I Respectfully Dissent

Early in Harvard’s history, it was assumed that the University would be “run by its resident teachers,” as William C. Kirby writes in his text “Empires of Ideas.”

Despite these early plans, however, the Harvard Corporation was consolidated by the early eighteenth century, designating ultimate governance to the Corporation and the President, with little formal accountability to those they governed.

Nowadays, the Corporation has neglected community involvement in important University matters, completely alienating our affiliates.

If current discussions about creating a faculty senate succeed, Harvard will at last have a University-wide body of governance led by faculty. Even so, the proposals released last October suggest that the senate seems poised to be born powerless, without real decision-making authority. If otherwise, it may play a role choosing presidents — doing the initial search, screening candidates, and preparing a short list for the Corporation to make a final decision.

Now, more than ever, Harvard needs shared governance. Its absence has enabled administrative overreach that undermines diversity, academic freedom, and political accountability.

Harvard has not learned to embrace — in its culture and, especially, in its governance structures — all of the diversity it has invited into its ranks.

When I was about to become chair of the History department in 2022, I tried to gather information about its past through recorded interviews and conversations with senior colleagues.

I found that in the early 1990s, the History Department had more than thirty tenured professors, two of them female. The department felt like a white male affinity group, with assistant professors hardly ever achieving tenure. It took a lot of resolve for the situation to change — in 2022, 44 percent of the department’s professors were female, although today it is down to about 38 percent. The department now, from my estimation, has faculty native to more than fifteen countries around the world.

Beyond our faculty, our student diversity is also paramount to our academic mission. I look forward to the unexpected turns that classes take when students come from three or four countries, from New York and Arizona and beyond, from different social classes, multiple sexual orientations, and various racial identities.

It is a feast for the intellect — a banquet of coexisting, distinct visions during discussions.

Against that backdrop, the Harvard administration’s retreat from DEI is disheartening. That it has also retreated without consulting its community — instead bending to external pressures — is unforgivable.

Regarding academic freedom, President Garber has stated his expectation of more “objectivity” and less “activism” in the classroom. Yet, I haven’t seen evidence to support the contention of faculty activism in class, nor has the President explained what he means by activism in this context.

His observations depart from a false binary: there is no contradiction between scholarly rigor and sincere perspective on contentious issues. Especially given the lack of formal accountability to the community, the President’s comments may be interpreted as an attempt to intimidate faculty. Will faculty continue to be able to approach topics from a perspective of gender, race, or class, for example?

I agree that objectivity should be prioritized in the classroom, but contend that the learning environment need not exclude opinion.

Perhaps the administration would also agree that academic freedom, rather than simply freedom of speech, is the value that informs classroom discourse.

Professors and students come to class with an attitude of shared responsibility: opinions need to be made plausible by empirical validation, dialogue with existing literature, and careful listening to fellow discussants. True academic freedom requires we all be cognizant of our own prejudices when engaging with our peers. While this comes with an inherent degree of discomfort, these classroom interactions should be expected and valued.

Contrary to its claims to the contrary, the University has continually deviated from neutrality regarding political speech. Facts speak far more strongly than words.

The current administration has attacked pro-Palestinian speech and programming wherever it could; it added restrictions to campus protest policy in an apparent attempt to silence political speech, suspended the partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank, dismissed the director and the associate director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and ended Dr. Mary T. Bassett’s tenure as director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights.

Administrators gave scant explanations for their actions but avoided attributing them to any political motivation — implausibly so, given the attacks these programs and centers have faced by external political actors.

In October of 2024, I accompanied a delegation of students to a meeting with President Garber. The students developed a detailed proposal to foster education on Palestinian Studies, including the appointment of tenured faculty in the near future. Later, in April of 2025, the Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias made similar recommendations. It appears nothing has come of either push.

If the administration were meant to show its honest commitment to extending academic freedom to scholarship on Palestine, these proposals were both chances to do so. Dehumanization needs to be countered with education. It is the least Harvard must do.

The Harvard Corporation has recently extended Garber’s presidency indefinitely. There was no consultation with the community. As such, I must respectfully dissent.

Sidney Chalhoub is the David and Peggy Rockefeller Professor of History and of African and African American Studies.