Donald Trump’s Cabinet of Influencers. Plus, The Harvard Plan.
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Pete Hegseth here. I'm here to tell you about another freedom-loving company. Donald Trump is cultivating a cabinet of influencer politicians, and they're out to sell. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Harvard is the nation's oldest and richest university. Yay! Yay!

But last fall, that offered no protection when a social media-fueled fight over Harvard and its new president broke out. And Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no? Claudia Gay is now gone.

We've exposed the DEI regime, and there's much more to come. Tune in for the first episode in a miniseries that we produced with the Boston Globe about the leadership crisis at Harvard and what it spells for universities writ large. It's all coming up after this. On the Media is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.

From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. For the last couple of weeks, the headlines have run us over with the president-elect's cabinet picks. From a man who likes to drink at work and is accused of sexual assault for Secretary of Defense, to a senator who proudly confessed to shooting her dog for Homeland Security chief.

This ain't your father's cabinet. And other than being underqualified for their proposed positions, there's something else that a lot of Trump's picks have in common.

This is sound from a video that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services nominee, shared with his 3.2 million followers on TikTok. He's standing in this room in a nondescript location, covered in sweat. He's surrounded by these fairly young, you know, 20, 30 somethings.

Drew Harwell, Washington Post tech reporter, wrote about the video, which is an advertisement for a game called Boxballin'. It's like a little bouncy ball that you strap to your head, and he's just like airboxing this bouncy ball, and then he gets like a high score and everybody cheers. Yeah!

This is a box bowl and the ideal stocking stuffer. When I'm on the road, I try to use it as often as I can because it keeps up my hand-eye coordination and it gives me a workout. It's a popular piece of sponsored content on TikTok. So you'll see this from like Khloe Kardashian and Bill Gates doing this.

But it's just so strange because, you know, this is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., right? Yeah, it's kind of unbecoming of a potentially incoming government official, no? You know, it's not just RFK, but it's people like Dr. Oz, Mehmet Oz, a celebrity doctor, a longtime TV personality who Trump has named to run Medicare and Medicaid. And he online is...

is the celebrity endorser of something called iHerb. - I'm Dr. Oz. I'm so excited to partner with iHerb. What is iHerb? They're an online health and wellness store that sells tens of thousands of high quality products from here. - And even days after he was named to lead the agency, he was telling people, "Hey, if you're stressed from Thanksgiving,

buy this adaptogen called ashwagandha ashwagandha which regulates metabolism and calms how your brain reacts to stress it also seems to help with my exhausted thyroid which i'm not alone with this problem so i can keep up with my relatives better during our annual thanksgiving football game

Happy Thanksgiving. You have Pete Hegseth, the former Fox & Friends weekend co-host, tapped by Trump for Secretary of Defense. Who not only hawks his book, The War on Warriors, but also shills for this soap that kind of looks like a grenade.

Bam. This company is called One Man Army. They love the country. They're patriots, they're anti-woke, and they're 100% American-made. These people are not just, like, political-facing figures, but they are...

in every way, influencers. They have big audiences, they have big followings, and they use that attention and capitalize on it in a way that allows them to, yeah, sell products, get promotional sponsorships, get money on the side, and boost their own personal brands.

In addition to RFK Jr., Pete Hegseth, Dr. Oz, we also have Matt Gaetz, who just after withdrawing his name from the attorney general nomination, signed up for Cameo, which is the site where you can pay influencers and celebrities to record personalized messages. Yeah, and it's wild because within hours of

stepping down from consideration for Attorney General, right? This huge role. He seemingly immediately went on Cameo, created an account, and people are paying him $500 or more for a two-minute roast or advice or like birdcage.

birthday thing. Hey, Jacqueline, it's Matt Gaetz. Happy 57th birthday. I went to his page and found this one, which he appears to have filmed while driving on the highway. It sounds like you've had quite a ride over these last 57 years and you've got an amazing...

The Cameo pivot was pioneered famously by George Santos, who's made a killing on the site since he was expelled from Congress last year. Tonight, George Santos' second act, hundreds of requests to record personalized videos on the website Cameo. His fee has now jumped to $350, and Santos is loving it. My favorite TS song is definitely going to be Trouble. I knew you were trouble when you walked in.

