It is hard to pity the presidents of elite private universities. They earn upwards of a million dollars a year and can extend the bounty well beyond their term in office through service on corporate boards. They can implement major projects and reforms at their home institutions and leave a significant mark on American higher education in general. Meanwhile, these institutions practically have a fiduciary duty to treat their presidents as cult objects: continually to praise their brilliance, their vision, their charisma, their caring, and their diligence. Whatever it takes to impress donors and keep the gifts rolling in. When I was at Johns Hopkins, the university’s propagandists (sorry, the media office) dwelled lovingly on the fact that President William Brody had learned fluent Chinese and qualified as a jet pilot while in office. It didn’t seem to have occurred to them that these time-intensive activities might conceivably have detracted from his job performance.
Yet perhaps just a little pity is warranted. These women and men live in fishbowls, unable to walk across campus or through the neighboring community without everyone aware of the fact and staring at them. In the case of Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the scrutiny extended to his research, leading to his resignation after questions arose about its integrity. The institutions themselves are not only enormous, but enormously varied in their activities, making it practically impossible for leaders to keep track of everything that is going on. Harvard’s Medical School—just one of the university’s twelve professional and graduate divisions (although by far the largest)—has over 12,000 faculty members, working at fifteen hospitals and research institutes. And presidents can count on the fact that at virtually every moment, at least a portion of some major constituency will be furious at them: the students; the faculty; the staff; the alumni; the local community. Often, the cause of the fury is largely or entirely beyond their control: a department has turned a popular professor down for tenure; a long-planned building project will remove green space from a nearby neighborhood; a faculty member has misbehaved in a spectacular fashion; radical students have shouted down a conservative speaker, or vice-versa; the university has invested in corporations that do business in suspicious places; and so on and so forth.
In recent years the elite universities have also come in for increasingly intense political criticism—from both sides. The progressive left lambastes them as bastions of privilege, plagued by the legacy of systemic racism, “hedge funds with classrooms attached,” integral parts of a wildly inegalitarian neoliberal order. For the right, meanwhile, they are hives of the “woke mind virus,” redoubts of angry radicals who discriminate against whites and Asians in the name of diversity, violently silence conservative voices, and impose their own rigid orthodoxy.
Given all these challenges, it is no surprise that in recent years, elite universities have had a tendency to hire cautious, presentable managers for their presidencies: “steady hands” The last president of Harvard with a brash, outsize personality and ambitious plans for remaking the university was Lawrence Summers, who left office under a cloud after publicly speculating that men and women had different innate mathematical abilities. He had also developed plans for a large new campus across the Charles River, whose cost for a time led the university into serious financial difficulties, despite its massive endowment. His three successors have tried their best to avoid controversy.
Up until this fall, strategies of this sort largely succeeded, and university presidents mostly managed to avoid career-ending blows from either side. It helped that faculties and student bodies themselves tilted largely to the left, and so mostly dismissed right-wing attacks while supporting administrations that promised to address progressive concerns. On the issue of divisive words, presidents mostly walked a careful line, balancing a defense of “free speech” with a denunciation of “hate,” and offering a legalistic distinction between protected “speech” and controllable “conduct.” This caution fully pleased no one, but mostly succeeded in avoiding both campus explosions and lawsuits—something that the elite universities have a pathological aversion to. From time to time, anger on campus did flare—most importantly, in response to the murder of George Floyd in 2020—but mostly did not split university communities in two.
But as the past week’s events have shown, the overall strategy is no longer working. Indeed, the Gaza war may be the rock on which it has shattered for good. The support that some students and faculty expressed for Hamas’s ghastly attack on October 7 prompted sharp, angry replies from other students, faculty, and alumni. Soon the two sides were accusing each other of supporting genocide, and the university presidents seemed caught in the middle. Artful statements designed to mollify both sides mollified no one, while spurring accusations that the presidents were tolerating anti-Semitism. And still they seemed unable to break the pattern, even when invited to testify before Congress last week. It was not hard to imagine how Republicans would conduct the hearings, yet instead of considering how legalistic tightrope walking would play on national television and on social media, the presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn doubled down on the legalisms, as if avoiding lawsuits was the most important thing at stake (Penn’s Liz Magill has since discovered that it was not). As Michael Tomasky wrote in The New Republic, the presidents needed to show some passion, to offer a full-throated denunciation of anti-Semitism and then hit back hard at the hypocrisy of Republican representative Elise Stefanik. But the sort of person who would do this was precisely not the sort of person that the institutions’ boards of trustees had looked for, when choosing their current leaders.
