Harvard Couldn’t Save Both Claudine Gay and Itself

The New York Times

By Ross Douthat

January 4, 2024


Throughout the weeks that Harvard spent resisting, unsuccessfully, the calls for Claudine Gay’s resignation, a common line of defense of the embattled Ivy League president was that it’s essential not to hand any kind of victory, under any circumstances, to conservative critics of higher education.


For instance, a Harvard Law professor, Charles Fried, said that he might give “credence” to the evidence that Gay was a serial plagiarist “if it came from some other quarter.” But not, he averred, when it’s being put forward as “part of this extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions.”


Such right-wing attacks, argued Issac Bailey, an assistant professor of communications at Davidson College, ultimately have nothing to do with the particulars of any given academic scandal: “Right-wingers believe awful things about liberals and colleges because they want to believe awful things about liberals and colleges, and they will always refuse to believe anything else, no matter what liberals and colleges say or do.”


Now that Gay has departed, now that the work of conservative activists and journalists has overcome institutional resistance, it’s worth examining right-of-center beliefs about higher education a bit more closely. The right’s writers and activists have indeed spent generations, from Christopher Rufo in the present day going back to William F. Buckley Jr. in the 1950s, critiquing the liberal tilt of academia. And the consistency of that critique could understandably persuade academics that it doesn’t really matter where they stand, what they teach or, for that matter, how tough they are on plagiarism. The right will always be against them — and bent on destruction, not reform.


But until quite recently, the right’s critique of academic bias coexisted with a surprisingly strong respect for American universities among Republicans. As late as Barack Obama’s second term — hardly a high point for right-wing institutionalism and respect for credentialed authority — Gallup polling showed a majority of Republicans reporting either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in American higher education. Pew Research Center polling around the same period found that 53 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning respondents thought that colleges and universities had a positive effect on “the way things are going” in the United States, as against just 35 percent who dismissed their effect as primarily negative.


Across just a few short years, however, that support rapidly collapsed. By 2019, 59 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning respondents told Pew that higher education had a negative effect on the country; by 2023, Gallup’s polling found that just 19 percent of Republicans were favorably disposed toward higher education.


There are a couple of ways that one could interpret this profound shift. Maybe the internet and social media changed everything; maybe Donald Trump, Rufo and a constellation of right-wing influencers have simply succeeded in deceiving and inflaming the public (including nonconservatives, since academia’s reputation also took a major hit among independents) against universities on a scale that far exceeds anything that Buckley, Ronald Reagan or Rush Limbaugh ever achieved.


On the other hand, the sudden Republican alienation from the American university could also be seen as an entirely reasonable response to academia’s own internal transformation in the past 10 years or so: the ideological ferment of the Great Awokening, the swift expansion of the diversity-equity-inclusion complex, the spread of progressive loyalty oaths in faculty recruitment and hiring, the attempts at political activism and statement-making by university administrators — plus the dwindling ranks of that always endangered species, the conservative professor.


The truth is that these differing explanations aren’t mutually exclusive. The internet has certainly encouraged alienation from every public institution; it would be strange if universities were exempt. And there’s clearly a dynamic process whereby intensifying populism on the right encourages a leftward lurch within the intelligentsia, and that leftward lurch then gives additional fuel to academia’s right-wing critics.


So Trumpism and social media probably do matter to changing Republican attitudes. But it would be absurd to pretend that the overt and much-celebrated ideological revolution within universities hasn’t also played a role in squandering the sympathy that many conservative-leaning Americans felt for academia — again, less than a decade ago, not in some misty Rockefeller Republican past.


If universities simply accept or even court that alienation, as Princeton’s Greg Conti wrote for Compact Magazine last week, they’ll complete their transformation from national institutions into “sectarian” ones. As sectarian schools, they can still be rich, powerful and important. But they’ll be influential within “an increasingly inward-looking portion of our privileged classes” rather than being respected by the nation as a whole.


From watching the debate over Gay’s resignation, it’s clear that many academics would much prefer to be members of a sectarian institution than a national one — at least if the price of national standing is regarding conservative Americans in any way as critics worth engaging, let alone as stakeholders in their institutions. A sect can hold firmly to uncompromised and unsullied truths, after all, whereas a nation can be wrong or racist or corrupt.


The sectarian model cannot work, however, for public universities that depend on conservative taxpayers and conservative politicians for their very existence. For them, as I have argued before, the future (in an era of aging populations and declining enrollments, especially) depends on negotiating across the political divide, finding common ground especially with those conservatives who believe strongly in the liberal arts and figuring out how to cultivate intellectual and ideological diversity notwithstanding their own liberal tilt.


The position of schools like Harvard is different. They have immense resources and political independence, and they can thrive in the form that Conti describes, as schools that both serve and dominate the liberal meritocracy, even if conservative America disdains them and their remaining Republican donors depart.


For the Ivies and their imitators, the great danger is a fracture within the liberal meritocracy. In this scenario, some important portion of the credentialed upper class — Silicon Valley money, pro-Israel Democrats, Wall Street moderates or just affluent professionals migrating to the South and West — becomes so alienated by contemporary progressivism, by D.E.I. and all its works, that it ceases to regard the famous schools of a declining Northeast as the natural destination for its sons and daughters or the natural repository for its generous donations.