That's me. Bye! Then there's Kash Patel, Trump's pick for FBI director. Back in 2021, after serving in the first Trump administration and earning notoriety as a conspiracy theorist obsessed with the deep state, Patel struggled to find his second act.

When Kash Patel comes out of the administration, he is incredibly frustrated that, as one source told me, he's not getting offers from places like Raytheon or Boeing, seats on their boards. Elena Plot-Colabro profiled Kash Patel for The Atlantic. And so without those sort of

plummy salaried positions, he starts cobbling together various other income streams in large part through the selling of merchandise, cash branded merchandise. A lot of the proceeds of which he says goes to a foundation he started called the Cash Foundation, the mission of which is really vague and details of which are very hard to come by even in filings with the IRS. And

And the merch, I should say, really runs the gamut. You have your Cash Crew polo tees. You have your Cash scarves, rhino tanks, basically anything that can be branded with K-A-Dollar sign H. Cash Fatale has probably sold it. There's Cash Wine. Six bottles of official Cash Wine for $233.99. But as of this recording, I believe it's sold out. There was a market for it. Another thing he did that...

I think is useful to mention. He did a lot of endorsement deals with these QAnon friendly, French friendly companies. So he would peddle on his truth social profile, these pills that claim to, if you've gotten the COVID vaccination, maybe flush the spike proteins out of your system. There's no evidence that these do what they say they do, but he has marketed them quite extensively.

All of this to say is that he was able to effectively commodify his relationship with the former president. It's also following a model set by Donald Trump himself. He's a big name influencer. And I said to him, knowing nothing about influences, I said,

Who is the biggest of all the influences? Here's Trump on Flagrant, a comedy podcast in October, recounting a discussion with one of his aides. Who is it? You, sir. It's true. I said, you. I never thought of it.

He said, you're the biggest. You have hundreds of millions of people. You have more people than anybody else by far. This blurring of politicians and influencers is part of a larger phenomenon that media studies professor Sophie Bishop calls influencer creep. Here's Drew Harwell. Not too long ago, we saw influencers as this side group of dilettantes, basically, right? Yeah.

people who were good at self-promoting online, but were not traditional media people. They weren't singers, actors, they were just influencers. But what they were really good at was building an audience, building a following online, posting really regularly, and a

A lot of those tactics are now being picked up by these traditional media figures who never had to do stuff like that before, but are now adopting those tactics because they work. Politicians are seeing influencer creep too. They know that attention is

a currency in the modern era, and that one way to do that is to reach people through their phones and online because we're all online all the time. These platforms allow them to speak our language. It allows them to kind of interact with us in a light and often superficial way, which is not consistent with the gravity of their power, right?

Yeah, exactly. What we really need to do to politicians is to evaluate who they are as a political leader and not just like a sharer of memes on TikTok. We've always expected those people to make decisions based off of...

what's right for the American people, not necessarily like what company landed a partnership deal with them. Hey Cameo, it's your girl from Colorado, Lauren Boebert. I am so excited to be joining another platform where I can connect directly with supporters. Unfortunately for Republican Representative Lauren Boebert, a House rule that prohibits paid speaking gigs forced her to shut down her Cameo account shortly after she launched it last month.

And it remains to be seen whether incoming White House officials will observe similar rules and norms or apply them evenly. During his first term, Trump's counselor, Kellyanne Conway, got a slap on the wrist for telling Fox News viewers to buy Ivanka Trump's fashion line. Go buy Ivanka's stuff is what I would say. I'm going to go get some on myself today.

It's a wonderful line. I own some of it. I fully I'm going to just give it. I'm going to give a free commercial. Of course, there are also more lucrative and less public ways for politicians to cash in and abuse their power. Trump's first term Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price both resigned in corruption and ethics scandals. Neither were influencers.

Meanwhile, members of Congress in both parties are free to own and trade stocks despite, you know, reviewing non-public information for a living. As far as we can tell from his cabinet picks so far, Trump seems to be prioritizing loyalty, charisma, and reach above all else.

Drew Harwell. I think about people like Vivek Ramaswamy, who, you know, former pharmaceutical executive, now big right-wing influencer, who will be helping Elon Musk with this promise to slash trillions off the government budget. How they're going to do that, we still don't really know, except that Ramaswamy has said they're going to do a Doge podcast where they're going to lay out in very colorful detail what they want to slash and why.

