presidency after floating the
hypothesis, in 2005, that women were underrepresented in science because they
might have less “intrinsic aptitude” for it.) He has long identified as a
free-speech champion, but said that he didn’t worry about the chilling effects
of discipline per se.
“Look, we want to chill certain things—people who come into
classrooms with megaphones, people who shout down speakers,” he said. “What
would be problematic would be to have rules that were differentiated with
respect to the content of the speech.”
Harvard’s current leadership seems to have embraced a
similar rationale. In addition to punishing the professors in the library, the
university had, over the year, tightened its rules on the posting of
unauthorized flyers of any kind, as well as unapproved “chalking” on university
property—a restriction that bemused some faculty members, who wondered whether
they were meant to stop writing on their lecture-hall boards.
“You’d open your e-mail, and it was like Dolores Umbridge
at Hogwarts in ‘Harry Potter 5’—every time, boom, boom, boom, there was a new
rule going up on the wall,” a senior professor told me. He had joined a band of
protest chalkers, writing “I LOVE PUPPIES”
on the pavement before running away. “They literally had a librarian who went
out and wrote in chalk on the pavement, in front of the library, something like
‘HAPPY NATIONAL LIBRARIAN DAY’—the
person was completely oblivious, just lighthearted, and got called in by the
dean.”
Students found the neutral rules officious. “It’s annoying
everyone that the university is saying ‘No chalking’ rather than saying, you
know, ‘Drawing a pro-Hamas symbol in the Yard is bad’—that’s what
we want to stop,” Charlie Covit, a Harvard sophomore and a supporter of the
Israeli cause, told me. The chalking ban, perhaps because of its reductiones ad
absurdum, was lifted in the fall by the dean of one part of the university, but
other rules remain. Some on campus saw them as a marker of a change in speech
tolerance.
“Protest is always disruptive—it always breaks some rules,”
Steven Levitsky, a Harvard government professor, told me. He had participated
in anti-apartheid protests as a college student at Stanford, in the
nineteen-eighties, a period when there were tent cities in Harvard Yard.
“Governments tolerate protests in democracy and err on the side of
forbearance,” he said. “I think those principles are under threat.” What was
going on now, with the stringency about chalk and libraries and signage, could
be taken as a rehearsal of more authoritarian norms.
Ryan Enos, another government professor, joined the library
protest in an effort to push back against what he worried was a widespread
clamping down. “One thing that has become very clear is that administrations,
not only at Harvard, are behaving in a way reactionary to political pressures,”
he said. “It’s not based on principle.” Faculty in some specialty fields have
been unsettled by new guidelines that seem to discourage political speech by
leaders in their institutional capacities—a constraint that they worry could
apply to increasingly politicized subjects like vaccination and masking. “The
way that people describe the guidelines is: You can’t say anything about
anything,” Lara Jirmanus, a Harvard Medical School clinical instructor, told
me.
Enos believed that the fault lay partly with the faculty.
Of the nearly four hundred Harvard faculty members who responded to a Crimson survey
in 2023, only three per cent of the ones declaring their politics identified as
conservative. “There’s almost no political reason for a Republican not to
attack universities now,” he said. Except, of course, that higher education is
one of the sectors in which the United States remains preëminent, a forum of
free thought last seriously challenged during the second Red Scare.
“In the nineteen-fifties, when it was politically
convenient, there were politicians who went around using universities as a
cudgel to attack free speech in this country, and it wasn’t because the
universities were prioritizing inclusivity or people’s feelings or trigger
warnings or anything like that,” Enos said. At Harvard, a physicist named
Wendell Furry had been investigated for possible Communist connections but was
defended by the university president; Enos worried that Harvard today wouldn’t
take a stand against political antagonists. “The historical parallel, in my
opinion, is crystal clear—it looks like a rerun of McCarthyism,” he told me.
“One day, people will look back on this and be embarrassed.”
Wildfires burned in late October north of Boston. The air
in Cambridge had a still, warm glaze. In a plaza before Harvard’s
ziggurat-shaped Science Center, dozens of students assembled with cardboard
signs. A divinity student named Alexandra Potter, dressed in jeans and a
T-shirt, wielded a bullhorn.
“Gaza, Gaza, you will rise!” she chanted, as the crowd
echoed the phrase. “Palestine will never die!”
The protest, originally scheduled to take place in Harvard
Yard but moved so as not to run afoul of the new rules, seemed low-key. Many of
the protesters wore backpacks. Some clutched to-go coffee cups. A stream of
freshmen coming from their mailboxes, several of them carrying large Amazon
packages, paused to watch.
On a bench nearby, a man and a woman stood holding
counter-protest signs. “Never again,”
one read, and quoted incendiary language from a Hamas leader. Another showed an
infant hostage. The woman, Rotem Spiegler, an alumna of Harvard Law School,
wore a T-shirt that said “Shut Up” in Hebrew and told me that she represented
an initiative called Cambridge Voices for Israel. “We feel it’s important to
have this presence here to show the other side and also make those people from
the Jewish community feel a little safer,” she explained. A few yards away, a
pale, middle-aged man wearing a military-style windbreaker and industrial cargo
pants with bulging pockets took photographs.
“First
and foremost, I’m here to document,” he said, pointing at a camera attached to
his breast pocket. He said he lived in town but would not give his name. “These
kids, they don’t know any better—they just have something that gives them a
sense of community, and they’re happy to show up,” he said. “It’s only if they
say something downright supportive of terrorism that I’ll engage them and ask
them more questions.”
