At Harvard, some wonder what it will take to stop the spiral

When seventy university presidents gathered for a summit in late January, the topic on everyone's minds was the crisis at Harvard.

The summit's presenters treated the university, beset by accusations of coddling anti-Semitism, as a business school case study in higher education leadership, complete with a slide presentation on its plummeting reputation.

The killer slide: “Boeing and Tesla have similar levels of negative buzz as Harvard.”

In other words, Harvard, a centuries-old symbol of academic excellence, generated as much negative attention as an airplane manufacturer that dropped a door panel from the sky and an auto company with a mercurial CEO and multiple recalls.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management, organized the summit. “Despite nearly 400 years of history, brand equity is not nearly as permanent as Harvard administrators think,” he said in an interview. “There used to be a term in the industry that it was the Cadillac of the industry. Well, Cadillac itself is, you know, unfortunately not the Cadillac of the industry anymore.”

Many of the presidents who attended the summit saw the erosion of the Harvard brand as a problem not only for the school but, by extension, for the entire enterprise of higher education. If Harvard couldn't protect itself, what about every other institution? Could Harvard's leadership find an effective response?

There was a whiff of a more assertive approach by Harvard on Monday, when the university announced it was investigating “highly offensive anti-Semitic tropes” posted on social media by pro-Palestinian student and faculty groups. The groups had posted or reposted material featuring an old cartoon of a puppeteer, his hand marked by a dollar sign in a Star of David, the lynching of Muhammad Ali and Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Harvard took this action at a time when the House Committee on Education and the Workforce began investigating its record on anti-Semitism. On Friday, the committee issued subpoenas to Harvard's interim president, the head of the school's board of trustees and its investment manager, in a sweeping search for documents related to the university's handling of anti-Semitism claims on campus. The threat of the subpoenas prompted PEN America, a writing group that defends academic freedom, to warn against a fishing expedition.

There also is a court case against Harvard, calling the university “a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and intimidation,” as well as federal investigations into allegations that the university ignored both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia on campus.

Business leaders and major donors, including hedge fund director Ken Griffin, have threatened to withhold money and not hire Harvard students who defended the atrocities committed by Hamas in its Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Right-wing media and anonymous researchers continue to do this. filing plagiarism claims against university officials, as part of an attack on diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

There is already evidence of reputational damage: a 17 percent drop in the number of students applying to Harvard this year for early admission decisions. Other Ivy League schools saw an increase.

The attacks “have clearly thrown Harvard into disarray, in terms of its top leadership,” said Randall Kennedy, a Harvard law professor. 'They have undermined morale. It has been a very effective attack.”

Within Harvard, faculty members and students are looking for a signal from university officials, including its main governing board, the Harvard Corporation, about its future direction.

In a interview Last week, Alan Garber, the university's interim president, outlined with Harvard magazine some efforts to ease the tension by enforcing rules against disruptive demonstrations and offering a series of events designed to encourage dialogue instead of conflict between students and teachers.

These are good steps, says Dara Horn, a novelist who last year served on a committee to advise the president of Harvard on combating anti-Semitism. She had noticed that many students were not connecting with people they disagreed with and did not know how.

“That attitude is the end of education,” says Dr. Horn, who published an article about her experiences at Harvard in The Atlantic. “For me, that's kind of a baseline.”

Alex Bernat, a Harvard junior and board member of Chabad, a Jewish student group, said Tuesday that the university's swift response to this week's anti-Semitic posts was a good sign. But he worried that some members of a pro-Palestinian faculty group who redistributed the anti-Semitic material would have power over the academic careers of Jewish and Israeli students.

The groups that posted the material removed it on Monday, saying their apparent endorsement of anti-Semitic imagery was unintentional.

Yet the Harvard Corporation has remained relatively quiet, other than confirming that its leader, Penny Pritzker, a philanthropist and former Obama administration official, would stay on and conduct a new presidential search, just as she led the one which the previous one had chosen. chairman, Claudine Gay.