That marketing vessel is going to push out Trump views, right?

relentlessly. And there's going to be a big audience for it. It's going to get social media traction. He doesn't have to go through a middleman of traditional media people testing the bounds of it, asking questions about it, having that adversarial relationship. They have the microphone and they can say whatever they want and frame it however they want. We've heard similar plans about sidestepping legacy media from Trump's inner circle. We had the conversation about opening up the

the press room to a lot of these independent journalists. Here's Donald Trump Jr. on Triggered, his podcast. Why should, if the New York Times has lied, they've been adverse to everything, they're functioning as the marketing arm of the Democrat Party.

Like, why not open it up to people who have larger viewerships, stronger followings? As one Trump insider told Politico last month, quote, I could very well see a press briefing room where Maggie Haberman sits next to Joe Rogan. You know, I think in a situation like that, it will be interesting to see because they do have different goals. So, Drew, how should the press go about covering and thinking about

politicians who are increasingly becoming more like influencers every day.

Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, my first thought is that we have to take this seriously. It is a big part of American culture and life. It is bigger in many people's lives than the traditional media. And we just have to take it seriously. And part of that is understanding it, immersing ourselves into it. You know, people are not

into listening to Joe Rogan, they turn it on because it does something for them. They get something out of it. Same thing with Don Jr.'s podcast. So I think part of it is just accepting that this influencer creep situation is not going away and that's going to be affecting how people understand our democracy for a long time.

Drew Harwell is a technology reporter for The Washington Post and author of the recent article, Trump and Allies Blur the Lines Between Politician and Influencer. Drew, thank you very much. Yeah, thanks. Coming up, a behind-the-scenes look at what went on after the presidents of three of the most exclusive universities in the country were hauled up in front of Congress. This is On the Media.

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With the conclusion of the election and Donald Trump heading back to the White House, there are a lot of changes and questions coming. I'm Scott Schaefer. And I'm Marisa Lagos. We are the host of Political Breakdown, a podcast covering all the top political news with new episodes every weekday. Trump is making big promises. This will truly be the golden age of America. There's a lot of ways the next four years can go. And the Political Breakdown team is in it with you. Find Political Breakdown wherever you listen to podcasts.

This is On the Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. On December 5th, 2023, the presidents of three private universities went before Congress for a hearing titled Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism.

This took place against the background of almost wall-to-wall coverage of the pro-Palestinian campus protests following the Hamas attack on Israel and Israel's subsequent war in Gaza.

As a fact-finding exercise, the congressional hearing deserved a D-, but as TV, A+. Must watch. Here's Harvard's then-president Claudine Gay being questioned by Representative Elise Stefanik. So based upon your testimony, you understand that this call for Intifada is to commit genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally, correct? Correct.

I will say again, that type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me. Do you believe that type of hateful speech is contrary to Harvard's code of conduct, or is it allowed at Harvard?

It is at odds with the values of Harvard. Can you not say here that it is against the code of conduct at Harvard? Within weeks, two of the three presidents at that hearing had resigned, gay among them. And more college presidents have since quit, worn out by the demands of their increasingly trying jobs.

Meanwhile, university critics are on the rise. Stefanik, Harvard class of 2006, was nominated by President-elect Trump to be the next American ambassador to the United Nations. And then there's incoming Vice President J.D. Vance. We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country. Like Stefanik, he knows them from the inside.

I'm an alumnus of Yale Law School at the ridiculous, thank you, boo. The story of Harvard's leadership crisis is the subject of a new three-part series we produced in collaboration with the Boston Globe.

Ilya Maritz, our former colleague and occasional fill-in host, is the host of this series. And over the next three weeks, we'll investigate the forces that brought down Harvard's president and revealed the plan that the incoming administration and others have for all institutions of higher learning in America. We're calling the series The Harvard Plan. Here's Ilya.

Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America. The governing board calls itself the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere. If Harvard were a human being, its endowment alone would make it the 18th richest billionaire on the Forbes list. I spent a year at Harvard as a visiting journalist on a fellowship. From the moment I arrived, I kept noticing how much people at Harvard think about power, analyzing it, quantifying it, forming the people who will hold it.

Just this past semester, the course catalog included more than 250 classes with the word leadership in their description. Leadership, as I eventually figured out, is Harvard-speak for power.

