Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard

Yesterday, in protest of the war in Gaza, dozens of student organizers began an encampment at Harvard Yard, holding protests and spending the night in tents.

Many on campus support this cause. Others oppose it, finding some of the chants offensive or even antisemitic. Harvard’s administration has warned participants that the encampment violates University guidelines, igniting debates about the regulation of protests on campus.

Listening to these conversations as an Israeli-American and a Harvard professor, I have to say: Against the backdrop of a raging war, events at Harvard seem almost inconsequential.

Today at Harvard, we are struggling with a culture of fear and contempt — one that has created a lot of unhappiness. But University leadership can do a great deal to change this culture and help pave the way for improvement across higher education.

I speak at many alumni events, where graduates celebrate their years at Harvard as some of the happiest of their lives. The reason for this is easy to understand: Alumni reflect on the love they had for each other, for their former professors, and for the intellectual growth they experienced by being exposed to strange new ideas at Harvard.

When I ask alumni how today’s Harvard differs from their own time, they often say they are baffled and saddened to see something that has replaced the love they remember: fear. They hear horror stories about “cancel culture” and angry activism directed toward ideological minorities; they read about students and professors ostracized or driven away entirely for considering impermissible ideas or holding forbidden political views. They see a narrowing range of academic freedom and empirical evidence that free speech at Harvard is in decline.

As the last spasm of America’s decade-long cultural convulsion plays out at Harvard, we find ourselves at an extraordinary moment in time.

The embers of the global War on Terror still smolder in Syria, Somalia, and elsewhere. A sleepy Europe has suddenly awoken to find itself threatened. The Middle East is, again, on fire. The South China Sea is contested. Piracy on the high seas is on the rise. The global economy appears to be teetering on the brink of a crisis born of wars, the pandemic, and the consequences of, in effect, free money for years. Piles of plastic, rising sea levels, and a myriad of other changes force us to reconsider how we occupy the planet.

New tools in biology present both promise and threat to human health. Artificial intelligence offers both relief and peril to human cognition, while destigmatized psychoactive drugs cloud our minds or lull them into eternal slumber. Social media and the digital incarnation of America’s free press can potentiate new cultural conflicts on a timeframe of just minutes.

On a posting for a position as an assistant professor in international and comparative education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, applicants are required to submit a CV, a cover letter, a research statement, three letters of reference, three or more writing samples, and a statement of teaching philosophy that includes a description of their “orientation toward diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.”

At Harvard and elsewhere, hiring for academic jobs increasingly requires these so-called diversity statements, which Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning describes as being “about your commitment to furthering EDIB within the context of institutions of higher education.”

By requiring academics to profess — and flaunt — faith in DEI, the proliferation of diversity statements poses a profound challenge to academic freedom.

Let me tell you a story. Parts of it are true.

Once upon a time, there was a university named “Harvard,” located just outside of Boston. Harvard was an old university – at least, as Americans measure such things. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, it maintained a well-earned reputation as one of the world’s premier research institutions.

Partly for that reason, and partly because of the rather less admirable ways in which it had entrenched itself in powerful political and economic institutions, it attracted a remarkably talented group of students to its undergraduate program and the programs run by its various professional schools.

Insisting that the primary “telos,” or aim, of a university can be “truth”, or “social justice,” but cannot be both, Jonathan D. Haidt has eloquently argued on behalf of “truth.”

Haidt’s richly thoughtful critique of ways in which a specific conception of “social justice” – one that emphasizes the equality of outcomes – can be harmful as a “telos” includes valuable insights. But positing “truth” and “social justice” as competing alternatives is a false and tragically oversimplified dichotomy.

The Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard’s statement on “The Freedoms of a University” offers a more complex vision for Harvard: “A university has two great obligations to society: to foster the discovery and dissemination of knowledge and understanding, and to prepare students for lives of meaning, purpose, and service.” While seemingly distinct, these two goals are deeply interdependent.

For evidence that intolerance is a problem at Harvard, one need only look at the cases from 2021 involving evolutionary biologist Carole K. Hooven and biostatistician Tyler J. VanderWeele.

