We Are All Harvard Now

Harvard University is under the worst assault by the U.S. government since the McCarthy era, but other Ivy League schools and state universities are also sitting in the crosshairs. Harvard is especially newsworthy for the breadth of the attack on its administration, faculty and programs, but other prestigious public and private universities have been put under the federal government microscope. This national blitzkrieg against higher education was kicked off by campus demonstrations blamed on antisemitism and the apparent unwillingness or inability of college administrators to protect Jewish students from harassment.

At Columbia University, it did seem that university administrators were slow to recognize the need to confront pro-Palestinian demonstrators who harassed Jewish students in various ways, including obstruction by protestors of students’ access to classrooms and demonstrators’ expressions of hateful racist and religious sentiments. On the other hand, when Columbia and other universities did make sincere efforts to crack down on rowdyism threatening to campus operations and culture, media and government criticism only intensified. The half-life of Ivy league college presidents began to resemble the longevity of postings on Tik-Tok.

The most recent U.S. government demands on Harvard University and others go well beyond concerns about antisemitism, however. There is clearly an underlying bias in the Trump administration toward Ivy League and other universities that are supposedly teaching uncritical liberal political ideologies and suppressing free speech on the part of conservatives. These allegations of liberal bias in higher education are not new, but the Trump administration has demanded what amounts to ideological audits of campus curricula, together with executive orders demanding the disbanding of offices promoting diversity, equity and inclusion across the government and in federally funded colleges and universities.

Has any other democratic country declared war on its own higher education system?

The assumptions on which the current war on higher education is based deserve closer scrutiny. For example, the argument that universities are both excessively antisemitic and too liberal contradicts what we know from research on political attitudes within and outside of higher education. Antisemitism is most apparent in small towns and rural areas and among far-right groups, including neo-Nazis, promoters of the supremacy of the “Aryan race” and others who are detached from any connection to mainstream political thinking. College faculty liberals are the least likely to appear among persons committed to antisemitic biases, compared to other occupations and to the general public. Nor is there any evidence that a majority of American college students have antisemitic or other ethnic, national or religious biases.

Instead, universities have been buffeted by two forces in politics outside of the college classroom and halls of Ivy: intense polarization of political discourse; and online radicalization of some individuals within and outside of higher education. The combination of polluted political discourse and digitally driven radicalization has swamped efforts by college administrators to find a resolution to conflicts involving two competing political objectives. Those competing objectives are free speech as protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, on one hand; and, on the other, the desire to protect students and others from campus harassment that interferes with learning and denigrates a person instead of critiquing an idea.

This balance between competing objectives can be difficult to define in particular conflict situations. How far can free speech and purportedly peaceful demonstrations go before they cross the line into harassment, intimidation, or destruction of property that is unacceptable in an academic community? There is no abstract solution: each case is unique. That is why universities have established elaborate procedures for fact-finding and adjudication of allegations of student misconduct according to academic standards and, when necessary, possible violations of law. Professors, administrators, and student representatives spend a considerable amount of time sorting out these things on campuses across the country.

On the other hand, government intrusion into the micromanagement of universities or, even worse, into the contents of courses and curricula, will almost always be counterproductive to student learning and to academic excellence. One reason that the United States prevailed in the Cold War was the creation of strong partnerships between the U.S. government and higher education, especially with regard to basic and applied research in science and engineering. The list of research breakthroughs promoted by federal funding of colleges and universities included not only technologies and discoveries that improved our quality of life, but also contributed to our national defense. American experience in the 20th century showcases the fact that education is our first line of defense.

Will this successful past be repeated in the present century, or will we chase our scholars and scientists into a fugitive relationship with elected and appointed government officials? Has any other democratic country declared war on its own higher education system? Finally, one notes with interest the number of prominent conservative politicians with Ivy League academic degrees: including the current President and Vice President and not a few Republicans in the U.S. Congress and in the Trump administration. Somehow, they survived the allegedly biased experience of an Ivy League education.