The Harvard Plan: The Finale
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On this week's On the Media, the leadership crisis at Harvard and the backlash to decades of diversity efforts didn't begin or end with the resignation of its first black president last year. Diversity wasn't much of an important political term in the 1970s. Integration was a much bigger term. You know, nobody was buying stock.

in diversity. There is no racially blind method of selection which will enroll today more than a trickle of minority students in the nation's colleges. I refer, in my opinion, to the Harvard admissions program as one example of how race properly, in my opinion,

may be taken into account. Proof-free speech has been curtailed on many campuses and conservative voices have been shouted down. We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country. Stay tuned for the gripping finale of our series, The Harvard Plan. On the Media is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash?

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OnTheMedia.org slash donate. Thank you. Enjoy the show. From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

For the past two weeks, we've brought you The Harvard Plan, our series produced with the Boston Globe about the crisis in American higher education. We focused on our country's oldest and richest college. And as you've heard, a place where the very idea of diversity has come under a lot of scrutiny of late.

Actually, though, diversity has always been associated with Harvard. I mean, how do you think Elle Woods got into Harvard Law in Legally Blonde? She does have a 4.0 from CULA, and she got a 179 on her LSATs. A fashion major?

Well, sir, we've never had one before, and aren't we always looking for diversity? And in The Social Network, it's how the Mark Zuckerberg character rationalizes getting snubbed by an exclusive social club after his friend Eduardo gets an invitation. It probably was a diversity thing, but so what?

But there is no movie yet that describes the particular pickle that Harvard and other universities now are in. College is becoming an increasingly politically coded place, and President-elect Trump says they have to change or else.

The Boston Globe's Ilya Meretz was a visiting fellow at Harvard last year during the brief, troubled tenure of the university's first black leader. He picks up this hour with Claudine Gay, the woman whose critics called a diversity hire.

The brutal takedown of Harvard's first and only Black president seemed to register very little on the Harvard campus. This surprised me. It happened during winter break, sure, people were away. When they came back, I expected to see posters for assemblies and talks about what it all meant. I waited, and nothing happened. I started to feel like a house guest in one of those families where they don't discuss uncomfortable things.

I wondered what it must feel like to be Claudine Gay. On taking office, she had moved herself and her family into the grand mansion where Harvard presidents live. As a political scientist, she must have been delighted by the fact that it was once the home of Elbridge Gerry, the founding father who gave us the term gerrymandering. But within months, Gay was moving again, back out of the mansion. ♪

One day last April, I noticed Gay's name on the signboard outside Memorial Church. She would be speaking there. So I went. Welcome to the Appleton Chapel of our Memorial Church for our daily service of morning prayers. People arrived in ones and twos until there were about 70 of us seated in two banks of pews facing each other. Sunlight streamed in through the east windows.

— Our speaker this morning is Claudine Gay, the Wilbert A. Collett Professor of Government and African American Studies and former president of Harvard University. — Then a diminutive woman in those recognizable chunky glasses rose to the lectern. — Good morning. — She told a story. — When my mother emigrated from Haiti to the United States,

She came as a live-in nanny for a family here in the Boston area. The agreement with her and with the agency that had placed her was that the family would help her enroll in English language courses as the first step in her journey to college and eventually to a nursing career.

Claudette Gay, Claudine's mother, was quickly disappointed. Her household responsibilities grew and grew until the job came to feel like indentured servitude. There were no English classes. She felt trapped. But she wasn't stuck. She quietly began making weekly trips to the post office, each time sending off a small package, small enough to fit in her purse.

to an address in Brooklyn where an older sister lived. One day, Claudette walked out of the house and got on a Greyhound bus to New York. Years later, she would tell this story to her daughter Claudine. What I heard was an epic adventure story, and it elicited in me a mix of pride in my mother's ingenuity and envy that my own life was devoid of drama. Ha! Ha! Ha!

Gay said she realizes now that her mother told this story less as entertainment than as evidence. What a person will do when circumstances become intolerable. Though mind and body may feel unsettled by change, the soul delights in the act of starting over, even when the destination is not clear.

One day, I imagine, Claudine Gay's portrait will hang on a wall someplace at Harvard. People will walk by, maybe stop and wonder who she was and why she was in the job for not even one full year. I've been puzzling over this since I watched her flame out. What did it all mean?

I have come up with two answers to that question, and I'm going to give you both of these answers in this episode. The second answer, which we'll get to a little later this hour, is all about the present political moment. Polarization, social media, and the Trump-Vance administration's plans to attack universities. Their words, not mine.