When I first got there in the fall of 2023, I'd go to the main library and roam the stacks, inhaling the scent of old books. And on my way back out, I'd pause at the top of the granite steps and look across the yard, crisscrossed by footpaths. Workers were hanging banners, building a stage for a big party. Harvard was about to inaugurate a new president.

Nobody knew then that the aftermath of that celebration would be a spectacular torching of Harvard's reputation, that Harvard's own assumptions about how power works, its own blind spots, would be used against it by a bunch of Harvard grads. And then, one Friday in September, the brass band struck up a tune and the celebration began. ♪

I think no one expected that it's going to be so rainy. This is my friend Sonia Groysman. She's a journalist from Russia. She and I went to the inauguration together. We sat on folding chairs as it started to drizzle. And I remember us saying something like, oh, it's like at Harry Potter, remember? It really did look like Hogwarts, with all these professors in colorful robes and mortarboard caps passing by.

When Harvard's new president, Claudine Gay, swept past, I snapped a photo. I still have it on my phone. Here's a Black woman with short hair and chunky glasses, smiling, waving. Her body language says, thank you for throwing me this party you really shouldn't have. If her inauguration had a one-word theme, it was...

This community is thrilled by her historic appointment as Harvard's first Black leader and its only second women president. Gay's parents immigrated to the United States from Haiti. Many students felt that this moment called us to repair past harms. One speaker after another talked about this event as historic, as a kind of correction. Many look to our next president to guide us through this reckoning.

We are lucky enough to have found that person in President Gay.

As a scholar, Gay studied Black participation in politics. Later, she became an administrator, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. So here was change grafted onto tradition. I invite President Emeritus Lawrence Summers to present two silver keys, which represent the opening of doors to knowledge and truth.

For much of the ceremony, Larry Summers, probably the most famous living former Harvard president, was sitting with his fingertips pressed together, looking grim. Now he rose to give Gay a pair of very oversized keys on a ring, and she held them up for everyone to see.

There is something about this moment. It's not only the visual of a new president who looks different from her predecessors, it's also the timing. Harvard had just lost a major legal challenge to its admissions policies that went all the way to the Supreme Court. At stake, the future of race-based affirmative action. We'll hear argument next in case 2011-99, students for fair admissions versus the president and fellows of Harvard College. Mr. Norris?

The court ruled against the university, overturning almost five decades of precedent. The ruling would set the guidelines not only for Harvard, but for nearly all colleges and universities. Madam President, the chair is yours. Thank you. And thank you for soldiering through the rain. The theme of Gay's inaugural speech was courage. The courage to ask why, why not. The courage to pose the questions that lead to research breakthroughs and great insights—

Without directly addressing the Supreme Court, Gay said Harvard has a commitment. To draw from a deeper pool of talent and provide our institution with the excellence it deserves and our diverse society with the leaders it needs and expects. But what really stands out, watching it now after everything that's happened, is that Claudine Gay's speech today

kind of anticipates what's to come. - We are in a moment of declining trust in institutions of all kinds, of endless access to information, but doubts and conflict about who and what to believe.

of political polarization so extreme that gridlock is preferred to pragmatic collaboration. Her read on this is pretty precise, but her ideas for rebuilding trust are hazy. It lies partly in our courage to face our imperfections and mistakes, to turn outward with a fresh and open spirit, meeting a doubtful and restless society with audacious and uplifting ambitions.

It was Friday, September 29th, 2023. President Gay, you got this. Anything seemed possible. And we got you. This series is about what happened next.

about the very strange, very fast sequence of events that led to the premature end of Claudine Gay's presidency and a pretty major change of direction across American institutions, the same institutions Gay worried were losing public trust. More university presidents quit. More companies backed off efforts aimed at diversity and racial reconciliation. The thing that set it all off? A letter from a group hardly anyone had heard of about a war thousands of miles away.

Imagine that you came from Mars and said, I'm trying to learn about you strange people on Earth. Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman. And I know that on October 7, Hamas attacked Israel. And I know that three months later, give or take, Claudine Gay resigned the presidency. And I know there's some connection, but what was it again? It would take a whole podcast or a whole book to try to explain it. And even then, the Martian would still say probably nothing.

Gosh, you people, you're living in a very strange and complicated world. Most of the voices you're going to hear in this series come with advanced degrees, many of them Harvard degrees.

