Harvard is on fire. The zenith of the American meritocracy and the dream of climbers everywhere started to burn after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel when a marching minority of students and groups of vocal faculty took up the Palestinian cause, confounding many of its students, their parents and key donors, particular the Jewish ones. Then Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, only recently in the job, went before Congress — never a smart place to be — and, with two other major university presidents, became a subject of national ridicule for her cringe-worthy and tone-deaf efforts to avoid a question about antisemitism. In the face of Right-wing excoriation, against Harvard and Gay, the first black person to be its president, Harvard’s own elite staunchly defended her — until last week, when they didn’t, and she had to go.
The Trumpian Right claims victory here in its anti-elite agenda. The university Left, made up of faculty and students (and supported by journalists), bitterly decries Harvard’s capitulation and is now mounting a counter-attack.
The turmoil here has to do with Trumpness and wokeness, of course. But it is too, uniquely, about Harvard, that is to say about power, which Harvard is uniquely about.
The Trumpers rightly see Harvard as representing everything they despise — a scornful ruling class. For them to ultimately win, Harvard must lose, or be seriously discredited and reduced. The Left, however, has waged its own long-time grudge here against the elites, and done so with considerable success. The Harvard of the white male establishment, with its $40 billion endowment, and its alumni in the choicest corporate, finance, intellectual, government, and Hollywood jobs, has been converted over the last generation, along with other top colleges and universities, into a new world of the unforgiving Left’s proscribed and regulated speech, behaviour, and logic. It is an unrecognisable world to an older generation who came of age on America’s live-and-let-live campuses.
It is the old- fashioned middle, the middle-aged middle, that is suddenly, after years of paying exorbitant college bills, the strongest voice
A curious question is how parents of Harvard students, paying more than $80,000 a year, many of them themselves once Harvard students, and basically all committed to the understanding that their sons and daughters were learning the skills of power and achievement, were able to ignore this. Well, the Harvard fever is that strong.
But the appearance of Ms Gay and her colleagues — Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania (who resigned immediately after the catastrophic appearance) and Sally Kornbluth of MIT — before Congress has broken that.
The Right is claiming their heads, and the Left pinning this all on racism, Ms Gay being black. But it is arguably the middle, the old-fashioned middle, the middle-aged middle, that is suddenly, after so many years of paying exorbitant college bills for curriculums of self-sustaining baloney, the strongest voice.
This is represented by a precipitous drop in this year’s Harvard applications, a message from upper middle-class parents who have for so long neurotically pressed dreams of Harvard on their children. And, too, by tremors in the donor class, those people necessary to building an ever-bigger Harvard endowment — which, arguably, is Harvard’s true business.
Thus, Harvard’s fundamental contradiction: the university, or at least much of its faculty, has been trying to defy the practices and the assumptions of the establishment while trying to collect money from it, and, indeed, move its students into superior positions in it.
Appropriately, the power of this new upstart voice has become personified in the figure of a hedge funder: Bill Ackman, a billionaire Harvard graduate and activist — one might say, obstreperous — investor.
Ackman is one of those people who seems physically incapable of not getting the last word. His job is to invest money, but his real métier is writing letters filled with vituperation, demands and threats. His first gambit here was a public letter announcing his intention — and inviting other Wall Streeters and corporate chiefs to follow — not to hire students who were appearing on lists of pro-Palestinian campus organisations. The point he was making was suddenly clear to students who might be virtuous but yet pathologically career-obsessed (ie, most Harvard students).
He next went after President Gay. Not only for being caught out as a quisling dope in front of Congress, but also as a symbol of self-sustaining academic hokum. She had been hired not for her stature as a strong intellectual (and establishment) leader but as someone willing to parse, negotiate and defend — and certainly live with — the bizarre and tangled standards of thought and conduct that had become the Ivy League norm. She was hired to be pliable and accommodating. And, too, because she checked the necessary boxes: she was a woman and she was black. The visual of the three university presidents before Congress was a vivid one: all women. Here was an illustration that a clear success of the academic revolution was the exclusion and downgrading of men, particularly white men.
Ackman went on in his campaign to confront DEI programmes and indeed to suddenly make DEI — Diversity, Equity and Inclusion — a household word. Such offices, he argued, given vast discretion over all hiring decisions, had become expensive bureaucracies, operating on fear and thought-police power. And, of course, he was not wrong. Important universities were, perhaps above all else, now in the DEI business (as well as the money business).
Ackman also joined with the Right (strange bedfellows here — finance elites and Trump populists) to attack one of prestige education’s most vulnerable spots: its scholarship. Unsuspecting parents and donors pay for masses of poorly written academic publications that justify lifetime jobs. In Gay’s case, a closer read of her work discovered numerous instances of copying from other sources. And why not, she might reasonably have argued — shattering the great conceit of academic rigour — such writing is supposed to be dull, rote, boilerplate and unread? Original expression was always to be avoided. Ackman (whose wife, an academic, was immediately accused by the Left of Wikipedia copying) is now threatening to use AI tools in a hunt for copiers throughout the ranks of snobby universities.
Both the Right and the Left see universities and higher education as an opportunity to seize power. But this now, more noteworthy, is a rearguard action by a newly awakened establishment, which pays the bills, to take back its turf.