Harvard was the site of a very early student protest in the
Americas, when, in 1766, students spent weeks demonstrating against the quality
of campus food. (Their chant: “Behold, our butter stinketh!”) During the height
of the school’s Vietnam activism, in 1969, protesters were evicted from an
occupied building by police, leading to more than forty injuries. That protest
was heavily covered by national media, which was unusual for college activism.
Today’s protests, however, are carried out continuously in the public eye—a
social-media vantage that makes the campus less a world apart than a snow globe
for all interested parties. Since October 7th, Israel’s bombings of Gaza have
killed fifty thousand people, mostly women and children. Some students who spoke
out against Israel found themselves the target of doxing campaigns. Faculty got
the same treatment. After Kirsten Weld, a history professor and the president
of the Harvard chapter of the American Association of University Professors,
signed a letter to Claudine Gay urging that the term “antisemitism” be better
defined in the university’s usage, a Web site was set up for her, and for other
signatories of the letter, with a head shot and the phrase “Harvard’s Leading
Antisemite.”
“My husband is Jewish, whatever,” Weld told me. “But I had
to have a weird conversation with my dad.”
For students, the involvement from outsiders has a cost. “I
kind of want to be a lawyer,” Violet Barron, a college junior who joined the
pro-Palestinian protests, told me. “But the top twenty law firms will never
hire me because of my activism.” It is unclear who will hire
her, with a doxing Web site identifying her as an antisemite; at some point,
she had to make a choice between her professional future and what she felt was
an urgent moral cause. “We do all this because we don’t want to see hate, don’t
want to see genocide,” she said. “But there’s an understanding that, if you put
yourself out there, you will be doxed, and the career that you’ve come to
Harvard to try to achieve is in jeopardy.”
Barron was brought up going to Hebrew school. In high
school, she volunteered at food pantries and, through her synagogue, lobbied
for gun reform and climate legislation on Capitol Hill. “My Judaism went hand
in hand with social justice,” she said. “I grew up believing in Israel as this
dream project, the place that had been saved, the refuge for a wandering
people.” The bombings in Gaza had unsettled her. “I had this dissonance, which
I didn’t even realize was dissonance, which was to fight for these values of
social justice and liberation but also stand by Israel,” she continued. “I was
harshly awoken.” All her life, Barron said, she had been a believer in the
two-state solution; now she favored “one binational state where you have
freedom of movement and equal legal rights for everyone, from the Jordan River
to the Mediterranean Sea.”
Several students told me that they didn’t think campus
leaders realized how defining the war had been for members of their generation.
“Everything was tangentially related, in some way,” Charlie Covit observed of
campus discussion last year. During the spring term, the university began
offering a series of programs intended to encourage “constructive dialogue” and
“civil discourse,” but many students I talked to were more aware of incidents
that struck them as suppressive.
In October, 2023, the Harvard Law Review commissioned
an article from Rabea Eghbariah, a doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School and
a Palestinian citizen of Israel who had worked on developing a legal theory for
Palestinians’ situation in the region. During a meeting of the journal’s staff,
however, a majority of editors voted to cancel the publication of his
contribution, called “The Ongoing Nakba: Toward a Legal Framework for
Palestine.” An expanded version eventually appeared in the Columbia Law
Review, after a conflict between that journal’s board and some of its
editors. “Unfortunately, our silencing has been extreme to the point where even
when we’re given the platform to speak we’re silenced—which
ultimately serves to manufacture consent for the Israeli genocide in Gaza and
the subjugation of Palestinians more broadly,” Eghbariah told me.
If there are major donors to the university who favor the
Palestinian cause, they have not been nearly as vocal as those, like Ackman,
who identify as Zionists. “It was shocking and appalling to the establishment
that pro-Palestinian voices were probably majoritarian at Harvard and other
campuses,” Levitsky, the government professor, told me. People on both sides of
the issue posited that, for all the claims of equipoise, the new rules at
Harvard had been introduced with the goal of containing pro-Palestinian
protest.
“The university doesn’t want us talking about Palestine,”
Barron told me, sitting at a picnic table as the protest cleared away. “They
don’t want us calling them out for being invested in Israel. And they’re
cracking down in this unprecedented way—it’s what we call the Palestine
exception to free speech.”
At noon that day, I was rushing behind Matthew Meyerson,
who seemed to be always in motion. “We should probably keep moving or we won’t
get lunch!” he exclaimed, and led me swiftly down the corridor of his large
laboratory in the Broad Institute, a genomics-research center that Harvard and
M.I.T. co-founded in 2004. Meyerson has spent nearly his entire adult life at
Harvard, where he arrived as an undergraduate in the nineteen-eighties. His
laboratory’s successes include the discovery of a genetic link for lung cancer
that helped inform its drug treatment.
Meyerson had round wire-rimmed glasses, a checkered navy
jacket, and a batting of snowy hair that, with his brisk solicitude, put me in
mind of Lewis Carroll’s white rabbit. He bounded through heavy doors and into
the multilevel garage where he kept a Chevy Volt, and we drove to the medical
campus for a lunch meeting of Harvard Faculty for Israel, a group that he
co-founded in September.