The first answer has to do with the long and surprising history of a very potent, very American concept, one that was developed at Harvard and spread to the world. Diversity. So let's start there. When Claudine Gay was announced as Harvard's next president, there was grumbling because she hadn't published many articles or a book. This observation goes hand in hand with a belief I also heard as I reported this story, that Gay was a diversity hire.

People who know Claudine Gay professionally as a colleague describe her with words like thoughtful, intelligent, and good listener. She was low-key, low-drama. And you could argue that those qualities made her not the best pick for this moment in time. Still. A Black woman was made president of Harvard University. Randall Kennedy is a professor at Harvard Law School. He's written many books on race and the law. Now,

I'm sorry that her tenure was so short and that it was cut off in such a terrible way, but I don't think it should be forgotten that a black woman was president of the most famous university in the United States. Part of making that happen

was, you know, diversity consciousness. Kennedy heard the whispers and insinuations that she was chosen for her race, and he thinks this is true to a point, but also, so what? There are going to be some people who are going to, you know, sort of look at that and snicker and make that part of a deficiency story. Well, she must be deficient. And, you know, I think that's ridiculous. I look at the

social forces that made her presidency possible as on balance a good thing.

We're going to go deep now on Harvard and diversity because the conversation didn't begin with Claudine Gay. It stretches back decades, actually a whole century. In fact, you could say the whole idea of diversity in education was developed at Harvard and spread from there to all corners of the country.

To walk us through this history, our guides are Randall Kennedy, who you just met, and his colleague, another Harvard Law professor, Noah Feldman. I'm a Felix Frankfurter professor of law at the law school. Feldman pointed me to the very beginning of the diversity conversation. It goes back to a time before there were many black or brown people at Harvard. The discussion then was about Jews, and it wasn't pretty. ♪

At the start of the 20th century, Jews were arriving in America in large numbers from Eastern Europe. By the 1920s, their sons were taking the Harvard entrance exam and getting in. And people at Harvard did not like it. There's no very exact count, but people's estimates at the time put the number of Jews up at 20% of the population.

This led to concern and backlash from, among other people, A. Lawrence Lowell, who was the president of Harvard at the time. President Lowell fretted that the character of Harvard was changing and wrote that there was an urgent need to prevent a dangerous increase in their proportion of Jews.

What to do about it became a high priority, but Lowell's initial proposals to simply cap the number of Jews admitted didn't fly with the faculty. It was too much of a blunt instrument. And so he, with the assistance of advisors, came up with an alternative strategy. And this was a strategy they called the diversity strategy. And what it set out to do was to make Harvard a national university, drawing on people from all over the country. Diversity not to bring people in, but to keep them out.

This is the moment when Harvard moved to an admission system that looks more like what we know today, with interviews for applicants, an emphasis on character, and an effort to recruit from all over the nation, tools that enabled the school to have more of a say in its own student body. The point of this plan, the diversity plan, was to say, by making it a national school, we'll draw in people from Nebraska and Iowa, still men, of course, at the time, and diversity.

The idea was that the university would then be more diverse nationally. And by magic, it would also have very many fewer Jews because it wouldn't have urban ethnic Jews. And it worked. Jews continued to get into Harvard, but in smaller numbers. And hang on to Harvard's concept of diversity as a key principle in admissions because a few decades later, it comes into play again in a big Supreme Court case.

First case on today's calendar is number 76-811, Regents of the University of California against Bakke.

In the late 1970s, a white plaintiff named Alan Bakke claimed he'd been denied admission to the University of California Davis Medical School because of his race. Many colleges and universities had begun considering an applicant's background in response to the civil rights movement. They felt it was time to give opportunity to more minority students. Mr. Cox, you may proceed whenever you're ready. This was sometimes called...

affirmative action, but it wasn't clear whether it was constitutional. Mr. Chief Justice, may it please the court? The Bakke case involved a challenge to affirmative action in which the challengers claimed that affirmative action violated

violated the equal rights of white students who had the same scores as black students who were being admitted on the basis of there being an addition to diversity. Among the nine justices, there was a clear divide. Four justices said, essentially, affirmative action should be unconstitutional as a violation of equal protection.

Four justices said affirmative action should be perfectly constitutional because we have a history of racial exclusion and discrimination in the United States, and admitting students to remediate that history of discrimination is totally legitimate and doesn't violate equal protection. That left one swing justice, Lewis Powell, a white Virginian and Harvard Law grad, class of 32.