Since last week, a host of right-wing and centrist commentators have argued that the Capitol Hill debacle was the inevitable result of the universities’ politicization (see Andrew Sullivan’s hyperbolic column, for instance). But this is off base. The current class of university presidents are anything but activists. They were chosen precisely because they were not activists in any real sense, but rather cautious managers who would instinctively try to dampen down political passions.
But as the Gaza war turmoil has made clear, there are some circumstances in which literally anything that a university president does will be seen as political. If a university group takes a position that others interpret as advocacy of genocide, then any stance taken towards it will in fact have political ramifications. In that sense, at least, the universities cannot remain “apolitical,” and if they try, it will simply lead to more debacles of the sort we saw last week. The time for cautious managers may be at an end.
You are a historian who writes about the Enlightenment and you think that the words-actions distinction, the very heart of the American free speech tradition, is a mere legalism?
I agree that these Presidents deserve little sympathy. They knew that they were going to be grilled and therefore prepared with lawyers. They had to perform a juggling act. On the one hand, they had the general public, congress, and some donors who were outraged by what transpired at their universities. While the early reactions of these universities to the massacre was terribly insensitive, they all issued corrective statements that while not great, could pass as okay. The presidents were certainly unhappy with the radical groups and members of the faculty on their campuses that issued pro Hamas statements in the aftermath of the massacre, but they figured this was just another woke idiocy that happens every so often on our campuses which will fade when the next idiotic posture will pop up. The best way to address woke nonsense is to ignore it. The right media loves to publicize these incidents, and some of them are indeed beyond strange, but they really amount to nothing more than adolescent virtue signaling. People grow out of them. And the 3 presidents were also aware that when Columbia and Brandeis took disciplinary measures against these groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, their presidents were crucified by progressive students and faculty who dominate elite institutions of higher education. And so they tried to avoid saying anything. They talked as if they were in a faculty meeting. And they failed where most academics do (including me), which is when academic posturing and positions run counter to common sense. (Non related example of similar academic absurdities -- you can't propose in today's academy that the basic man woman binary exists; you can't suggest that 2 headed households are better for raising children etc.). They knew what happened to Larry Summers when he dared to address statistical facts in public. They know what happened to Ian Baruma when he allowed a different point of view at the NYRB, and they behaved like supreme court nominees. Unlike you David, I believe their answers reveal where progressive group thinking has done to our institutions -- that instead of producing critical thinkers we create virtue signaling parrots. And that progressive antisemitic antizionism has become a central component of intersectional dogma.
As Jacobson noted in his brilliant December 3 article in the Guardian, the absolute vilification of Israel in academia over the last few decades has been seen by the majority of Jews as unfair and antisemitic bullying. An emotional connection to Israel is an important component of Jewish identity, regardless of where Jews stand politically. It has been so for 2000 years. And the hypocrisy screams antisemitism. Universities obsess over microaggressions and do not allow dissenting voices a stage on campuses in the name of assuring a "safe environment." But antizionist antisemites must have freedom of speech, particularly when it comes from minority groups like African Americans or Arabs. Black Lives Matter chapters and activists frequently issue such statements, but no one in the liberal universities dares to confront them. Malcolm X has become the glorious symbol of black resistance and is celebrated more than MLK. He was a hateful antisemite. So scholars and activists put his antisemitism In "context," just like the 3 presidents explained to Congress about calls for genocide. When students and faculty call "from the river to the sea," which means one thing -- genocide of the Jews -- the NYT publishes a thoughtful balanced article that explains that they really don't mean it -- it's just a catchy slogan. When demonstrators scream intifada intifada they don't really mean it in a violent way. Universities have become such a hostile place for Jews that to be accepted by their teachers and their peers Jewish students need to renounce their identity. They have to prove that even though they were born Jewish, they hate zionism just as much as the next progressive. It's a ritual that happens to most of us -- a trial by metaphorical fire. We need to prove we're good Jews who hate Israel. That's the price of admission. And I have yet to meet a Jew who hasn't bowed in one circumstance or another to this pressure. This semester, for example, I have a student whose father is Jewish and her mother Catholic. Her name is Shannon. She's at a Jesuit school in which there are very few Jewish students. And yet she frequently has to prove to her peers that her parental ancestry doesn't compromise her moral credentials and that she hates Israel just like the rest of them.
This has been going on for years. And this is the reason why so many Jewish alumni are so angry. They see what's happening on campuses and they remember what they had to go through. How humiliating this self-negation was and is for all of us. I speculate that these alumni are, like me, ashamed of how we caved to social pressure. We renounced the ancient tradition of our forefathers, who all too often suffered dearly because of who they were, just so that we could be accepted as cool members of the club. We are embarrassed by our past behavior and realize that things have gotten so bad because we were cowards. And the worst of it. Many of us still are.