“This is probably the world’s largest collection of
biomedical research,” Meyerson said, after we parked and began walking up
Longwood Avenue. “The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute is to the right. That’s
Boston Children’s Hospital. And you see that building to the far right? Part of
Brigham and Women’s Hospital, one of two large hospitals
here.”
Longwood Avenue, the Appian Way of global health, shows the
stakes of defunding. Sixty per cent of the School of Public Health’s operating
budget and more than a third of the Medical School’s comes from sponsored
funding. But it is also a reminder of what the American university, in its
singular tangle of service, scholarship, and enterprise, represents. With
public and private money, Harvard had created a small city of medicine. “A
conservative institution but with radical functions” is one way that Clark Kerr,
the postwar University of California president and theorist of higher
education, described the reality of the American university. Meyerson’s father,
Martin Meyerson, was Berkeley’s acting chancellor under Kerr, at the height of
the Free Speech Movement, and subsequently became president of the University
of Pennsylvania—the first Jewish head of an Ivy League school. For Meyerson,
Longwood is both a crown jewel of the university’s growth and an alarming
measure of a fading Jewish presence.
Harvard
keeps no official figures for its Jewish population, but surveys suggest that
representation has more than halved since the Vietnam era. Today, less than ten
per cent of Harvard College students are reported to be Jewish, one of the
lower proportions in the Ivy League. “I initially appreciated more the problem
for Israelis, who faced, especially after October 7th, really fierce shunning
and discrimination,” Meyerson told me as we arrived at the lunch—a small group
sitting in a medical amphitheatre, eating kosher wraps. “But it has also been
more serious than I appreciated for Jewish students and staff.” He believes
that Jewish representation among the younger generation at Longwood is smaller
than on the campus broadly. “I’ve talked to graduate students whose advisers
had basically never heard a Jewish perspective,” he said.
If the struggle to find Jews on a medical campus sounds
like the setup for a Yiddish joke (“Bubbeleh, how about you start in the
ophthalmology department?”), it has become unfunny to many people. Meyerson’s
lunch group, which meets weekly, acts as a support group for an
alienated-feeling minority. Charleen Adams, a computational geneticist, told me
she had grown frustrated by social-justice initiatives that struck her as
reflexively anti-Israel and allowed no space for dissenting views. “It seemed
like a top-down, ‘Shut your mouth if you’re for Israel or are Jewish’
campaign,” Adams said.
One Israeli medical researcher and Harvard professor who
had raised his kids—happily, he said—in a social circle of “stereotypical
Cambridge liberals who used to drive Subarus and now drive Teslas” described to
me being shocked by the community’s response to the Hamas attacks on October
7th, even before there was Israeli retaliation. “I got zero responses, except
from open supporters of Israel,” he said. “It’s almost as if empathy has become
politicized.”
A Title VI complaint filed against the university is filled
with accounts of experiences of unsympathetic response, alienation, and
aggression. It cited a widely circulated video clip of an Israeli student at
Harvard Business School being surrounded by protesters holding open kaffiyehs,
and accused the university of insufficient discipline. It described a community
social-media feed that, at one point, included posts such as “All of you
Zionists are the same. Killers and rapists of children!” and suggested Jewish
conspiracy. It noted a student who felt disturbed by the prospect of discussion
about the Israel-Hamas conflict in his torts class. “It’s sort of a
philosophical question whether that’s antisemitism or not,” Jesse Fried, a
Harvard Law School professor who co-founded Harvard Faculty for Israel, said.
“But, whatever it is, it’s immiserating students, and that type of humiliation,
discrimination, harassment, and shunning would not be directed at any other
group.” The complaint suggested that Jewish people on campus weren’t afforded
the same protections offered other subjects of discrimination.
“You’re either the oppressed or the oppressor,” Daniel
Kuritzkes, a professor of medicine at Harvard and the chief of the
infectious-disease division at a Harvard-affiliated hospital, observed of
current campus discourse when I visited him one morning. The split struck him
as nonsensical for Jews, who, he noted, had broadly been “economically
successful” but, on the other hand, had been beaten, vilified, and killed
nearly everywhere they’d ever lived. Kuritzkes described himself as a longtime
critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies but found attacks on
Israel’s basic legitimacy suspicious. Students and faculty who sought to get
Jewish identities protected by the school’s diversity offices reported having
been met with mixed responses, which some have perceived as a rebuff.
Kuritzkes recalled that the corporate-style sensitivity
training he had received at his hospital seemed unscholarly and reductive—too
pro forma in the orbit of a university where scholars come at subjects like
diversity and pluralism with years of thought and research. When members of his
division were told during a diversity training to consider their white
privilege, he bristled: he had gone from public school in Queens to Yale, where
he had been made to feel like an outsider amid a patrician Wasp culture.
“I’m saying, you have no idea what my
background is,” he said. “You don’t know that my father came to the United
States at age nine speaking no English. Or that my wife, who is Chinese, came
at age six.” American identities comprise many layers and pathways. “D.E.I.
makes certain assumptions about who and what people are,” he said. “And the
solution can’t just be that you have to watch a thirty-minute
video about how to be nice to Jews or how to be nice to Muslims.”
Kuritzkes, like a number of his colleagues, sees these
weaknesses as an invitation for more of the nuanced scholarship that has been
central to the twenty-first-century university. Many politicians on the right
have seemed to disagree. In late October, a congressional committee chaired by
the House Republican Virginia Foxx released a
three-hundred-and-twenty-five-page report detailing what it described as
incidents of antisemitic behavior on university campuses, including Harvard.