These denizens of the Success Factory have much in common, but this crisis divides them. I was deeply saddened. I still am deeply saddened by it. I thought that she was mistreated. I wanted her to be fired because of failures of leadership, failure to stop an emergence of anti-Semitism on campus. Because of gender and race, you don't get any credits. All those credits you think you've been building up for years, the credits are always at zero.

So

So it was over the weekend. It was Saturday night. This is my Boston Globe colleague, Hilary Burns, who covers higher education. I was in Vermont, you know, not working, but obviously the news of October 7th was all over the news. We have breaking news out of Israel this morning, where Hamas has launched a surprise attack within Israel's borders overnight. Thousands of rockets were fired into Israel as gunmen infiltrated several border towns and bases, kidnapping civilians and soldiers.

Within hours, Hillary Burns heard that a Harvard student group had put out a letter that was getting noticed. I remember thinking people were going to be very angry about this. The letter was written by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and originally co-signed by 33 other Harvard student organizations. And it blamed Israel entirely for the attack. Quote,

Today's events did not occur in a vacuum, the statement reads. For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel's violence. The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. I knew that this issue in particular had been so divisive and contentious over the years before this. It caused a lot of rifts at Harvard in the past.

By Monday, the letter had gone viral. Some people said it was anti-Semitic. I mean, there were members of Congress, Larry Summers, prominent alumni tweeting. It was making international headlines. Tonight, there is growing backlash to a letter signed by nearly three dozen student groups at Harvard, which solely blamed Israel.

Now executives in finance and tech want the students blacklisted. Several groups of individual students have already apologized, revoking their support of the letter. And at that point, Monday, during the work hours, Harvard administration had not yet put out a statement at all.

Claudine Gay spent the previous night at Hillel, the Jewish student center on campus. The place was packed. Some students demanded that Harvard respond to the letter from the undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee with some kind of official condemnation. Gay told them that in her view, statements don't bring healing. Showing up in person can.

The next day, seeing no public statement, former Harvard president Larry Summers, the man who gave Gay the ceremonial keys to knowledge and truth, took to X to criticize the university for its silence. An official statement signed by Claudine Gay and the university's deans appeared later that day.

Harvard leadership had, in fact, spent much of the weekend hashing out the wording. Summers responded on Bloomberg TV. In the same way that previous leaders flew the Ukrainian flag over Harvard Yard after Putin's invasion, I thought it was appropriate for there to be a strong Harvard statement condemning, in the strongest possible terms, Hamas terrorism.

Harvard's statement on the Hamas attack actually came out faster than Harvard's earlier condemnations of Russia's invasion of Ukraine or the killing of George Floyd. But those letters showed passion, moral clarity. This was much more removed. Some saw it as anti-Israel for not mentioning the hostages, not using the word terrorism, and for drawing a kind of grammatical equivalence between Israel and Hamas.

The following day, under pressure, Claudine Gay put out another statement aimed at diffusing the outrage. Take two is short and clear and signed only by her. She said that that statement does not speak for Harvard. It really separated her from that student statement that had angered so many people.

If that was supposed to close the book on this episode, now trucks had started circling campus. A digital billboard parked right outside Harvard University is attracting a lot of attention. The names and faces of Harvard students are displayed under the title Harvard's Leading Anti-Semites. Some of the students being called out hadn't signed the letter or even known about it. Students were really freaked out and afraid. And at that point, we were seeing alumni on Twitter, including

including hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, doubling down on this and saying, you know, Harvard needs to release the names of students affiliated with this statement so we know on Wall Street not to hire them. Some students did lose job offers.

She called me. Around this time, Rabbi David Wolpe received a phone call. Wolpe was a visiting scholar at Harvard's Divinity School. But before that, he led a large, diverse congregation in Los Angeles. In that role, he had to be attuned to potential disputes and balance the wishes of more liberal American-born members with those of more conservative Iranian-born congregants. BLM lawn sign? No. Gay marriages? Yes.

So, Rabbi Wolpe's phone was ringing. He picked up. She said, this is Claudine Gay. She said she realized that the campus was, you know, exploding with this, and this was not her expertise. More acutely than the content of the call, Wolpe remembers this. She was clearly, deeply shaken.

