Searching for Harvard

In recent years, “academic freedom” has become a loaded term.

For many at Harvard and beyond, it evokes the rhetoric and ambitions of a conservative project to regain footing in an increasingly progressive academy.

That connotation is reductive and regrettable, as the politicization of formally unpolitical terminology often is. But the association of “academic freedom” with cultural conservatism is surely founded in reality.

John F. Manning ’82, Harvard’s newly minted interim provost, is a conservative. He’s also an exceptional pick.

Like most students at this University, I lean progressive. As such, I object to the right-wing legal movement to which Manning belongs. Still, his appointment by interim University President Alan M. Garber ’76 invites us, students and faculty, to reevaluate our picture of excellent administration and the academic project it serves.

That picture ought to include Manning.

Harvard has an optics problem.

In the course of the (predominantly right-wing) assault on higher education, our detractors succeeded at convincing the American public of a diminished Harvard. Through an overt takedown of our presidency, our administrators, our hiring and admissions practices, critics recast Harvard as a cesspool for “woke” D&I groupthink antithetical to the University’s history of excellence.

A once-revered American treasure, they claim, has ruined itself by placing diversity before ability in admissions and hiring.

Harvard has no permanent president. Let’s keep it that way — for now.

Not for a lack of urgency but out of a sense of responsibility. A university president is the face, voice, and navigator of his or her institution — the captain. When that person fails, whatever the cause, it has consequences.

Right now, Harvard is still reeling from its last administration; observers on the right and left, opponents and allies alike, carry on their tongues the bitter aftertaste of disappointment, of a tenure turned sour. As Harvard prepares for its next presidency, we should all take notice.

Harvard doesn’t know what it wants to be.

The trials of the last three months have clarified that fact, but Harvard’s identity crisis did not begin in the fall of 2023. It took time to fester until, suddenly, we were amazed to watch it give way to international controversy.

Over the last century, the University has adopted an increasingly public stature, coming to conceive of itself as an institution with a unique national purpose. Vexingly, though, it has failed to decide precisely what that purpose is.

The morning after Harvard President Claudine Gay’s resignation, an op-ed of mine ran in The Crimson. In that piece, I labeled President Gay a failure.

Though I did and do feel sure of that judgment, it was not one I made lightly. I admired President Gay. For me, as for many students at Harvard and across the country, she promised the dawn of a new age in academia.

Her inauguration felt like a vindication. If a Black woman could ascend to the most esteemed post in American higher education, perhaps the academic project — that bastion of free intellectual innovation and competition — was entering a new chapter, one that would be more diverse and meritocratic, the antithesis of the white, rich “Old Boys’ Club” Harvard once epitomized. Perhaps this institution really would keep pace with a changing world with changing values.