“Extremist faculty members hijacked the disciplinary process to allow
ideologically aligned students to avoid consequences,” the report claimed.
“We’re not asking for special treatment—we’re asking for
equal treatment,” Shabbos Kestenbaum, a Title VI plaintiff and a former Harvard
Divinity School student, who spoke out against Harvard and other universities
at the Republican National Convention last summer, told me. “ Jewish
students deserve equity, equality, and justice, and, if Harvard is not going to
fulfill their mandates under federal law, we’re going to insure a court of law
forces them.”
Higher education isn’t an especially scarce resource in
America. Two-thirds of Americans below the age of thirty have attended college.
Of the nearly four thousand accredited colleges in the United States, a
majority admit most people who apply; the average acceptance rate is about
seventy per cent. What “élite” schools, the Harvards and the Michigans and the
Caltechs and the Spelmans, offer is two interlocking promises of special
access. First, help with tuition: a rich university, with its deep financial-aid
coffers, is likelier to be more affordable for students without means than a
state school. Second, a Willy Wonka glass elevator to blast you from where you
are to places you might want to go. Because these universities can summon
senators, activists, and maestros; because their scientists need researchers
and co-authors; and because some of their grateful alumni have lunch budgets,
they are hubs of convocation and acculturation. All conflict on élite
campuses—even conflict about Israel and Palestine—ends up as an
equality-of-access conflict, because access is the key to these schools’
democratic function. Change the norms of access on a campus, and you redraw
many larger maps.
Harvard was among the first élite American universities to
extend merit-scholarship programs, and one of the earliest Ivy League campuses
to make classrooms coeducational. In the nineteen-seventies, it made such an
effort to reach communities of color that a landmark U.S. Supreme Court opinion
of 1978 asserting the constitutionality of affirmative action touted “the
Harvard Plan” as its ideal. Much later, in 2023, the university was at the
center of the Court decision that struck down affirmative action. In the first
law-school class admitted after the decision, nineteen Black students
enrolled—a drop from forty-three in the previous class.
“D.E.I.” was by that time a catchall term for projects in
diversity. (In some quarters, it has become a euphemism for the demeaning
suggestion that unqualified people are elevated solely on the basis of their
gender or their race; some recent efforts to limit D.E.I. programs—like a
lawsuit against Starbucks, filed by the Missouri attorney general, alleging
that its workforce is “less qualified” because it has become “more female and
less white”—seem to have overlap with the ideology of white supremacy.) Harvard
created what would become the Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and
Belonging in 2018, on the recommendation of a task force that had also released
a report noting that only a third of faculty members across the university were
female, and only a fifth minorities. Harvard’s president, the historian Drew
Gilpin Faust, invited John Silvanus Wilson, Jr.—a former president and
graduate of Morehouse College, the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s
president-in-residence, and a member of the Board of Overseers—to become a
senior adviser to that effort and a mission that she had in view.
“What was very much on my mind was that we had brought a
lot of different people to this campus, but we hadn’t made sure that they felt
they were complete full citizens of the place,” Faust told me. For Wilson, that
struck a chord.
“ It was very clear as soon as I arrived on
Morehouse’s campus that Morehouse was made for me, but it was very clear as
soon as I arrived at Harvard that Harvard was not made for me,” he explained.
“It’s in the campus curriculum. It’s in the campus culture. It’s in the campus
communications.” In 2019, Wilson, leading the new initiative, ran the largest
optional survey in Harvard’s history, comprising twenty thousand people, to
measure “belonging” with a tool that a researcher in the education school had
devised. “ The profile of the person at Harvard who felt most like they
belonged in 2019 had the following descriptors,” he said. “White, male,
heterosexual, educated parents, U.S. citizen, conservative or liberal, Jewish
or Christian.” The situation on campus for Jewish people had changed since
then, he thought, but, as far as bringing them into “the D.E.I. orbit” went,
“the challenge is complicated by the fact that reasonable people can no longer
agree on what constitutes certain forms of discrimination, antisemitism
included.”
The
Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, which has since passed
to other leadership, now has six full-time staffers and affiliates across
campus. It offers trainings, events, and internal grants and is run out of the
office of the president. Critics of D.E.I. programs at colleges note that, for
initiatives intent on giving voice to the marginalized, they have a way of
drawing power to the executive center.
“The difference is the managerial elements,” Michael Clune,
an English professor at Case Western Reserve University, told me. In the fall,
he published an editorial in The Chronicle of Higher Education called
“We Asked for It,” arguing that scholarship had become self-defeatingly
politicized. “In the sixties, or the nineties, when I was a college student,
you’d see students protesting against administrators,” he said. “Increasingly,
the agents of this politics are management and bureaucracy.”
Clune views it as a misdirected response to student
concern. When students a decade ago confronted national inequity and called for
support, he thought, university leaders saw less a social urgency than a
service-and-liability problem—the way United Airlines might staff its way out
of a customer crunch. “Administrators heard it as a request for the creation
and expansion of bureaucracies around student services and so forth—one of the
main drivers of tuition,” Clune said. “It created this feedback loop.”