Powell was not ready to go with the four justices who supported affirmative action on the grounds of history. But he was also unwilling to close the door on the notion that the applicant's personal background could play some kind of role. He found a middle way in arguments made by Harvard, specifically by a slow-talking patrician Harvard law professor who was a bit of a legend. Certainly the objective of improving education through greater diversity,

His name was Archibald Cox. Here he is arguing for Harvard at the Supreme Court. There is no racially blind method of selection which will enroll today more than a trickle of minority students.

in the nation's colleges and professions. Randall Kennedy got to know Cox when Kennedy joined Harvard Law School in 1984, fresh from clerking for Justice Thurgood Marshall. There hadn't been many black people on the faculty, and Cox took an interest in his young colleague. You can tell just from the tenor of my voice, I remember him with tremendous fondness and respect and admiration. If he was being portrayed in a movie as

The directions would say, you want a person who looks like a Boston Brahmin. Cox was partial to bow ties and semi-rimless readers. But what he was famous for was being fired by President Nixon. Just a few years earlier, Cox was a special prosecutor investigating Watergate. He had refused to drop a subpoena for recordings Nixon secretly made of his own conversations in the White House, and he was canned.

That gave Cox a particular kind of gravitas as he went before the Supreme Court and sketched Harvard's idealistic vision for higher education as a vehicle for social advancement open to all. So that they, other younger boys and girls, may say, yes, it is possible for a black to go to University of Minnesota or to go to Harvard or Yale. I know Johnny down the street.

And I know Sammy's father, he became a liar, and John's father became a doctor. This is essential if we are ever going to give life.

true equality in a factual sense to people. And what Archibald Cox says was the community that we want to facilitate is a community in which individuals come here, they're selected to come here, and a lot of the learning comes from, you know, people learning from one another. Well, for people to learn from one another, won't that happen best if

if there is some degree of curated difference. It's not about repairing past wrongs, but about who's in the classroom. At that time, there was something novel about this idea. Diversity wasn't much of an important political, cultural term in the 1970s. There were other terms. Integration was a much bigger term.

You know, nobody was buying stock in diversity. But then in the 70s, the 80s, the 90s into the 2000s, diversity becomes more and more and more influential as an idea. Thanks in large part to the U.S. Supreme Court. Mr. Justice Powell will announce the judgment of the court tomorrow.

There is no opinion of the court supported by a majority. Justice Powell's one-man opinion carried the day. And in that opinion, Powell said diversity

Again, Noah Feldman. A majority of one.

Although the University of California was the school whose policies were being challenged, it was Harvard and law professor Archibald Cox who supplied the blueprint for race-conscious admissions to Justice Powell. Here's Powell at the Supreme Court. I refer, in my opinion, to the Harvard admissions program as one example of how race, properly, in my opinion, may be taken into account. Sometimes also called the Harvard Plan.

I will quote briefly from the description of the Harvard program, a copy of which is in the appendix to my opinion. And here I quote in substance, the committee, the admissions committee has not set target quotas for the number of blacks or musicians, football players, physicists. So in that moment in 1978, Harvard's diversity admission policy became the law of the land.

The difference it made is still much debated. But either way, universities adopted this approach. Student bodies did become more diverse. In 1991, Barack Obama graduated from Harvard Law. In time, corporate America embraced diversity. You can see diversity on TV and in movies and panel discussions. It's so everywhere, you notice when it's missing.

Again, Randall Kennedy. The diversity rationale says, you know, actually, the people that we are selecting are bringing something very special and very good to the table. I think this may be the very first time in the history of the United States in which a policy, a racial policy, actually valorized diversity.

People of color. Diversity doesn't dwell on history. It's inclusive. And so everyone, the whole community is going to be uplifted through diversity. At least in theory, everybody, you know, gets a role in the show. But in higher education specifically, affirmative action has always had its critics.

In 2022, the Supreme Court heard a major challenge to considering race in college admissions. The plaintiffs said that like Jews decades earlier, Asian Americans had become too successful for some people's comfort. Race-based affirmative action was used to keep their numbers down. The defendants were the University of North Carolina, a public institution, and Harvard. Noah Feldman says that was no accident. You didn't need Harvard, which is a private university.

