Will Harvard Bend or Break?

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.

Woman annoyed that she cannot communicate with baby.

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. ♦

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