When 70 university presidents met for a summit in late January, the topic on everyone’s minds was the crisis at Harvard.
The summit’s hosts treated the university, hit by accusations of coddling anti-Semitism, as a business school case study in leadership in higher education, complete with a slide presentation about its plummeting reputation.
The killer slide: “Boeing and Tesla have similar levels of negative rumors as Harvard.”
In other words, Harvard, a centuries-old symbol of academic excellence, was generating as much negative attention as an airplane manufacturer with a door panel that fell from the sky and an automobile company with a mercurial CEO and multiple recalls.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management, organized the summit. “Despite nearly 400 years of history, the value of brand equity is not as permanent as Harvard’s trustees believe,” he said in an interview. “There used to be a term in the industry that said something was the Cadillac of the industry. Well, the Cadillac itself is, unfortunately, no longer the Cadillac of the industry.”
Many of the presidents who attended the summit saw the erosion of the Harvard brand as a problem not only for the school but also, by extension, for the entire enterprise of higher education. If Harvard couldn’t protect itself, what about all the other institutions? Could Harvard leaders find an effective response?
There was a hint of a more assertive 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 caricature of a puppeteer, with his hand marked by a dollar sign inside a Star of David. lynching of Muhammad Ali and Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Harvard took the action at a time when the House Education and Workforce Committee has begun examining its record on anti-Semitism. On Friday, the committee issued subpoenas to Harvard’s interim president, the head of the school’s board of trustees and its investment manager, in a wide-ranging search for documents related to the university’s handling of anti-Semitism allegations at the campus. The threat of subpoenas led PEN America, a writers’ group that advocates for 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.
Corporate executives and major donors, including hedge fund executive Ken Griffin, have threatened to withhold money and refrain from hiring Harvard students who defended the atrocities committed by Hamas in attacking Israel on October 7. Right-wing media and anonymous researchers continue to make claims 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 for early admission to Harvard this year. Other Ivy League schools saw increases.
The attacks “have obviously disrupted Harvard, in terms of its senior leadership,” said Randall Kennedy, a Harvard law professor. “They have undermined morale. “It was a very effective attack.”
Inside Harvard, faculty and students are looking for any sign from university officials, including the main board of directors, the Harvard Corporation, about its future direction.
in a interview Last week in Harvard Magazine, Alan Garber, the university’s interim president, described some efforts to ease tension by enforcing rules against disruptive protests and offering a series of events aimed at encouraging dialogue rather than conflict between students and faculty. .
Those are good steps, said Dara Horn, a novelist who served on a committee last year to advise the president of Harvard on how to combat anti-Semitism. She had observed that many students did not associate with people they disagreed with and did not know how to do so.
“That attitude is the end of education,” said Dr. Horn, who published an article about her experience at Harvard in The Atlantic. “To me, that’s kind of the bottom line.”
Alex Bernat, a Harvard student and board member of Chabad, a Jewish student group, said Tuesday that the university’s quick 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 power over the academic careers of Jewish and Israeli students.
The groups that had posted the material removed it on Monday and said their apparent endorsement of anti-Semitic imagery was inadvertent.
Still, the Harvard Corporation has remained relatively quiet, other than confirming that its leader, Penny Pritzker, a philanthropist and former Obama administration official, would stay and conduct a new presidential search, just as she led the one that elected the previous one. President, Claudine Gay.
The Corporation has received criticism for its selection and support of Dr. Gay, who resigned on January 2 after an uproar over her testimony before Congress that calling for the genocide of Jews was not necessarily a violation of Harvard’s code of conduct. , depending on the context.
The Corporation has been criticized for not acting more quickly to address the issue, “letting the university go with the wind,” as Steven Pinker, an outspoken psychology professor, put it in an interview. He (he was quick to point out that he had not called for Dr. Gay’s dismissal).
However, there is a feeling among some faculty members that the university may go too far in appeasing its critics.
At the December congressional hearing that convicted Dr. Gay, Virginia Foxx, a Republican from North Carolina, singled out a class at Harvard, “Race and racism in the creation of the United States as a global power,” as an example of “ideology in action.”
The professor of that class, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, said the accusation was “absurd” and that the class included readings on the history of anti-Semitism in the United States. He said he was concerned that new conduct rules adopted in September, which prohibit discrimination based on “political beliefs,” would lead students to complain if, like Dr. Foxx, they objected to the content of their classes.
“Prominent blacks at this university have reason to worry” that their credentials will be questioned, he said.
In this tense atmosphere, good intentions have sometimes led to problems.
Harvard’s decision to create task forces on anti-Semitism and Islamophobia on campus—typically the most anodyne of institutional responses—ran into trouble in late January, after Derek Penslar, a prominent Jewish studies scholar, was tapped to co-chair the working group on antisemitism.
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 mocked his comments, quoted in the Jewish press, saying that the degree of anti-Semitism at Harvard had been exaggerated.
Harvard’s failure to anticipate the skeptical response to Dr. Penslar’s appointment points to overly insular leadership, according to David Wolpe, a prominent rabbi and visiting scholar at Harvard divinity school.
“There is an inability of the university to see how it would be viewed, and there is an awkwardness that is disheartening to many of the Jewish students, faculty and staff,” Rabbi Wolpe said.
Dr. Penslar, who remains co-chair of the task force, declined to comment for this article. His supporters bristled at what they saw as easy criticism of a respected academic.
“For him to be vetoed, from the outside, for expressing his views – particularly because they are quite dominant views – is just a terrible, terrible precedent,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of Latin American studies and government at Harvard. Contrary to public image, Dr. Penslar is “an avowed Zionist,” Dr. Levitsky said.
Some alumni are trying to change things. Several independent candidates mounted a campaign for seats on Harvard’s Board of Overseers, the university’s second governing body. The candidates failed to gather enough signatures on the petition to appear 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 problems with leadership.
Harvard’s governance system is “almost like a peacetime organization,” unsuited to navigating turbulent waters, he said. Candidates for the Board of Supervisors are typically nominated through the alumni association, and the position is often perceived as “a glorified reward for being a mover.”
Some teachers are also organizing. Some 170 Harvard professors have joined a council on academic freedom, co-founded last spring by Dr. Pinker, to counter what he describes as “an intellectual monoculture.”
Dr. Pinker believes that if Harvard had adopted a policy of institutional neutrality and refrained from taking positions on vexing issues of the day, some of the agony of recent months could have been avoided.
“Universities should abandon the habit of giving mini-sermons every time an event appears in the news,” he said.
Dr. Pinker has made a mischievous hobby of collecting headlines and cartoons that mock Harvard’s reputation problems. A sticker in his collection reads: “My son didn’t go to Harvard.”
Yet despite all that, Harvard “still has the brand, it still has the legacy,” Dr. Pinker said. “I don’t know if everything will go back to normal. I suspect that will be the case.”
Stephanie Saul contributed with reports. Sheelagh McNeill contributed to the research.