They added Harvard to that same case because they wanted the oomph of being able to say diversity came from Harvard, diversity was bad from the start. The decision came down June 29th, 2023. The question in these cases is whether Harvard and UNC's programs are permissible under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. We conclude that they are not. Two days after that,

Claudine Gay formally assumed the job of Harvard president. Incredible timing. To my mind, not at all a coincidence that the Supreme Court strikes down the diversity rationale and then almost immediately the attacks on Claudine Gay start to depict her as, quote unquote, a diversity candidate with the intent of undermining her. For critics of diversity, depicting a president who was already in a lot of trouble

as a diversity candidate was a way of weakening diversity as a cultural category that can be used positively for anybody else in the future. Diversity is on the ropes and race-based affirmative action is legally dead. So what now? For me, racial affirmative action, I wrote a book defending it. I've been defending it. And then Kennedy said something that I did not expect. Is it the last word?

No, I don't think it's the last word. It may very well be that there are superior alternatives. It's even possible, it's even possible that the Supreme Court of the United States decision, which I don't like, it's possible that that decision will lead to better policies in the future. Life is just complicated like that.

Coming up, Black alumni of Harvard get together to process everything that just happened. This is On The Media. On The Media is supported by Rocket Money. Managing finances can feel complicated and time-consuming, right? But it doesn't have to be. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and aims to help lower your bills so you can grow your savings.

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I'm CNN tech reporter Claire Duffy. Claire Duffy was one of them. I cover artificial intelligence and other new technologies for a living. And even I sometimes get overwhelmed trying to keep up with it all. So I'm starting a new show where, together, we can explore how to experiment with these new tools without getting played by them. It's called Terms of Service. This technology is so crazy powerful. Follow CNN's Terms of Service wherever you get your podcasts.

This is On the Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. We're back with The Harvard Plan, our collaboration with the Boston Globe. The series started with a deep dive into the short and troubled leadership of Claudine Gay. But it soon became clear that there were much bigger forces at play in the crisis over America's institutions of higher learning. Here's reporter Ilya Maritz. How's everything going? Great.

Not long ago, I got a glimpse of all that 45 years of race-conscious admissions has accomplished. So this is called the Harvard Black Alumni Weekend. Mount Holyoke College President Danielle Hawley. It started, I think we had the first one maybe 20 years ago or so. Remember Hawley from our first episode?

She became a college president on the same day Claudine Gay did. We're sitting on a bench outside the Harvard Science Center. It's college weather, sweaters, autumn leaves, and all around us, Black Harvard grads in their 40s, 50s, and upwards are hanging out in little clusters.

as undergrads come and go on foot and on scooter. And so there are over a thousand alums this weekend, Black alums who are here to celebrate together. We spotted Alvin Bragg, the district attorney of Manhattan, and an actress from Riverdale. Oh, there's Soledad O'Brien right there. I hadn't really prepared for all the famouses, but yeah, of course. Whether it's Justice Jackson or President Obama or Eric Holder or Loretta Lynch,

Every major leader who's Black American in this country, the road to that leadership runs through the Ivy League schools and Howard. But if so, if you cut off access to Harvard, you're cutting off access to leadership in this country. In the days just before the Black Alumni Weekend, colleges started releasing the numbers on their first post-affirmative action classes.

At some schools, Black admissions are down a lot. Other places, there's no big change. At Harvard College, the percentage of Black freshmen is down four percentage points. At Harvard Law School, just recently, we learned Black admissions are down by more than half. No one I talked to at this gathering seemed to have an answer for what the post-affirmative action world should look like. Again, this was September, when it seemed possible that a Black woman lawyer might become the President of the United States."

Holly told me it was former Attorney General Loretta Lynch who brought the most fire in her talk. We will not back down from the notion that we belong here. And there's a sense that many of us have sacrificed quite a bit personally to contribute, build this place up. And then we see one more famous person. Oh, but here's President Gay right here.

Claudine Gay is making her way across the plaza. People keep stopping her, wanting to talk. She's wearing crimson flats and a very colorful dress. Holly and I sort of hover nearby, waiting for an opening. Holly wants a selfie. I just want to introduce myself. In person, Gay is warm and relaxed. Here, this weekend, she's been celebrated.

While I stand just a little to the side, the women kibitz. I notice they're now holding hands, swinging their arms. We would love to have you come to Mount Holyoke. Yeah, yeah. Next year, I'm on sabbatical. I know you're on sabbatical. But whenever, and it doesn't even have to be, but like whenever. Yeah, I know. I know. And you were at the new president's thing. We were at the new president's together. Oh my gosh.

After Gay moved on, Danielle Hawley told me she had expected this weekend to be something like a reckoning or a family conversation. It hasn't been that at all. I think it's really been more about, wow, you know, look what this community has been able to do. And look what the institution for years believed was important for it to do. And I think the question is, does the institution still believe that?