I mean, she was very emotional on the call. She was having a hard time, and who wouldn't in her position? Gay asked Rabbi Wolpe to join a task force in anti-Semitism. He said, yes, of course. She also asked him for a reading list. Books that would give her both the history of the conflict...

and also some deeper understanding of Jewish history and why Jews feel the way they do in response to what's been going on. So I made a suggestion of a couple of books. I don't know that she ever got the time to read them, but I did make the suggestions. It's hard to imagine now, but that October and into November, it was still possible to kind of ignore the noise. I didn't really notice any protests. The students in my classes just wanted to get ahead.

Still, things were happening. There were a couple incidents that were very high profile. The Globe's Hillary Burns. Including the one at the business school where there was a peaceful die-in where people were just lying on the ground holding signs calling for a ceasefire. And a student walked through the crowd like filming students and saying,

some kind of altercation happened. In this video, which was posted online, a person who has been identified as an Israeli student is kind of mobbed by a big group of people holding up keffiyehs, shouting what sounds like, "'Shame!'"

We don't really know what to make of what happened. The prosecution of two pro-Palestinian graduate students who were charged with assault and battery and a civil rights violation is still playing out in the courts. For some Harvard alumni, this incident and others were a tipping point. Coming up, a billionaire's tweet sets the wheels in motion for more drama on campus. This is On The Media. On The Media.

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With the conclusion of the election and Donald Trump heading back to the White House, there are a lot of changes and questions coming. I'm Scott Schaefer. And I'm Marisa Lagos. We are the host of Political Breakdown, a podcast covering all the top political news with new episodes every weekday. Trump is making big promises. This will truly be the golden age of America. There's a lot of ways the next four years can go. And the Political Breakdown team is in it with you. Find Political Breakdown wherever you listen to podcasts.

This is On The Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. You're listening to part one of the three-part series we made with the Boston Globe about the crisis at Harvard following the events of October 7th, 2023.

Before the break, we heard that for some in Harvard's community of alumni and mega donors, the perceived absence of leadership when it came to the pro-Palestinian protests on campus was the final straw. The host of the series, Ilya Meretz, picks up the story.

What is the Mark connection? You guys were friends at Harvard or what? We were friends to be overstated. Sam Lesson, class of 2005, is a tech executive who's worked at Facebook. He was at Harvard at the same time as Mark Zuckerberg, who did not graduate. We knew each other in college. We became close years later. Lesson had been hearing murmurs about bad things happening at Harvard for a while, but he didn't buy it.

I started hearing, like everyone else, the trigger warnings. And I'm like, wow, there are trigger warnings? Like, we talked about some crazy stuff. And so you kind of get a sense that things are changing here or there. You know, people worry about anti-Semitism. They worry about what can and can't be said. What does and doesn't happen on campus? You have disinvited speakers. You kind of see this drumbeat.

But again, I, pre-10-7 and last fall, really was the one who defended the university pretty consistently in my friend group. Being like, yep, look, this stuff is complicated. Lesson had given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Harvard in the past. But now he was questioning that. I'm like, oh my God, I'm the one who's wrong here. And that sucks. I went up to campus and I met with hundreds of students.

in small groups and larger groups. And they're like, Bill, why is the president doing nothing? Why is the administration doing nothing? And that was really the beginning. This is taped from the Lex Friedman podcast. The guest is Bill Ackman, Harvard College class of 88, MBA 1992, who'd given Harvard millions. He was on his own parallel journey.

Ackman is a wildly successful hedge fund manager known for picking big public fights with companies he thinks are mismanaged. He once successfully browbeat Wendy's into selling off the Tim Hortons chain of donut shops. Reaching out to Harvard's leadership...

you know, take a meeting. Bill Ackman bailed on an interview with us last minute. Like Sam Lesson, he experienced a kind of awakening about Harvard. They started talking to me about this oppressor-oppressed framework. I had not even heard of this.

Basically, they're like, look, Israel is deemed an oppressor, and the Palestinians are deemed the oppressed. Many of Harvard's critics once considered themselves liberal or center-left. But the crisis at Harvard worked like a wedge. You could see it prying off a segment of rich and influential supporters in real time. The story was reaching critical mass, and Congress got interested. Specifically, the Republican-controlled House Committee on Education and the Workforce—

Near the end of November, Claudine Gay and two other college presidents agreed to testify in a hearing on anti-Semitism at colleges. Rabbi Wolpe, the guy who sent Gay the reading list, he texted her with an offer. I knew that she was going into the hearings, and I thought I could help.