It’s to forestall that potential future, not to reward the muckraking of conservatives, that Harvard presumably decided to sacrifice its plagiarist president. The Ivy League believes in its progressive doctrines, but not as much as it believes in its own indispensability, its permanent role as an incubator of privilege and influence. And Harvard’s critics can probably force more change the more that centuries-old power seems to be at risk.


https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/03/opinion/claudine-gay-harvard.html

Where Liberty and Learning Endure

June 29, 2026
As America commemorates 250 years of independence, we reflect on the enduring principles of liberty and learning that have defined Davidson College for nearly two centuries.

Bankruptcy and Higher Education

June 21, 2026
By Todd Zywicki The Wall Street Journal June 21, 2026 Auburn University is known for its agricultural and STEM programs, its flight school and athletic programs. But the land-grant university recently became notable for another reason: The board of trustees is taking control of the school back from its faculty. The board began seizing the university’s academic programs—including curriculum, course offerings, degree requirements and academic credentials—at its June 5 meeting. The board also dissolved the faculty senate and replaced it with an advisory council to the president, which includes two faculty members from each of the university’s colleges and additional members appointed by the president. The board’s assertion of authority mirrors incoming mandates by the Alabama Legislature restricting the role of faculty senates in the state’s public university system. Predictably, Auburn’s faculty has responded with howls of outrage, decrying these intrusions on the faculty’s authority over academic operations. How could outsiders appointed through a political process have the expertise to make such delicate decisions? I’ve been a professor at a state university for almost 30 years, and I am sympathetic up to a point. But before becoming a professor I was a bankruptcy lawyer. And bankruptcy law teaches an important lesson for how academia can respond to this moment. Bankruptcy gives businesses an opportunity to admit mistakes, reform and emerge stronger. Successful enterprises don’t need bankruptcy lawyers. But when an enterprise loses its way, it goes into receivership. Most universities aren’t financially bankrupt but have lost their mission and direction. Society has long recognized certain institutions’ authority to manage their own affairs. Two notable examples are licensed professionals—such as doctors and lawyers—and universities. Universities, even state universities, have run their enterprises with minimal external oversight. Faculties enjoyed substantial rights of self-governance because they committed to higher standards than those required by ordinary jobs. Professors would establish and maintain standards of scholarly integrity, freedom of speech and inquiry, and rigorous dedication to merit-based assessment of research in specialized areas. They policed their own house, enforcing norms of truth-seeking, maintaining scholarly integrity and rigor, and ensuring that students emerged with basic knowledge, employable skills and civic competency. But over the past several decades, commitment to those values collapsed. Surveys by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression consistently reveal fear among students and faculty around expressing unfashionable ideas. Universities have seen shout-downs, cancellations and even violence against speakers. Merit and quality yielded to “diversity” and “equity.” Truth-seeking has been displaced by faddish theories and ideologically charged teaching and research. Professors design esoteric departments and teach niche classes to cliques of activist students while the needs of other students and taxpayers for real education go unaddressed. Like companies I represented, universities have lost their way. And many have proved either unable or unwilling to self-correct. When that happens, it is appropriate to put institutions into receivership until they reform and rededicate themselves to their mission. At Auburn incoming students must now take certain required civics and history courses to master basic competency in U.S. history and government. To ensure the classes actually meet that objective, professors will have to make their syllabi publicly available. In the classroom, instructors will be expected to stick to the matter at hand and avoid free-ranging political punditry. Just as other companies can learn from the ones that go bankrupt, other institutions of higher education can learn something from Auburn: Fix what’s broken, or someone else might fix it for you. Mr. Zywicki is a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. He was a Dartmouth College trustee, 2005-09. https://www.wsj.com/opinion/bankruptcy-and-higher-education-4c2b178e

Race Preferences Are Falling Nationwide

June 19, 2026
By the Editorial Board The Wall Street Journal June 19, 2026 The Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against racial preferences is turning out to be a landmark with profound consequences as its influence spreads. On Thursday the famously progressive Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a state program that issued scholarships based on race violates the U.S. Constitution. Justice Annette Ziegler wrote for the court that the Constitution requires “that every person ‘must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race,’” and that the state cannot “use race as a factor in affording educational opportunities among its citizens.” That must have been painful for the activist liberal majority on the court. In a concurrence, Wisconsin Chief Justice Jill Karofsky took some shots at Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College (2023) before acknowledging that “I am bound by the precedent set forth in SFFA” and other Supreme Court rulings “when interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment.” The case was brought by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty against a 1985 Badger State law that reserved need-based scholarships through a grant program for “Black American,” “American Indian,” “Hispanic” and some Southeast Asian undergraduate students enrolled in Wisconsin’s private and technical colleges. Last week the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that a scholarship program earmarked for black University of Iowa students studying physical sciences was “impracticable” under SFFA. State governments would be wise to repeal these discriminatory grant programs, or the courts will do it for them.
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