There is a movement in the opposite direction to take the Supreme Court's decision and the DEI backlash and decisively lock racial diversity out of the university's goals and its gaining ground.

I want to reintroduce someone we met in the first episode of this series, Sam Lesson, Harvard College class of '05, California venture capitalist, friend of Mark Zuckerberg's. You know, I'm a stereotypical Silicon Valley guy. Lesson is the one who used to defend Harvard when his friends complained about trigger warnings and political correctness.

He had an awakening after Hamas attacked Israel. I'm the one who's wrong here, and that sucks. If you think of Bill Ackman or Chris Ruffo as the clean-cut Harvard grads who fanned the flames of outrage... Does Harvard value veritas or truth, or does Harvard value DEI and... True free speech has been curtailed on many campuses, and conservative voices have been shouted down. Lesson shares some of their views, but his approach is different.

There's a lot I respect about Bill Ackman, a lot of the good I think he's done. But I also think, you know, from a purely political, how do you fix things perspective, there's a difference between the aggressive yell at things versus give people paths forward, right? And so I think that's like the interesting balance to play in terms of saying, no, I want substantive change and revival. I don't want to just be mad.

Lesson takes meetings from a standing desk at home. He has the kind of just-rolled-out-of-bed hair some people would pay a lot of money for.

And he's running a marathon, not a sprint. We checked in a bunch of times while I was working on this series. He has a plan. He's been circulating a 97-page slide deck about how Harvard should change. There's a weekly newsletter with 20,000 subscribers and counting. Lesson is talking with donors about how they can leverage their dollars for accountability. We believe the school needs to refocus on academic excellence, improving governance,

real free speech and free inquiry. Like, there's a bunch of themes we have. Notice diversity is not one of the core values. Lesson thinks it's a mistake to try to solve bigger social problems through university admissions policies. He's okay with what the Supreme Court did.

I actually believe this was the right decision, right? Which is, how can we as a society say that it should matter, you know, what the color of your skin is in terms of who gets into college? That's crazy, right? By the way, Lesson's father and sister went to Harvard, too. I asked him about that. He told me doing away with legacy admissions is, quote, a valid conversation.

But he worries that the kind of classroom environment where students learn from each other is more difficult to achieve today with people growing up online. They created a sense of identity and purpose and meaning by being extreme. And you say, oh, now we want you to go to college and we want you to be in a diverse community and work with all these people that you're not going to agree with completely anymore.

And they all come in like atoms just bouncing off of each other. You're supposed to learn to learn from people you don't agree with. It's just like, it's oil and water, right, is what's going on. You're a Facebook guy. I mean, do you blame...

No. Facebook, you believe social media? No, social media, like, I think the answer is I think it's like such a simplistic read, right? Like, you know, people love scapegoats, right? Like, because it's fun. Okay, so I put him on the defensive a little. He said, it's not social media per se, but the underlying technology and what it enables. Lesson told me in his ideal world, universities would be monasteries of truth, less online, more focused on IRL debate and discussion.

They defend the truth. They search out the truth. They look for the best of the best to do that. They train the best, etc. And in that world, I think it would be great for them to be set up in such a way that they have incredible independence from any politics, right? Well, sure. But especially after what happened to Claudine Gay, that is increasingly hard to do. Good evening, Milwaukee!

Representative Elise Stefanik, the tormentor of college presidents, took a victory lap in primetime at the Republican National Convention last summer. Who saw that congressional hearing with the college presidents of so-called elite universities? As if to declare, yeah, college is political now. Suck it up. Former presidents. This year, Republicans campaigned against universities. It is a big change.

They used to talk about making college more accessible. Now they're saying college itself is bad. The time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical left. And this little nugget from then-candidate Donald Trump made Hillary Burns, the Globe's higher education reporter, sit up straight. Our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system.

Accreditation, a secret weapon. No one knows what accreditors do or what they are, and they certainly have never been the topic of a political campaign. So I think it has everyone on edge. Accreditor is this totally obscure job. You really only pay attention to the accreditor when a college closes. That's where you get the alert from, the accreditor. Accreditors come under the oversight of the Department of Education.

They are like the quality assurance. You can kind of think of it as like they work for the consumer and they do visits to colleges. They call out when colleges are, you know, doing something not good. Like we've seen colleges that have closed sometimes at the end when they're financially crunched, they start doing things that lessen the quality. And that's where the accreditor steps in and says, you know, this isn't OK.