The Corporation has been criticized for its selection and support of Dr. Gay, who resigned on January 2 following an uproar over her testimony to Congress that calling for the genocide of Jews was not necessarily a violation of Harvard's code of conduct, depending on the context.

The Corporation is blamed for not acting more quickly to address the matter, by “letting the university spin in the wind,” as Steven Pinker, an outspoken professor of psychology, put it in an interview. (He quickly noted that he had not called for Dr. Gay's impeachment.)

However, there is a feeling among some faculty members that the university may be going too far in appeasing its critics.

During the December hearing in Congress, which Dr. Gay damned, Virginia Foxx, a Republican from North Carolina, called one class at Harvard, “Race and Racism in the Making of the United States as a Global Power,” as an example of “ideology at work.”

The teacher of that class, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, said the accusation was “absurd” and that the class includes lectures on the history of anti-Semitism in the United States. He said he was concerned that new conduct rules adopted in September, which ban discrimination on the basis of “political beliefs”, would encourage students to complain if, like Dr. Foxx, would object to the content of his lessons.

“Prominent black people at this university have reason to worry” that their credentials will be questioned, he said.

In this tense atmosphere, good intentions have sometimes led to problems.

Harvard's decision to create task forces on anti-Semitism and Islamophobia on campus — usually the most abhorrent institutional response — ran into trouble in late January, after Derek Penslar, a leading scholar of Jewish studies, was asked to co-chair become part of the anti-Semitism task force.

Critics objected to his appointment, citing an open letter signed by Dr. Penslar and other academics and published before the October 7 attacks, which accused Israel of being “an apartheid regime.” The critics mocked his comments, quoted in the Jewish press, and said the level of anti-Semitism at Harvard was exaggerated.

Harvard's failure to anticipate the skeptical response to Dr. Penslar points to a leadership that is too insular, said David Wolpe, a leading rabbi and visiting scholar at Harvard's divinity school.

“There is an inability on the part of the university to see how it would be perceived, and there is an unpleasantness that is disheartening to many of the Jewish students, faculty and staff,” Rabbi Wolpe said.

Dr. Penslar, co-chair of the task force, declined to comment for this article. His supporters were angry at what they saw as superficial criticism of a respected scholar.

“For him to be vetoed from the outside for expressing his views — especially considering they are fairly mainstream positions — is just a terrible precedent,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of Latin American studies and governance at Harvard. Contrary to popular belief, Dr. Penslar “a self-proclaimed Zionist,” said Dr. Levitsky.

Some alumni are trying to shake things up. Several independent candidates campaigned for seats on Harvard's Board of Overseers, the university's second governing body. The candidates failed to collect enough petition signatures to get on the ballot, but have vowed to keep pushing.

One of those candidates, Sam Lessin, a 2005 Harvard graduate and venture capitalist, said the election process itself exposed the problems with leadership.

Harvard's governance system is “almost like a peacetime organization,” and is ill-suited to navigating troubled waters, he said. Candidates for the Board of Overseers are normally nominated through the alumni association, and the position is often seen as “a glorified reward for being a booster.”

Some faculty members also organize. About 170 Harvard professors have joined an academic freedom council co-founded last spring by Dr. Pinker, to counterbalance what he describes as “an intellectual monoculture.”

Dr. Pinker believes that if Harvard had adopted a policy of institutional neutrality and refrained from taking positions on tough issues of the day, some of the pain of recent months could have been avoided.

“Universities need to get away from the habit of giving mini-sermons every time there is something in the news,” he said.

Dr. Pinker has made a fun hobby of collecting headlines and cartoons ridiculing Harvard's reputational problems. A bumper sticker in his collection reads, “My son didn't go to Harvard.”

But despite all that, Harvard “still has the brand, it still has the legacy,” said Dr. Pinker. “I don't know whether it will get back on track. I suspect this will happen.”

Stephanie Saul reporting contributed. Sheelagh McNeill research contributed.