Carole claimed that sex (not gender) was binary, the standard position in evolutionary biology. For this she was publicly denounced by the graduate student director of her department’s DEI task force and said she was unable to teach her lecture class as no graduate students were willing to serve as her teaching fellow. The fallout, coupled with the lack of support from her department, led to her eventual resignation.

Tyler, a practicing Catholic, signed an amicus brief opposing a federal, constitutional right to gay marriage in favor of state-by-state resolution. In response to the brief, and past writings of his on abortion, graduate students in public health insisted he be fired or, at minimum, barred from teaching. (He continues to teach at Harvard.)

In 1960, during my freshman year at McGill University, I experienced firsthand the influence wielded by university administrators. It taught me why universities — Harvard included — need to adopt a posture of institutional neutrality.

Four years prior to Mario Savio’s Berkeley Free Speech movement, I engaged in activism — and faced suppression — for protest on my campus.

The catalyst for my activism was the tragic event in March 1960 in Sharpeville, South Africa, where oppressive anti-Black “pass laws” sparked a riot that resulted in the deaths of over 60 people at the hands of local authorities.

In the aftermath of former University President Claudine Gay’s resignation, demands for institutional neutrality have sharpened at Harvard. We should not allow the present sense of crisis to foster hasty policymaking on an issue of this importance.

The Kalven Report, promulgated in 1967 by the University of Chicago, is the flagship institutional neutrality document and has been invoked in recent days as an example for Harvard to follow. It sets a presumption that the University will not express “opinions on the political and social issues of the day” or modify “its corporate activities to foster social or political values.”

The Kalven Principles also state, however, that the presumption of neutrality can be overcome in two instances: when the “very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry” come under threat, and when the institution “must act” as a corporate body, for instance when it owns property, receives funds, or bestows honors.

The animus for much of the recent debate roiling Harvard is the claim that the liberal tilt of the academy has accelerated in recent years. This process is believed to have excluded heterodox voices and thereby restricted academic freedom of expression on college campuses.

Lack of viewpoint diversity is widely believed to pose an existential threat to the University’s core mission of deepening intellectual inquiry, learning, and knowledge generation.

As John Stuart Mill’s classic “On Liberty” framed the argument: “The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.”

In 2002, writer David Horowitz proposed an Academic Bill of Rights to ensure viewpoint diversity in U.S. higher education. The proposal was criticized for not respecting the autonomy and scholarly standards of academic disciplines, and for attempting to force change from the top down.

The critics had a point, but I think his diagnosis of the problem was correct: Higher education struggles with respect for appropriate forms of viewpoint diversity.

For example, the imbalance in faculty political commitments has only grown in the intervening decades: By one measure, the liberal-to-conservative ratio of faculty in American universities increased from 2:1 in 1989 to 5:1 in 2017. According to a 2023 survey by The Crimson, among Harvard faculty, it now appears to stand at roughly 26:1.

If you are a Harvard undergraduate, the question in my title might not be top of mind. In the early anthropocene, when I was in college, many people went to university with the idea that they might find somebody to marry. Back then, where your future children might go to college was something engaged college couples would discuss.

If by some remote chance this thought has crossed your mind too, congratulations! Your children will be legacies. It may come as a surprise that the issue of legacy admissions could eventually impinge on you. Despite an overwhelming tendency for undergraduates to oppose preferential admissions for legacies, it seems that few have given the issue much consideration.

I find the case against legacies is far from clear. In fact — let me just say it — there’s a good argument for favoring legacy admissions if the question we’re asking is who we want to be supporting Harvard financially in the future. My answer is: you! You and your children, and maybe even your grandchildren.

Harvard admissions should be more meritocratic.

By “merit” I don’t mean cosmic merit — moral deservingness, a judgment by the almighty at the gates of heaven. I mean the traits that enable a student to profit from an elite university education, including cognitive aptitude, conscientiousness, and a thirst for knowledge.

What’s the opposite of meritocracy? Historically, positions were distributed by hereditary privilege, family ties, patronage to cronies, or sale to the highest bidder.