At Harvard, administrative staffers outnumber the faculty
around three to one in the most recent count. There is about a one-to-one ratio
of undergraduates to administrative staffers at the university. Some of this
explosion at schools across the country has been in legal staffing, for
instance in response to the increase in litigation under Title IX, the
sex-discrimination law originally passed in 1972 that addresses sexual
harassment.
Clune saw D.E.I. programs as the stronghold of an
overrepresented administration more than the voice of underrepresented people.
(He noted that the ideas of Adolph Reed, a leading scholar of Black politics
and a co-founder of the U.S. Labor Party, would have no place in the programs,
which Reed has criticized for overlooking issues of class by focussing on race,
creating a more diverse élite rather than a more egalitarian society.) And
turning to management as a solution to big problems, he thought, encouraged a
new mind-set.
I first visited the Harvard.edu home page as a callow West
Coast high-school student more than twenty years ago. Back then, it had links
to basic topics: “Academics,” “Admissions,” “Campus Life.” There was a virtual
tour and low-resolution QuickTime videos. In the lead reel, I remember, Seamus
Heaney, Harvard’s Nobel laureate in literature, read a poem as a choir sang
“Shenandoah.” At the time, my family knew exactly three people with ties to
Harvard College—an English teacher who advised my high-school newspaper, a
departed upperclassman from my school whom I’d spoken with perhaps twice, and a
neighborhood kid years ahead of me—so the Web site was my portal to an
unfamiliar world.
Harvard.edu now has a different mood. When I looked
recently, the top item was a guide to following New Year’s resolutions. Below
that was a module advertising Harvard’s free branded online courses (“Building
Personal Resilience,” “Backyard Meteorology”), with a link to many others—some
free, some purchasable for a few thousand dollars. Next came a module with
mindfulness instructions (“1. Sit, 2. Focus, 3. Expand, 4. Embrace”); another
was called “Read an Engaging Book” (“Revisit anything Agatha Christie wrote.
She is more brilliant than you remember. I’m immersed in the Body in
the Library”). Nowhere on the home page was there any information about the
academic institution.
“Universities have already begun to shift how they justify
their existence,” Clune went on. “It’s away from the traditional, you know,
‘pursuit of knowledge’ and toward the stuff you read on corporate Web
sites—like, we’re here to ‘create value’ and ‘create engaging customer
experiences.’ ”
Afairly reliable way to judge whose power is ascendant in
American society is to see who’s making influential demands about campus access
at a given moment. For the past couple of years, newly but to no one’s
surprise, greater Silicon Valley has led the way. Newly because the business
world’s interest in higher education has traditionally flowed through clubby,
connected M.B.A. types with an eye for institutionalism. And to no one’s
surprise because, after years of political pragmatism bordering on apathy, Silicon
Valley’s style of business thinking has sharpened to a social-ideological
point. Last spring, a group of powerful figures in tech and finance touted a
cause that one called “M.E.I.” (“Merit, Excellence, and Intelligence”) and
proclaimed their commitment to hiring on those principles. Last summer, a small
but noisy group of venture capitalists, many of whom had criticized
left-of-center workplace norms, endorsed the candidacy of Donald Trump. In the
fall, Elon Musk backed Trump’s campaign with promises to champion free speech.
These figures seem to hold extraordinary sway over the President, who may see,
in their taste for drawing theories of the universe from the growth of their
own enterprises, a reflection of himself. In January, Amazon and Meta rolled
back some of their D.E.I. programs. The same week, the venture capitalist Peter
Thiel published an editorial touting Trump’s challenge to “media organizations,
bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs,” which were united, he
posited, in a conspiracy to censor information on such topics as COVID-19 and the Kennedy assassination.
Few in the greater tech world share such views. But many
are sympathetic to their counter-institutional thrust. Sam Lessin, a venture
capitalist who graduated from Harvard in 2005 and went to Silicon Valley a few
years later to join the early Facebook, told me, “A lot of my friends were
saying, ‘Look, Harvard is too complicated, too far gone, we’re going to support
the University of Austin’ ”—an unaccredited institution founded, in 2021,
by such figures as the historian Niall Ferguson, the venture capitalist Joe
Lonsdale, and the columnist Bari Weiss. “That’s a very West Coast mentality:
These things are too hard to reform—it’s easier to start a new thing.”
Lessin, a longtime donor, described himself as Harvard’s
defender among his Silicon Valley friends. Still, after October 7th, he
wondered whether they were right. He turned his mind toward joining the
university’s leadership. Although members of the Harvard Corporation are chosen
through an arcane internal process, candidates for the university’s lower,
larger body, the Board of Overseers, are nominated by committee and picked by
an open alumni vote. Lessin wasn’t nominated. But, he learned, with 3,238 alumni
write-ins, he could get on the ballot, so he launched a campaign.
“Harvard must be focused on fostering a safe and open
environment for academic free speech AND protect the academic focuse [sic] of
the institution,” he wrote in his opening pitch—the first of ten mass e-mails
in two weeks. “No disruptions in class. No protests in Widener. This should be
obvious, it is sad that it is not to some.”
