When 70 university presidents gathered for a summit in late January, the topic on everyone’s mind was the crisis at Harvard.
Summit hosts treated the university, battered by accusations of rampant anti-Semitism, as a case study in leadership in higher education, with a slide show of its crumbling reputation.
The killer slide: “Boeing and Tesla have similar levels of negative buzz to Harvard.”
In other words, Harvard, a century-old symbol of academic excellence, was generating as much negative attention as an airplane manufacturer with a door that fell from the sky and a car company with a mercurial CEO and multiple recalls.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at Yale’s School of Management, organized the summit. “Despite nearly 400 years of history, the value of the brand is not as permanent as Harvard’s trustees believe,” he said in an interview. “There was a term in the industry that something is the Cadillac of the industry. Well, Cadillac itself, you know, unfortunately is no longer the Cadillac of the industry.”
Many of the presidents attending the summit saw the erosion of Harvard’s brand as a problem not only for the school, but by extension for the entire enterprise of higher education. If Harvard couldn’t protect itself, then what about every other institution? Could Harvard’s leadership come up with an effective response?
There was a hint of a more forceful approach from Harvard on Monday when the university announced it was investigating “deeply offensive anti-Semitic tropes” posted on social media by pro-Palestinian student and faculty groups. The groups had posted or reposted material containing an old cartoon of a puppeteer, his hand marked with a dollar sign inside a Star of David, lynching Muhammad Ali and Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Harvard took action at a time when the House Education and Workforce Committee has begun scrutinizing its record on anti-Semitism. On Friday, the committee subpoenaed Harvard’s interim president, the head of the school’s board of trustees and its chief investment officer in a broad search for documents related to the university’s handling of allegations of anti-Semitism on campus. The threat of subpoenas led PEN America, a writers’ group that defends academic freedom, to warn against a fishing expedition.
There is also a lawsuit against Harvard, calling the university a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment,” as well as federal investigations into allegations that the university ignored both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia on campus.
Business executives and major donors, including hedge fund executive Ken Griffin, have threatened to withhold funds and not hire Harvard students who defended the atrocities committed by Hamas during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Right-wing media outlets and anonymous researchers continue to make allegations of plagiarism against university officials as part of an attack on diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
There is already evidence of reputational damage: a 17 percent drop in the number of students applying to Harvard for early admission decisions this year. Other Ivy League schools saw increases.
The attacks “have obviously rattled Harvard, in terms of its top leadership,” said Randall Kennedy, a Harvard law professor. “They have undermined morale. It was a very effective attack.”
Inside Harvard, faculty members and students are looking for a message from university officials, including its main governing board, the Harvard Corporation, about its future direction.
In an interview last week with Harvard Magazine, Alan Garber, the university’s interim president, described some efforts to defuse the tension by enforcing anti-protest rules and offering a series of events aimed at encouraging dialogue rather than conflict between students and faculty. faculty members.
These are good moves, said Dara Horne, a novelist who served last year on an advisory committee to Harvard’s president on how to combat anti-Semitism. He had noticed that many students didn’t engage with people they disagreed with and didn’t know how.
“This attitude is the end of education,” said Dr. Horne, who published an article about her Harvard experience in The Atlantic. “To me, that looks like the key thing.”
Alex Bernat, a Harvard junior and board member of Chabad, a Jewish student group, said Tuesday that the university’s swift response to anti-Semitic posts this week was a good sign. But he worried that some members of a pro-Palestinian faculty group that republished the anti-Semitic material had leverage over the academic careers of Jewish and Israeli students.
The groups that had posted the material removed it on Monday and said its apparent endorsement of anti-Semitic imagery was unintentional.
Even so, the Harvard firm has been relatively quiet, except to confirm that its leader, Penny Pritzker, a philanthropist and former Obama administration official, would stay on and conduct a new presidential inquiry, as led by the one that chose past president, Claudine Gay.
The Company has been criticized for its selection and support of Dr. context.
The Society was accused of not acting more quickly to address the issue, “leaving the university to twist in the wind,” as Steven Pinker, an outspoken psychology professor, put it in an interview. (He was quick to note that he had not called for Dr. Gay’s removal.)
Among some faculty members, however, there is a sense that the university may go too far to appease its critics.
At the congressional hearing in December that convicted Dr. work.”
The teacher of that class, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, said the charge was “absurd” and that the class includes readings about the history of anti-Semitism in the United States. He said he was concerned that new rules of conduct adopted in September, which prohibit discrimination based on “political beliefs”, would lead to students complaining if, like Dr Fox, they objected to the content of his courses.
“Prominent blacks at this university have reason to be concerned” that their credentials will be challenged, he said.
In the fierce atmosphere, good intentions have sometimes led to trouble.
Harvard’s decision to create task forces on anti-Semitism and Islamophobia on campus — usually the most painless of institutional responses — ran into trouble in late January after Derek Penslar, a prominent Jewish studies scholar, was tapped to co-chair the task force. anti-Semitism.
Critics opposed his appointment, citing an open letter signed by Dr Penslar and other academics and published before the October 7 attacks, accusing Israel of being an “apartheid regime”. Critics derided his comments, reported in the Jewish press, as saying the degree of anti-Semitism at Harvard was exaggerated.
Harvard’s failure to anticipate the skeptical response to the appointment of Dr. Penslar exhibits a leadership that is too insular, according to David Wolfe, a prominent rabbi and visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School.
“There is an inability of the university to see how it will be seen, and there is a malice that discourages many of the Jewish students, faculty and staff,” Rabbi Wulpe said.
Dr. Penslar, who remains co-chairman of the task force, declined to comment for this article. His supporters expressed conflict with what they saw as facile criticism from a respected scholar.
“For him to be vetoed, from the outside, for expressing his views — especially given that they’re pretty mainstream views — is just a terrible, terrible precedent,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of Latino studies and government at Harvard. Contrary to public portrayal, Dr. Penslar is “a self-proclaimed Zionist,” Dr. Levitsky said.
Some graduates are trying to shake things up. Several independent candidates have launched a campaign for seats on Harvard’s Board of Overseers, the university’s second governing body. The candidates failed to gather enough signatures to get on the ballot, but vowed to keep pushing.
One of those candidates, Sam Lessin, a 2005 Harvard graduate and venture capitalist, said the election process itself exposed the problems with leadership.
Harvard’s system of governance is “almost like a peacetime organization,” ill-suited to navigating turbulent waters, he said. Candidates for the Board of Supervisors are usually nominated through the alumni association, and the position is often perceived as “a glorified reward for being a booster.”
Some faculty members also organize. About 170 Harvard professors have joined a council on academic freedom, co-founded last spring by Dr. Pinker, to deal with what he describes as “intellectual monoculture”.
Dr. Pinker believes that if Harvard had adopted a policy of institutional neutrality and avoided taking positions on vexing issues of the day, some of the anguish of recent months might have been avoided.
“Universities should get out of the habit of giving mini-sermons every time there’s an event in the news,” he said.
Dr. Pinker has made a wicked hobby of collecting headlines and cartoons mocking Harvard’s reputational problems. A bumper sticker in his collection reads, “My son didn’t go to Harvard.”
Nevertheless, Harvard “still has the brand, it still has the heritage,” Dr. Pinker said. “Whether it will get back on track, I don’t know. I suspect it will.”
Stephanie Saul contributed to the report. Sheelagh McNeill contributed to the research.
