What Jill Lepore Knows About Harvard
Universities face unprecedented attacks from the government. But those within must sort themselves out if they want to regain trust.
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Jill Lepore just provided an object lesson in how American universities can return to their purpose and win back the trust of the American people.
Lepore, a renowned historian, Harvard professor, and New Yorker staff writer, made this statement to David Leonhardt of The New York Times about how the intellectual culture at Harvard changed around 2014:
Students started showing up, determined that their job in a classroom was to humiliate one another and possibly catch a professor in saying something that was a violation of what they believed to be a way you can speak … This entire campus became incredibly prosecutorial.
She continued:
[I]t just surprises me to no end when people are like: Well, there was really never a problem on campuses. I don’t know what college campus they’re talking about … I just think it’s silly to deny that that existed, that it didn’t harm a lot of people, that it wasn’t wildly out of control on many occasions.
And in a subsequent conversation with Evan Goldstein of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Lepore went even further. She said that the culture at Harvard got so “miserable” that she felt like she could not do intellectual work anymore. She could not teach the way she wanted to teach, because students refused to read viewpoints that they disagreed with. She could not publish essays she wanted to publish because colleagues warned her that, for example, her writing comparing the #MeToo movement to various moral panics would “destroy [her] life.”
She felt so suffocated that she resolved to leave higher education altogether. At breakfast on the day she planned to announce her resignation, one of her kids convinced her to stay.
“I look back on that time with considerable shame at my unwillingness to speak out,” she told Goldstein.
What I found so refreshing about Lepore’s statements is the recognition that, while hostile forces might be able to destroy your operations, it’s you yourself who are in a unique position to corrupt your own purpose and squander your credibility. And then there’s the clarity about what the road back requires:
Face the problem.
Name the problem.
Recognize how bad it was, and still is.
Confess that you should have done more.
Take full responsibility.
Resist the temptation to make an excuse by saying “but the other side is worse”—and yet still guard against the other side’s assaults.
I’m curious whether Lepore’s comments will inspire others to come forward and make similar statements.
Right now, seven in ten people think American higher education is heading in the wrong direction, and the suffocating dominance of progressive ideology is one reason for this. The ideological skew may be especially acute in higher education, but it is a problem for civil society more broadly.
In his recently published book, The Nonprofit Crisis, Greg Berman correctly identifies the central issue: “The hidden crisis facing nonprofits is the declining public confidence in the sector.” He cites studies which show that roughly half of Americans do not trust civic institutions.
A key reason for this is the increasingly ideological bent of many nonprofits. Berman quotes from a study of the effects of ideology on trust: “Higher perceived politicization of institutions consistently predicted lower trust, often with large effect sizes. Similar patterns were observed between institutions, such that the institutions perceived as the most politicized were also the least trusted.”
Exhibit A may well be the Sierra Club, long amongst the most widely-trusted environmental organizations. Last month, a front page story in the Sunday New York Times titled “The Sierra Club Embraced Social Justice. Then It Tore Itself Apart” detailed how a precipitous decline in both fundraising and membership (at a time when the Trump administration is gutting environmental regulation) can be directly linked to the organization’s embrace of progressive social justice causes that undermined its prior strategy of bringing strange bedfellows (like Michael Bloomberg and teachers’ unions) together for the environment.
I found one particular story especially telling. At a board meeting, a Sierra Club director noted that 108 staff members were part of the “national equity investment” while only two staff members were devoted to saving the Arctic wildlife refuge from Donald Trump’s attacks.
“I don’t think we have our priorities straight,” the trustee said. Nobody else on the board agreed. The budget, as it was proposed, passed.
The decline of the Sierra Club, the Times concluded, “helps Mr. Trump. But it was not his doing. The Sierra Club did this to itself.”
In his research, Berman found that “The best way for nonprofits to begin to address the corrosive problem of declining public trust, in sum, is to do an outstanding job of whatever their core work may be.” Wokeness derailed the core work of many civic institutions, from Harvard to the Sierra Club. There are people who say the worst of it is over. But this dramatically understates the problem.
It is good news that bias response teams are being replaced by civil discourse centers on campuses, but wokeness is not going anywhere in higher education. Syllabi with a progressive skew are still being written, campus administrators are still being hired with a 12-1 liberal to conservative ratio, cultures are still being entrenched.
My field of sociology, for example, has one Republican for every 44 registered Democrats. Twenty percent of sociology professors identify as far left. Even with a mammoth effort, it will take generations for the field to become anywhere near ideologically balanced.
Wokeness is literally written into the career competencies of the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), the leading professional association for job readiness with 17,000 dues-paying members. According to NACE, graduates who are ready for the job market “engage in anti-oppressive practices that actively challenge the systems, structures, and policies of racism and inequity.”
Towards the end of her interview with Evan Goldstein, Jill Lepore said, “I don’t want anything that I say … to give an inch, not a millimeter, to the conservative claim that the Trump administration has any right to say who universities can and cannot hire and admit to their programs.”
I think that’s exactly right. Naming the problem of suffocating progressiveness in higher education is not an endorsement of the Trump administration’s strategy of demolition and conquest. The goal is to squarely face your own problems so that you can begin to right the ship, and name the challenges clearly so that you regain the trust of the American people.
“As a Catholic, I believe in confession, and contrition, and in making amends,” Lepore said.
Whatever your spiritual convictions, these are necessary steps.
Eboo Patel is the founder of Interfaith America and the author of We Need to Build: Field Notes For Diverse Democracy. He served as an advisor on faith to President Barack Obama.
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I’m an academic, in the business for a long time, and I take issue with this article. In my discipline there is one Republican for every 4 Democrats last I looked—not one for every 44—and that’s more or less what you’d expect in any population of educated, upper middle class Americans. It’s likely worse in various ‘studies’ disciplines—gender studies, ethnic studies, etc., but they’re peripheral. And, yeah, there’s a certain amount of posturing and virtue-signaling—land acknowledgements in sig files and pronoun designation—but this is just irritating and has no serious impact on how we do our jobs.
I’m sick of the ongoing rhetoric about the ‘wokeness’ of academia that the Right promotes, which the article echoes. This may be the way things are at Harvard, where simply having been admitted guarantees students good jobs if they get through, so students can entertain themselves playing these games. It isn’t so at other colleges where students go to be trained and credentialed for jobs and can’t afford this nonsense. And where faculty like me have other things to do.