He enlisted faculty supporters, such as the cognitive
scientist Steven Pinker. He hosted live Zoom events, including one in which
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan interviewed him about his candidacy. “I’ve
done my part—I voted for Sam,” Chan said, adding, with mock pity, that
Zuckerberg couldn’t vote because he never graduated. (Zuckerberg grinned and
agreed: “My honorary doctorate of letters is meaningless in this context.” The
university had awarded him a doctorate of laws in 2017; in 2021, he and Chan pledged
half a billion dollars to fund a Harvard center for A.I.) When, in the final
tally, Lessin fell short by three hundred and thirty-seven write-ins, he vowed
not to give up the fight. He launched a project he calls the 1636 Forum, for
the year of Harvard’s founding. It publishes a weekly newsletter to twenty
thousand subscribers, with a focus on free speech and academic excellence.
“We can talk about what excellence means—I’m not saying the
highest SAT scores,” he told me one day at a Blank Street Coffee in midtown
Manhattan. He had flown to New York on his way to Cambridge for a dinner that
Garber was hosting for donors. He wore a puffy navy jacket over a navy T-shirt
and had a scruffy beard; his manner was of the Peninsula-boardroom kind,
easygoing but executive. “The big mistake is when you start trying to
manufacture who you want to be in the élite,” he said, of efforts to diversify
the student body. “You’re optimizing for the end rather than the input.”
To Lessin, campus protest, too, set the wrong terms of
exchange. “People always say, ‘Students have a right to free speech,’ ” he
said. “I’m, like, Americans have a right to free speech. If
people want to say whatever they want, they can go to Boston Common. Harvard is
a private institution.” During Lessin’s campaign, he weighed in against Derek
Penslar, a professor of Jewish history and the director of Harvard’s Center for
Jewish Studies, who was chosen to co-chair Harvard’s antisemitism task force;
Ackman, Stefanik, Summers, and others found Penslar to be the wrong man for the
job. (Penslar told me, “ I remember thinking, First they came after Claudine
Gay, and now they come after a very middle-level person like myself. If they
can get me to buckle, they can go after anyone.”)
“I did in-person lunches and breakfasts with a lot of the
largest donors,” Lessin told me. “Over the years, alums of all shapes and sizes
have given on trust, and have ended up seeing their money used in ways that
wasn’t their intention.” Today, the 1636 Forum’s reports serve in part as
action memos for the donor class, with advice on restricting or channelling
giving to help guide the university’s course. From 2023 to 2024, philanthropic
contributions to Harvard fell by roughly a hundred and fifty million dollars,
or fourteen per cent.
Lessin considered running for overseer again but gave up
the idea. “There are all sorts of things in the world—government, companies, et
cetera—where, if you’re on the inside, things become harder,” he told me.
Instead, he is turning the 1636 Forum into a nonprofit, seeded with his
capital. Disenchanted with academic credentialling, he has launched, with
Lonsdale, an initiative focussed on professional recruitment for people from
unconventional backgrounds through standardized tests graded by A.I.
Universities
have always gone far to court wealthy donors: both Lessin and Ackman were first
introduced to Claudine Gay when she was a dean. Just how far became clear
through a motion filed in 2024 in a long-running lawsuit against seventeen
élite colleges and universities, Harvard not among them. Subsequently released
testimony and records indicated that some schools had policies of waving
through applicants whose parents were expected to give a lot of money.
Traditionally, big-ticket donors were held apart from campus politics, but that
boundary has eroded. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis and like-minded donors
have begun to refashion schools in their ideological image. Universities
elsewhere have removed the names of unsavory historical donors from buildings.
In 2023, Harvard named its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for Ken
Griffin, an erstwhile backer of DeSantis’s and a big Harvard donor. Theda
Skocpol, a sociologist who was previously dean of the school, described herself
as “absolutely disgusted.”
Lessin told me he shares a widespread donor view that, at a
moment when universities have become large and growth-oriented, more like
companies, scholars are the wrong people to guide their trajectories. “The wild
card is the faculty—they’re by far the hardest thing to solve for,” he said.
“The students change every four years, so you can make a mistake, put the wrong
people in, select for the wrong things, and fix it.” Scholars were often there
for life, and held misguided sway. “The faculty is a unique characteristic of
universities versus companies,” he noted. “It’s not clear what to do about it.”
By the end of Trump’s first month in office, universities
had been squeezed, like stress balls, into new and painful forms. The
Department of Health and Human Services began a fresh round of antisemitism
investigations at medical schools, including Harvard’s. In January, Trump
signed an executive order barring public funding from any efforts devoted to
diversity, though a federal judge has since temporarily blocked that order; in
mid-February, citing Harvard’s recent affirmative-action case, the new acting Assistant
Secretary for Civil Rights gave universities a two-week deadline before which
to end D.E.I. programs or face possible funding cuts. (At a diversity forum
last month, Garber reiterated the university’s belief that “exposure to
different backgrounds, different perspectives, and different experiences leads
to intellectual and personal growth,” and unveiled four student projects that
it was funding to try to bridge differences.) The National Institutes of Health
announced that it would be capping its indirect funding, which supports
researchers’ overhead costs, at fifteen cents per dollar of direct funding,
which is meant for pure research. (The directive is currently held in legal
challenge.) Harvard, which had been receiving around sixty-nine cents per
dollar, would lose out on more than a hundred million dollars a year.
