Two cheers for Harvard

Reflections on Trump's war against the universities

In April 1969, near the end of Harvard University’s tumultuous spring semester that had been wracked by antiwar protests and a police “bust” of a building occupation, around two dozen faculty members kept a three-night watch over Widener Library, which left-wing students had threatened to incinerate. Then-undergraduate Mark Helprin spoke with one of the radicals, who described to him a detailed plan for burning the university’s main library, “holding that it would be for the better. When asked what could possibly replace the thousands of years of art, thought, and scholarship that would vanish in smoke, he held up his tattered spiral notebook, in which he had written God-knows-what, and said, ‘This.’”

It’s one small sign of the present chaos and confusion that this story strikes me as a vignette from a simpler age. Today, Harvard is threatened with destruction from a radical right, as the Trump administration aims to defund and delegitimize the university, with an eye toward intimidating the rest of higher education and civic institutions more generally. But so far public sympathy for Harvard and other universities has been more limited than might have been expected. That could be because so many people have been persuaded that the Harvard faculty are no longer the guardians of tradition and learning, but in fact are the same radicals who once tried to burn down the library and ended up filling it with their crazy ideas. In this contest of the barbarians outside the gates against the barbarians inside, much of the public is staying neutral.

Personally, I’m giving two cheers for Harvard president Alan Garber for telling the administration to go pound sand. But only two cheers, because Harvard and other elite universities have made themselves vulnerable to this assault by doing little or nothing to address the factors behind the public’s loss of trust in higher education over the past few decades.

As I mentioned in a previous essay, I wrote my dissertation and first book on Kingman Brewster Jr., who was president of Yale University from 1964 to 1977. Brewster led his institution through the crises of the late 1960s with far greater success than most university presidents have achieved in the current crisis. But I have hesitated to use him as a kind of yardstick against which to measure the shortcomings of present-day presidents, for a variety of reasons.

Universities today are different in many ways from what they were in the 1960s. The social and political environments in which they operate have changed. And the university presidency — always a difficult position under the best of circumstances — now has become close to impossible. Not for nothing did Rose Horowitch, writing in the latest issue of The Atlantic, call being an elite university president “the worst job in America.” It’s also the case that calling out universities’ shortcomings at the very moment that they’re under attack by a lawless and authoritarian administration can feel like “a luxury that we can no longer afford,” in the formulation of many commentators on the left.

But there’s a sense in which the crisis on the campuses is part of the larger argument about abundance and the underperformance of critical institutions. I believe that universities are among those institutions of American society that increasingly are failing in their missions, in ways that have imperiled liberal democracy. The Trump administration’s professed reasons for declaring war on Harvard are obviously hypocritical, but it’s true nonetheless that the elite universities have forfeited public sympathy because they have lost sight of their defining purpose as places of learning. They have become monolithically left-wing and dedicated to identity above excellence in ways that have made them intellectually sterile. And they have lost the moral high ground because, as former Harvard president Lawrence Summers put it, they “continue to tolerate antisemitism in their midst in a way that would be inconceivable with any other form of prejudice” and have failed to pursue truth rather than “particular notions of social justice.”

In my view, of course Harvard and other institutions of higher education have to do whatever they can to stand up against the Trump administration. To borrow the title of a brilliant essay by Jonathan Rauch, universities are worth saving. But they can’t lose sight of the need to reform, and only the university presidents can lead that effort.

A few months ago I did a podcast interview with former Harvard president Neil Rudenstine, who served in that office between 1991 and 2001. What became clear to me, both from that conversation and from reading Rudenstine’s recent academic memoir, Our Contentious Universities, is that the elite universities didn’t sufficiently think through the consequences of turning their presidents into more-or-less full-time fundraisers.

Rudenstine ushered Harvard into the era of next-level money, overseeing the university capital campaign that brought in $2.6 billion, at a time when the most that any university campaign had raised prior to that was $1 billion. He also boosted the endowment from $4.7 billion when he entered the presidency to $19 billion by the time he left. (It’s now up to $53 billion.) Harvard’s entry into plutocratic-scale fundraising and spending in those years set the pattern throughout higher education. But this move came at a high personal cost for many presidents; Rudenstine at one point in the capital campaign had to take a three-month medical leave of absence due to exhaustion. And because there are only so many ways to squeeze a balloon, redirecting the presidency toward fundraising necessarily entailed a turn away from many of the internal responsibilities that traditionally had defined the office.