When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxists, maniacs, and lunatics. We will then accept applications for new accreditors who will impose real standards on colleges once again and once and for all.

Trump, who is the founder of the now-defunct, never-accredited Trump University, says he'll pressure schools to refocus curricula on Western civilization, American tradition, and of course, to get rid of DEI. There are other levers at his disposal. Investigations, taxes on endowments, cuts to research funding.

It's all on the table. Do universities have like a plan to deal with this? Are they ready for this? Universities have been very quiet since the election. That's something I've been speaking with people about. Universities have so many fires they need to be watching right now. Like not only it's their finances and their academic freedom, but also their education.

Their students and their professors, their employees are being threatened with many of Trump's immigration policies. Trump has said he'd deport foreign students who join pro-Palestine protests. And many universities have responded. They want all international staff, faculty and students getting back to campus before Trump takes office in January, just in case they can't get them back here.

What I'm hearing from higher education watchers and lawyers who are working on this is that universities are doing the work behind the scenes, like quietly, because they don't want a target on their back. The tools, the pressure points, were always there. But it's new that there are politicians willing and empowered to use them. Coming up, J.D. Vance's plan to attack the universities looks to Viktor Orban's Hungary for inspiration. This is On the Media. On the Media.

On the Media is supported by Rocket Money. Managing finances can feel complicated and time-consuming, right? But it doesn't have to be. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and aims to help lower your bills so you can grow your savings.

See all of your subscriptions in one place, and for those you don't want anymore, Rocket Money can help you cancel them. Rocket Money's dashboard also gives you a clear view of your expenses across all your accounts and can help you easily create a personalized budget with custom categories to help keep your spending on track.

Whether your goal is to pay off credit card debt, put away money for a house, or just build your savings, Rocket Money makes it easy. Rocket Money has over 500 million users and has saved users a total of $500 million in canceled subscriptions.

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I'm CNN tech reporter Claire Duffy. Claire Duffy was one of us. I cover artificial intelligence and other new technologies for a living. And even I sometimes get overwhelmed trying to keep up with it all. So I'm starting a new show where, together, we can explore how to experiment with these new tools without getting played by them. It's called Terms of Service. This technology is so crazy powerful. Follow CNN's Terms of Service wherever you get your podcasts.

This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger. We're back with the final part of the Harvard Plan, our collaboration with the Boston Globe, looking at the growing battles over American universities.

Earlier in this hour, we delved into the history of diversity in American college admissions, part one of Ilya's answer as to what exactly happened last year at Harvard. Now we get to part two, the politics of our current moment.

So much of what we want to accomplish, vice president-elect J.D. Vance, so much of what we want to do in this movement and in this country, I think are fundamentally dependent on going through a set of very hostile institutions, specifically the universities. Vance gave this speech in 2021 when he was running for Senate from Ohio.

Everything about it is blunt, starting with the title, The Universities Are the Enemy. I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country. Next, Vance explains the concept of red-pilling.

If you don't know it, it comes from the movie The Matrix, which, as I understand it, is made by a couple of people who do not share the politics of the people in this room. The writer-directors of the film are siblings and trans women and critics of Donald Trump. Still, there is an idea in their movie that people on the right love. The basic idea is that once you see the way that knowledge is transmitted, once you see the way that public policy works in this country, it's very hard to unsee it.

He runs the audience through some examples of campus liberals taking things too far. This, of course, is the key ingredient in all conversion narratives about universities. A pogrom started on social media. The guy was turned into... And it's effective because, you know, enough of it is true or feels right. People came out suggesting that gender transition surgeries and hormonal therapies for adolescents...

When I was at Harvard, I had a class where the students routinely reached for words like colonialism or oppression.

I found that annoying. A student who invited a bunch of students over to his house in a joking way has been threatened by the diversity bureaucracy at Yale Law School. Vance speaks with the fluency of an insider. He graduated Yale Law School in 2013. I really want to end this on an inspirational note. I'm including the end of his speech because it contains this weird historical coda that

Vance says he looked for a quote from scripture or from history. And the person whose quote I ultimately had to land on was the great prophet and statesman Richard Milhouse Nixon. Vance releases a little smile, and his eyes sweep the room, as if to say, are you ready for the mic drop? There was a wisdom in what Richard Nixon said approximately 40, 50 years ago. He said, and I quote, the professors are the enemy.