The neurobiology laboratory of David Corey, a Harvard
Medical School professor who has spent forty years studying hearing, works on
gene therapies for children who are born deaf. “I’m going to have to let people
go,” he told me last week. The N.I.H. indirect-funding cap would cut his
laboratory’s federal funding dramatically. “Maybe only half the supplies and
half the equipment can be purchased,” he said. “Maybe half the discoveries will
be made, which could lead to half the new ideas for therapies, and maybe half
the new medicines that get to the clinic.” At a major center of medical
innovation like Harvard, indirect funding is tightly wound into the progress of
research itself. It keeps the lights on in laboratory buildings, pays grants
managers, and so on—but it also goes toward building and maintaining shared
centers for specialty microscopes, or rearing thousands of the special mice
essential for genetic research like his. “These are all things that are
too expensive for any one lab to maintain, but that can be shared among many
labs,” he said.
Because funding for laboratories like Corey’s often leads
to new treatments, its reduction can wither not just university research but
the entire health economy. When word of the funding threats came down, some
grant-giving meetings were cancelled at the eleventh hour. “ It’s going to
be really devastating if that N.I.H. cap is upheld,” Corey said. “We don’t have
a strategy. We don’t know what’s going to happen. The news is different every
day.” Like many universities, Harvard has refocussed its political lobbying
efforts, but some feel that it and other schools should be taking a stronger
stand.
“ I don’t think many people would argue if higher
education were generally described as fearful, confused, uncertain—I can think
of a few other words—and beneath what institutions think their brand is,” John
Silvanus Wilson, Jr., told me. “I think it’s time for courageous leadership.”
At Harvard, there were fears that Garber was putting the
university into a supine pose. “He’s worried about attacks on higher education,
and his approach has been to try to represent the university in ways more
palatable to its critics,” one professor said. “I don’t think you can lead a
university if your goal is to make Elise Stefanik think you don’t have a
liberal bias!” People at four separate institutions noted to me that university
presidents, in this administrative age, were hardly selected for qualities of
fearlessness and probity. (Garber, through a spokesperson, declined to be
interviewed on the record about Harvard.) “They’ve become more cautious,”
another professor said. “I think that’s because of social media, and because
there’s such an ever-present reputational danger that attends speech by a
university leader.”
A president like Garber is now pulled, as much as anyone in
America, in the direction of a hundred strong interests. But it is also true
that universities of increasingly administrative character can more easily be
held to account for their policies; schools confronting the loss of public
funding are obliged to dance with donors and government officials all the more.
Of the eight schools in the Ivy League, five have had new presidents in the
past two years. Columbia has had a new president annually, and Harvard, like a
small, suffering nation embroiled in civil war, has had more presidents than
commencement parades. What used to be the grandest post in academia now looks
like the hardest job to hold. And the routes to it have changed. Of the eight
Ivy League presidents, five rose to high administration from professional
schools, and four have a medical background. All this has left many faculty
members feeling beside the point, especially in pursuits like chemistry,
classics, English, government, or law—five scholarly fields that together
produced every Harvard president of the twentieth century. Undergraduates are
said to have ever more pre-professional orientations at the expense of the
liberal arts; one professor ruefully described the place as the world’s most
élite trade school.
In the spring of last year, eighteen professors met to
discuss university governance and alighted on the idea of creating a faculty
senate—something that Stanford, Chicago, Johns Hopkins, and many other schools
already have. “Yes, the fall of 2023 was very turbulent, but it’s not like we
woke up one day and suddenly started thinking about governance,” Danielle
Allen, a professor of government who helped organize the project, told me.
Frustrations had accrued.
Tension reached a head that spring, after the university
forbade a protest encampment. Campers who did not move were placed on
involuntary leave, until the president made a deal. When the tents disappeared,
the leaves were rescinded—but a small group of Harvard College students,
including thirteen seniors due to graduate, were put on probation.
Every May, in a meeting so sparsely attended that it does
not have a quorum requirement, professors go through the formality of voting to
confer degrees on graduating students. Last May, the meeting was exceptionally
full. Two of the thirteen seniors had been chosen as Rhodes Scholars, and would
likely lose their places in the fall without a diploma. Others came from
low-income households, or were the first in their families to attend college.
Some faculty were furious and at least one, according to Kirsten Weld, was
“prepared to vote down the entire list”—that is, to vote to graduate no one in
the class of 2024. In the end, the faculty voted simply to amend the graduation
list to re-include the thirteen.
But those students didn’t graduate on commencement day,
because the Harvard Corporation rejected the faculty’s list. Eleven of the
thirteen ultimately got their degrees, after an appeals process, and yet a bond
of trust between the top of the university and its faculty had frayed. “I think
we’re seeing the sheep’s clothing fall off,” Steven Levitsky, the government
professor, said.
The goal of the Harvard faculty-senate project is to
increase scholarly input on scholarly matters. Each of the nine Harvard faculty
bodies will nominate representatives—thirty-seven altogether—who will meet and
slowly design a senate. (The president announced that he would convene his own
advisory counsel of faculty members, on a two-year trial period.) Harvard,
unusually, does not make its statutes readily available; it took the senate
organizers six weeks to receive them. They learned that the statutes already
described a university-wide body of faculty governance.
Distrust at universities has a way of flowing upward. Like
the boards at many other schools today, the Harvard Corporation has few fans.
In a column in the Crimson last spring, Bill Kirby, a
historian of China and a former dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, noted
that the merits of the Corporation had been weighed seriously during the uproar
of 1969 and suggested that such an assessment might be in order again.
