Necessity demands yet another essay related to the war in Gaza. I undertake it with reluctance. But the war has indirectly become the occasion of an important event in the life of American elite universities, the arena of my life’s work. I refer to the recent Congressional hearings, which were fairly widely viewed and very widely discussed throughout the country, and at which the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania answered questions about student life on their campuses. These institutions are among the most eminent in this or any other land. Harvard is the greatest university in the world. But this hearing was in my opinion a national embarrassment and a humiliation for anyone who believes, as I do, that the American achievement in higher education has been one of our nation’s greatest, and one that, despite all, remains the envy of the world. But it is possible, just barely, that the hearing lanced a cultural boil that has been tormenting the Academy with increasing ferocity.
As you probably already know, the presidents were grilled, in a less than friendly fashion, concerning the way their students felt treated in a context of political polarization currently exacerbated by the very strong feelings excited by the brutal war underway between the Israeli Defense Forces and the military wing of the Palestinian group Hamas in Gaza. Hamas fighters in a sneak attack on October 7 invaded Israel, killed with nearly incredible barbarity more than a thousand Israeli civilians, and kidnapped and removed back to Gaza well over two hundred hostages. Included in both the slaughtered and the kidnapped were many women, children, and elderly persons. In the devastating response since then Israeli forces have been hunting down and killing some thousands of Hamas fighters, mainly by aerial bombardment, and have destroyed or damaged much of Gaza’s crowded civilian environment. In the process they have killed many thousands of Palestinian non-combatants, including a huge number of children. As the war continues the humanitarian crisis among the displaced, the homeless, the wounded, the trapped, and the traumatized has grown ever worse.
The world’s horrified reaction to this situation, in many ways echoed on American college campuses, has been mainly anti-Israeli. This is the background that partially explains how a Republican congresswoman and Harvard alumna could put to the three American college presidents the essence of the following question: Is the advocacy of the genocide of Jews tolerated by your institution’s disciplinary protocols and speech codes? I am unable to explain why none of the three could answer this question in a sensible, straight-forward way that would make sense to the ordinary intelligent and educated person. All three failed miserably. The performance of the President of Penn, Liz Magill, was particularly egregious and seems to have been the final nail in her presidential coffin. She has resigned. The President of Harvard, Claudine Gay, has retained the (official) confidence of her board. But that the question of her retention should even be controversial, as it actually is, is a blot on the Harvard escutcheon. Elise Stefanik, the right-wing congressional interrogator, is far from the only unhappy camper among Harvard alumni. The unique importance of MIT lies in its legendary primacy in those fields of science and technology upon which many of us believe—and I think correctly believe—the future felicity and perhaps even the continuity of our species will depend.
There is and always has been a large element of political correctness in the selection of college presidents. But of course what have been regarded as the “correct” elements has varied considerably over history. It is needless to say that western higher education, which has clearly evidenced origins in the medieval monastic schools, was long an all-male affair. For a long time in Protestant America there were essentially two fundamental requirements for the man who would be a college president: theological orthodoxy and manifest erudition. What we usually think of as “administrative skill” and “people skills” were of course desirable and in a surprising number of instances at least partially present. By the middle of the nineteenth century the scene had evolved considerably. The decade at the end of the Civil War must be regarded as a Copernican moment in our higher education. Many old institutions, like my own, Princeton, gradually evolved by fits and starts toward educational modernity. But Cornell University (1865) and Johns Hopkins (1876) offered from the very start innovations of secular inspiration and scholarly ambition that would define the great American research university.
As our institutions have become more complex, the presidential job description has changed utterly, the expectations vastly expanded, and the bar set ever higher. The educational enterprise so brilliantly defined as the “multiversity” by Clark Kerr, the first Chancellor of the University of California about 1960, demands of its chief executive a panoply of skills and a reservoir of energy that simply cannot be reasonably expected of any single human being. I hope it is needless to say that none of these presidents in the congressional hot seat is an anti-Semite, and certainly none is stupid. They came to their high leadership positions through intellectual brilliance, practical know-how, manifest capacity for clear and inspiring communication, and a work ethic unknown to ordinary mortals. Why, then, did these three college presidents shock the Congress and much of the nation? Several commentators have suggested that an untenable situation derived not from a want of rules and regulations at their institutions, but from a surfeit of them emphasized or soft-pedalled with an air that smacked of hypocrisy.
Perhaps we could help simplify their task somewhat by suggesting that there is no compelling reason that a college president express a public opinion on the Gaza war, let alone an institutional opinion, and a few good reasons not to. And while an institution’s students are indeed partners in the learning enterprise, the direction of the enterprise is the responsibility of competent professionals. Likewise, the behavior of some students is such that it is necessary to remember that, with or without keffiyehs, they are in many instances often still unformed young people, as easily misled as led. In a relatively few instances the behavior is so appalling that it should invoke serious discipline, a concept anathema (except for select political violations) on most campuses. It is possible, barely possible, that this debacle in a congressional hearing room will lead to some good.
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