The end. The professors are the enemy. I want to underline what a choice this is. President Nixon said those words not in public, not in a speech, but in a secret recording made in the Oval Office in 1972, right after he won a landslide re-election. The tape was only released to the public in 2008. You'd have to be a Nixon scholar or a fanboy to really know about it. The press is the enemy.

Not long after Nixon said those words, the special counsel investigating Watergate requested some of his Oval Office tapes. Nixon resisted. When the special counsel refused to drop his subpoena, he was fired.

I tell you this because the special counsel was, of course, Archibald Cox. The same Archibald Cox who wore bow ties and taught at Harvard Law School. The same Archibald Cox who convinced the Supreme Court to uphold race-based affirmative action on the grounds of diversity.

I want to ask you about some of the things you've said about American universities. I know you've been very critical of them. CBS's Margaret Brennan had J.D. Vance on Face the Nation in August, shortly after he became the Republican candidate for vice president. By now, Vance had a specific model in mind for the change he wants to see. You gave an interview in February. You said, "...the closest conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with the left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orban's approach in Hungary."

Hungary's strongman president, Viktor Orban, grabbed control of state universities, putting friends from his political party in charge of the foundations that run them. Gender studies have been banned.

Hungary is now ranked lower for academic freedom than Sudan and just ahead of Uzbekistan, far below where it was when Orban intervened. Is that what you're advocating be done in the United States? Well, Margaret, what you're seeing in the United States, actually, is that universities are controlled by left-wing foundations. They're not controlled by the American taxpayer. And yet the American taxpayer is sending hundreds of billions of dollars to these universities every single year. I don't want taxpayers controlling education, necessarily. Is that what you're advocating for, federal government?

Margaret, what I'm advocating for is for taxpayers to have a say in how their money is spent. Does J.D. Vance admire Hungary because it's producing, like,

better graduates and like finer research and like more medical breakthroughs. I went back to Hillary Burns, the Globe's higher education reporter. I have not heard anything about that. I think we've only heard that he admires the government policing what's taught and how the universities run. There's no shortage of authoritarian governments around the world at this moment, and there have been many in the past. What do we know about universities in authoritarian systems?

So I asked a professor I spoke with over the summer, a CUNY professor, Benjamin Hett, about why is it that universities are among the first targets for authoritarian leaders? And his answer was quite simple. He said, because professors tend to tell them they're wrong. Who likes that? And I think that it's safe to say authoritarian governments

the people who are establishing truths and who are studying and researching controversial and difficult topics. That's a playbook that we've seen throughout history. And I think that's really concerning for anyone who cares about the truth or is in the truth business. In the new administration, uncooperative colleges could lose access to federally backed student loan programs, to research grants, endowment taxes could grow. We absolutely are thinking about that.

I went back to Mount Holyoke President Danielle Hawley one more time. How would we self-fund, for example, our entire financial aid system? We're in a conference room. Because it's a women's college, almost all the oil portraits on the walls are of women, which makes a nice change.

You know, if there's no funding for Pell Grants, if there is complete privatization of the loan system that we have, how will we be able to help parents and students? We're lucky we're a small liberal arts college. We believe that we actually probably have the resources to self-fund for four years or however the defunding lasts. But many colleges and universities don't have that choice.

Holly had read some of Vance's words before, but she hadn't seen the speech, so I played some of it for her. It's breathtaking.

It's truly breathtaking. When we ask the question of why universities, I think you heard a lot of it in that answer, which is they get to control what the truth is. The universities which control the knowledge in our society, which control what we call truth and what we call falsity, that provides research, that gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in our country. So if the truth is malleable, it's

If the truth is just something that we play out on social media, but there is no actual truth. I think when you put universities in the bullseye, you're essentially putting concepts like knowledge and truth, even values, what is right and what is wrong. All of those things are being called into question.

It lines up with something Holly recently noticed. When people find out what she does for work, they're sometimes skeptical or even hostile. I've had people in airports and on airplanes ask me, like, so what do you teach? And, you know, what are you doing in terms of indoctrination of students? Because, again, it's become such a—we've become like the tobacco industry, almost, for some people. They see us as a harm to the republic, as a harm to—

to their values and to their communities. She says it started in 2020 or 2021. That's when you began to hear a lot of this. And remember Ron DeSantis, of course, in Florida. When Florida did its own strong-arm reboot of education, at one public college, the gender studies program was axed, and more than a third of the faculty left the school. You know, it's early days. We don't know how much of a focus it's going to be in the end. We don't know

No.