“The M.I.T. corporation came out in support of its
president immediately, and never wavered, and the situation at M.I.T. did not
become the crisis that it became here,” Kirby, who was dean during Summers’s
presidency, told me. The Harvard Corporation used to include six members and
meet fortnightly; over the years, it began meeting about half as often and
doubled in size. The goal was partly to open up the Corporation to members who
might wish to fly in from places like California, but Kirby thought that the
expansion also unplugged the board from the rhythms of the university.
“You used to see the members with some frequency on campus,
and they would interact with faculty and students,” he said. Now they came with
other connections. During his deanship, he said, he had refused a few gifts
given with excessively controlling terms. He told me, “No university can afford
to alienate a few donors more than this one.”
In January, Harvard resolved an
anti-Palestinian-discrimination complaint, settled two antisemitism cases, and
recognized the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of
antisemitism, which condemns criticism of Israel “as a Jewish collectivity.”
The program director of the Nonviolent Action Lab at Harvard’s Kennedy School
quit in protest. Harvard’s own antisemitism-task-force report has yet to be
released. Derek Penslar, who has criticized the I.H.R.A. standards in the past
for being too restrictive, sounded a circumspect note. “We need to teach and
research controversial issues like Israel-Palestine without reprisals or
interference so long as we go about our work responsibly, fairly, and with
integrity,” he told me. He worries about antisemitism being dismissed, but also
about accusations of antisemitism being used as a tool to stifle inquiry. “This
is not the Harvard of thirty or forty years ago, when it was eighty per cent
white. Now it’s thirty-three per cent white and a different university. We’re
more diverse. We’re going to have more disagreement,” he said. “We have a
strange phenomenon where people on the right who often directly associate with
antisemites are also claiming to speak in defense of Jews.”
One afternoon, I spoke with Tarek Masoud, a political
scientist at the Kennedy School. In October, 2023, Masoud organized a panel
discussion about Gaza whose panelists included a Zionist “able to hear the
other side,” an Arab citizen of Israel, and a longtime American diplomat in the
region. The panel was a success. “Then two things happened,” Masoud said. A
student wrote in to the Boston Globe to lament an absence of
informative discussions about the events in Israel and Gaza. And Ackman, during
a visit, complained before an audience that the university had provided
insufficient discussions of the conflict.
“I was, like, Mother of God!” Masoud said. “I
literally have been busting my, you know, behind to put these out, and it’s
making no impact!”
Masoud decided to reach out to individuals with
controversial views and personally grill them onstage. His first interview, in
February, 2024, was with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who has counselled
the President on Israel and Palestine; among other things, Kushner spoke to
Masoud about the waterfront property values of the Gaza Strip and displacement
models for its residents. “A lot of people inside the university were upset
with me,” Masoud said. But he went on to invite the conservative columnist Bret
Stephens and Dalal Iriqat, a professor and the daughter of a lead Palestine
Liberation Organization negotiator. Many Harvard administrators now tout the
series as a model of exchange.
Masoud told me that he thought the series was a gigantic
mistake. Before his interview with Iriqat, social-media posts she had released
moved some people to call her pro-Hamas. “I got a lot of grief within the
Kennedy School about the event,” he said. The dean of the Kennedy School issued
a statement distancing himself from the talk. Stefanik, Senator John Fetterman,
and others excoriated Masoud from Washington, and the event was dissected in
the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Daily Mail.
“If you were to ask many of our colleagues, they would put
the blame on students,” Masoud said. “They would say that our students are
incapable of ‘absorbing’ or ‘coping with’ views that they object to, which they
then label as offensive and harmful.” He thought that this was an idea to which
a vulnerable and anxious leadership was overly attached. The university made a
show of rolling out “candid and constructive conversation” programs, but Masoud
saw an increasingly public, corporatized institution imposing its own anxieties
on young minds.
“By making debate or disagreement seem excessively
difficult, they are pathologizing it,” he told me. “You trigger everybody to
think that this is a dangerous thing. It’s not dangerous! Nobody is going to
die from a discussion with Bret Stephens!”
Incisive writers about higher education have pointed out
that the American university is a bundle of contradictions held in an uneasy
balance that miraculously works. And yet, in marvelling at the miracle, it is
possible to overlook how fragile even an uneasy balance is. Last year’s
struggles over speech—among protesters and counter-protesters, scholars and
administrators—seemed to show a system falling out of equilibrium. This year’s
ideological pressure, from government officials and donors, has made higher
education, one of the greatest achievements of American culture, vulnerable.
Universities are the reason that this country has been able to attract talent,
chase breakthroughs, and respond to change. If the American university survives
the twenty-first century, that resilience will probably have to do not just
with rules and standards but with a certain magic flexibility and eclecticism
being upheld.
Like many others I spoke to, Masoud kept returning to Gay’s
encounter with Stefanik on Capitol Hill. “Claudine Gay, she’s a person for whom
I have considerable respect, but I think one of her errors was that she did
comment on what the students said. She said, These students don’t speak for
Harvard,” he recalled. “What I wish she had done was say, ‘We have a lot of
students. And, yes, those students said this, but here are other student groups
who said something else.’ ” The real diversity of views brought by a real
diversity of people, he thought, was American higher education’s strongest,
truest claim to power.
He reflected for a moment, then continued. “The message
should be: Look. We are a university,” he said. ♦
Published
in the print edition of the March
10, 2025, issue, with the headline “As Harvard Goes.”