When I was working on my dissertation, I spoke with dozens of people who had led universities both in the United States and Britain during the postwar era. One of the main themes they emphasized was that university presidents had to constantly push their faculties toward intellectual pluralism if they were to maintain the overall academic excellence of their institutions. This is an endeavor that has always required exquisite diplomacy, since faculties everywhere jealously guard their autonomy. But left to their own devices, faculty typically will hire and promote people with near-identical outlooks and approaches, when what’s needed is a constant search for excellence and independence of mind, even at the cost of severe disagreement. Unchecked, the result is ideological rigidity and groupthink, along with intellectual and even moral decay. In broad outline, this seems to me to have been the story of the past two decades in many if not most of the humanities and social science departments at the elite universities, and now the consequences are becoming evident.

Any number of surveys have shown that while as recently as the mid-1990s self-described conservatives still amounted to about a fifth of university academics, along with roughly equal proportions of moderates and left/liberals, now university faculties have canted overwhelmingly to the left. A 2021 Harvard Crimson poll found that only 3 percent of faculty described themselves as conservatives and somewhat less than 20 percent as moderates, compared to nearly 80 percent who described themselves as “liberal” or “very liberal.” Other studies have found widespread discrimination against right-leaning scholars and scholarship, along with a hostile campus climate for conservatives and their ideas.

In the absence of any scholarly challenge from the right or the center, a campus orthodoxy increasingly holds sway that elevates activism over learning, diktat over discourse, and views the world only through the lens of oppressor and oppressed, colonizers and colonized. Johns Hopkins University political science professor (and Niskanen senior fellow) Steve Teles published a much-commented-on essay last year in which he observed that “The university’s ideological narrowing has advanced so far that even liberal institutionalists — faculty who believe universities should be places of intellectual pluralism and adhere to the traditional academic norms of merit and free inquiry — are in decline.” Reports from faculty at several other institutions suggested that “with each passing year, every class of admitted graduate students is further to the left of, and displays a more activist orientation toward scholarship than, the class preceding it. And of course, the graduate students of today are the junior faculty of tomorrow.”

Most Americans only really became aware of the prevalence of this new orthodoxy after the Hamas massacres of October 7, 2023, when elite university campuses became the primary venues for vicious anti-Zionist protests, some of which veered into violent anti-Semitism. This radicalism has been a major liability for the universities, provoking widespread popular revulsion that damaged their public image and financial viability even before the Trump administration seized upon campus antisemitism as the rationale for its kulturkampf. But university presidents have had difficulty condemning the protests because they hesitate to address the problem at its roots.

As Paul Berman wrote in an incisive essay in the summer of 2024, if there were to be a comprehensive presidentially-directed investigation of campus hate, along with its manifestations in the literary and artistic worlds, it would find that it amounted to “something more than a failure of civility. It is an intellectual crisis,” with its source in “a series of doctrines and assumptions that have degenerated from something authentically interesting into something grotesque, quietly presided over by professors who look and sound not just reasonable but attractively up-to-date.”

So the situation facing elite university presidents is far more challenging than it was for Yale’s Kingman Brewster in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. In those early days of meritocracy, he was able to recruit the most talented faculty and students from previously unrepresented groups including women and minorities, a move that pleased liberals while also burnishing the university’s elite credentials. Many of the new faculty that Brewster was helping to recruit at that time were politically left, but they still engaged with and respected more traditional scholarship. Brewster could jet around the country with moderate and right-leaning faculty members and undergraduates to reassure alarmed alumni and Republican officeholders that radical voices at Yale were loud but not all-powerful, and that academic freedom was still the university’s paramount principle. There was still space on campus for dissenting opinions in the classroom, pro-Vietnam manifestations as well as antiwar demonstrations, along with well-attended lectures that gave a respectful hearing to conservative celebrities such as William F. Buckley Jr. Brewster also had the backing of a critical mass of faculty in his insistence that “No sentimental egalitarianism, racial or otherwise, can be permitted to lower the standards for the relatively few institutions which are capable of really superior intellectual accomplishment.”

Today’s university presidents have none of those advantages. To address the ideological imbalances and derangements of their institutions in a meaningful way, they would have to be willing take on the faculty orthodoxy directly, in a cultural environment that allows them far less room for maneuver and with fewer tools at their disposal. For several decades following World War II, for example, the external review committee was a useful stimulus to quality and ideological balance. But as university faculties everywhere have become monolithic, such a device is no longer fit for purpose.