There are no compromises to be made. For me, my job is to promote the mission of my institution and to make sure that the students here get the best education possible. Do you think most college presidents are going to take the same position as you? Absolutely not.

I think what we will see is that we will see many institutions, we see that already, who are scraping their websites. They're being very neutral. They're trying to stay under the radar. And all of this, again, is understandable as a college leader. If I were leading a large Research 1 institution, I would absolutely be positioning, I think, my university to probably keep as much federal funding as possible.

In the end of the day, who's going to defend the universities from the federal government, like from these entities? Normally, it'd be people like me, right?

Again, Sam Lesson, Silicon Valley guy and alumni activist. I followed up with him after the election. Who would say, let's pursue truth at all costs, stay out of these schools, etc. And I'm at the point where I'm like, look, I still believe that intellectually, but practically speaking, you don't really have a leg to stand on, right? It's hard to defend the activities that have been happening on campus. A few years ago, in a speech, J.D. Vance said...

"We need to attack the universities," he said, "professors are the enemy." Do you have any concern about that kind of rhetoric? You know, here's my thing on rhetoric, is I think we live in this very split world at this point, where everyone's scared of everyone else, right? Lesson contrasted Kamala Harris' careful, more scripted media strategy with that of her opponents. People make fun of Trump for spitballing live for hours. It's actually a very reasonable strategy. Before landing on what he thinks of Vance's words. Yeah, that's a little intense.

Is it completely wrong? Like, are there some crazy liberal professors who are using the brands they're associated with as a political platform and are not pursuing truth? Yes, that is definitely true, right? Again, does it scare me? As a one-off, sure, if you plucked it out and said this is one point of platform, it's not great. But I don't think it's completely unreasonable in a spitballing sense. And I think people need to give some grace, right, to this different communication strategy.

In Sam Lesson's world, J.D. Vance gets grace, but universities don't. They are under obligation to police their students, their professors and administrators, to police themselves, or risk being on the wrong side of the government. Harvard's new president, Alan Garber, has told faculty he's worried. The Republican talk about significant increases in endowment taxes, quote, keeps me up at night, the Harvard Crimson reported him as saying.

Harvard has recently made some changes that may help it with the incoming administration. It did away with diversity statements for applicants to join the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. It adopted a policy on institutional voice, similar to Danielle Hawley's statement on statements. The new guidance says Harvard will only talk about stuff pertaining to Harvard and higher ed. But will it even do that? Again, Danielle Hawley. We need to watch carefully for the next four years.

will get in line, who will be ready to participate and cooperate with the notion that we must readjust our academic programs and academic freedom, what we teach in our classrooms, to conform to what the current federal government wants us to do. At the beginning of this series, I told you that Harvard is all about power, studying it, forming the people who will hold it.

I was skeptical, but also intrigued. So I signed up for one of those power classes, a one-week course during winter break. 80 people in a classroom, UN-style horseshoe with name placards. We watched film clips, discussed readings, heard from speakers. It was great. That class started six days after Claudine Gay resigned. We never talked once about the grand power play that had just taken place at our own institution, at least not in class.

I sat there the whole time wondering what lessons can be learned from what happened to Claudine Gay. Here are three that I landed on. One, we know social media fuels instant judgment. That is kryptonite for institutions that like to go slow. Two, attacking things is a way to build your own power. That's not a left or right thing. It's just how things work. And three, anyone making a historic change should prepare for a backlash.

If colleges and universities are going to survive and thrive, they need to look at the storm that blew through Harvard and start learning lessons fast.

A lot of people helped me to make this series. This list is incomplete, but it includes Anne-Marie Lipinski and everyone at the Nieman Foundation, my 2024 Nieman Fellows and affiliates, including Denise and Mike Cheda and Andrea Patino Contreras and Will Moose. Also, Ian Koss and Kelsey Tasowski, Jed Willard, Rebecca Lavoie,

Many professors, administrators, alumni, and others at Harvard who are patient with their time and generous with their knowledge. The Harvard Crimson for its excellent reporting. And at the Boston Globe, special thanks to Mike Damiano, Shirley Leung, Deirdre Fernandez, Adrian Walker, Aidan Ryan, Hillary Burns, Andrew Ryan, Jen Peter, and Nancy Barnes.

The Harvard Plan is a collaboration with the Boston Globe. The production team includes me, Jasmine Aguilera, Emily Botin, Regina DeHeer, Jared Paul, and the Globe's head of audio, Kristen Nelson.

On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondio, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wong. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondio is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger.

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