It was not unheard-of in past decades for university presidents to put inbred or ideologically unbalanced departments into academic receivership, or to cajole or overawe faculties into accepting undeniably excellent but heterodox scholars into their ranks. But at no point would any self-respecting university president have agreed to affirmative action for conservatives, let alone anything like the Trump administration’s demand that faculty hiring decisions be dictated by an external body of political commissars.

One less obvious advantage for university presidents in earlier times was the relative absence of bureaucracy. Yale during the postwar decades, and even into the 1970s, was run by a comparative handful of administrators, and university presidents and faculty in those days shared a determination to prevent the emergence of a powerful, independent-minded bureaucracy. But today that battle has been resolved in favor of the bureaucracy. Yale is one of several institutions that has more administrators than undergraduates, and something on the order of two-and-a-half bureaucrats for every faculty member. The growth of university bureaucracy in recent years has been inextricably linked with the spread of DEI as an ideology, which has become broadly unpopular as it has overreached and now provides the opening (along with antisemitism) for the Trump administration’s assault.

As Jonathan Rauch has observed, the army of higher education bureaucrats that has been hired in recent years has included many people who are not academics by training, and who neither teach nor research. “Yet at many universities, these are now the people who are telling tenured professors what to do and how to do it — whether in or out of the classroom. I’ve spoken to tenured and distinguished professors who’ve been called in for four-hour inquisitions at the hands of mid-level HR and DEI bureaucrats in regard to their classroom behaviors, simply because some student somewhere complained about them.”

It’s impossible to know how Trump’s showdown with Harvard and other elite universities will be resolved. But chances are good that the resolution will be neither the cultural victory that Trump desires nor the far-reaching reform that universities need.

Many presidents already are making a show of cutting back on their DEI bureaucracies, which serves as a sop to the right while also limiting an anti-academic presence within the universities that its leaders never should have allowed to metastasize. University leaders are also becoming warier of allowing their institutions to become directly involved in political controversies. The recent joint statement by the leaders of Vanderbilt University and Washington University — with its pledge to institutional neutrality, academic freedom, and excellence “in all aspects of our institutions’ work, free of political litmus tests” — is likely to be widely imitated.

Paul Berman, for one, predicts that most university presidents will try to get through the present crisis without engaging in serious reform by making examples of a handful of students and faculty members whose overt anti-Semitism is too blatant to overlook. He also predicts that the end result of the various committees created to examine campus anti-Semitism and recommend remedies will be “a call for renewed civility, for academic freedom, for tolerance, and for reasoned debate. It will be, in short, a search for the perfect speech code.”

Some universities are trying to address their vulnerability on the issue of viewpoint diversity by creating separate centers for classical and civic education and populating them with right-of-center scholars. Presidents have an important role to play in determining the success or failure of these centers by, on the one hand, insisting that they recruit among academically credentialed conservatives (though these come through an admittedly small pipeline), and on the other by pressuring faculty in the established departments to coexist with their conservative colleagues.

Other university leaders are undertaking more ambitious efforts. Johns Hopkins University president Ron Daniels has announced an intellectual exchange of faculty with the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute, along with a Graduate Student Intellectual Diversity Initiative that “aims to encourage conservative, libertarian and heterodox students and graduates to consider a career in higher education, and to support them in their efforts.” Steve Teles has also suggested that top research universities might do more to attract conservative scholars by bolstering subjects that are disproportionately appealing to them.

Another likely outcome will be the further diminution of the humanities in favor of the STEM disciplines. It’s telling that Harvard’s public responses to its clash with the Trump administration have emphasized its contributions to “groundbreaking innovations across a wide range of medical, engineering, and scientific fields,” rather than any of its efforts in the humanities or social sciences. Of course the vast majority of Harvard’s federal grants and contracts go to the STEM fields, but it’s also true that if the administration continues its assault on scientific research at Harvard and other universities, then even the most pliant Republican officeholders may start to worry about the consequences for American economic and national security in our sharpening competition with China. Still, reducing America’s future leaders’ exposure to what Mark Helprin called “the thousands of years of art, thought, and scholarship” embodied in the liberal arts will also have severe costs.

I’m unable to find any silver linings to the Trump administration’s assault on Harvard and other elite universities. While I believe those institutions to be desperately in need of reform, the administration’s characteristic approach of malice and incompetence is likelier to forestall reform than encourage it. Already the response at Harvard suggests that moderates and progressives alike are rallying around President Garber in his defense of the university’s core values, rather than conceding that there might be legitimate grounds for conservative criticisms. But my hope is that if the universities emerge from this confrontation without lasting damage, that they will take the opportunity to make the changes necessary to truly regain public trust.