And so I tried to persuade her to let me supply her with quotes from the Bible or the Talmud or the Jewish Sages, something that would show that she was taking this seriously. Wolpe wanted Gay to succeed, but he had serious doubts about how Harvard was responding to the crisis. He had joined the advisory group on anti-Semitism, which brought him face-to-face with a number of university leaders —

Where Wolpe saw a five-alarm fire, he says Harvard just didn't. I don't want to speak specifically for President Gay, but I mean, it was from everything that we heard, some of it official, some of it unofficial. The corporation, which is the board that oversees Harvard, the deans, everybody thought that it was going to eventually peter out and go away, in part because they saw, which was true, that many students...

were not involved and didn't care and just came to class and so on. And I don't think they realized that for the students who were involved, this was an epical event. Still, Wolbe thought Gay would be well-served to quote from a holy book when she went before Congress to show she was simpatico with the Jewish people and attuned to Jewish suffering. Did you have a specific quotation, citation in mind?

I think I had a couple that I thought of, but I don't really remember now what they were. But it's easy to find, you know, relevant citations for peaceful, you know, interaction for learned debate or whatever. I don't know what I would have come up with. What did she say? She thanked me very much. She said thank you for the suggestion and that's it? Yeah, basically. Okay.

During these difficult days, I have felt the bonds of our community strain. In response, I have sought to confront hate while preserving free expression. This is difficult work.

And I know that I have not always gotten it right. When the day comes and the C-SPAN camera is on her, Gay does not cite the Torah or the Talmud. She talks like the administrator she is. We at Harvard reject anti-Semitism and denounce any trace of it on our campus or within our community. Anti-Semitism is a symptom of ignorance. And the cure for ignorance is knowledge.

Harvard must model what it means to preserve free expression while combating prejudice and preserving the security of our community. For a hearing in which members professed to be alarmed about rising anti-Semitism, there is shockingly little fact-finding. Hatred of Jews is construed broadly to include contested terms like intifada.

Members of Congress don't want to hear about the fine points of balancing free expression with the need for public safety. For the three college presidents, it's a ritual beating lasting more than five hours. Dr. Kornbluth, at MIT, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate MIT's code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment? Yes or no?

If there's one part of this story that is probably very familiar to you, it's the barrage of confrontational questions from New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, Harvard College class of 2006, currently president-elect Trump's nominee for ambassador to the United Nations. Ms. McGill, at Penn, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's rules or code of conduct? Yes or no?

If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment. Yes. I am asking, specifically calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment? If it is directed and severe or pervasive, it is harassment. So the answer is yes.

It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman. It's a context-dependent decision. That's your testimony today. Calling for the genocide of Jews is depending upon the context. And Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no? It can be, depending on the context.

What's the context? Targeted as an individual. Targeted at an individual. It's targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals. Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them? Do you understand that dehumanization is part of antisemitism? I will ask you one more time. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?

I was in the barber chair, if you will, getting a haircut. Bill Ackman, remember, the hedge fund guy, class of 88, was watching and multitasking. And I had a guy on my team send me the three-minute section. I said, cut that line of questioning.

And I put out a little tweet on that, and I call it my greatest hits of posts. It's got something like 110 million views, and everyone looked at this and said, what is wrong with, you know, university campuses? Rabbi Wolpe was watching too, and he too had a tweet. Before he hit send, he called Claudine Gay to let her know he had decided to quit Harvard's anti-Semitism advisory group.

Then he shared the letter on social. It happened to be the start of that year's Festival of Lights. Resigning, a Hanukkah message. This tweet also went viral. Rabbi Wolpe read the letter to me. I believe Claudine Gay to be both a kind and thoughtful person.

Most of the students here wish only to get an education and a job, not prosecute ideological agendas. But the system at Harvard, along with the ideology that grips far too many of the students and faculty, the ideology that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors, and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil. Ignoring Jewish suffering is evil.

Claudine Gay declined my invitation to do an interview. I ended up spending a lot of time talking with a different college president. Hi, I'm Danielle Hawley. Last name is H-O-L-L-E-Y. I'm the 20th president of Mount Holyoke College. Like Claudine Gay, Hawley is a Black woman who attended Harvard in the late 1990s. Gay got a PhD. Hawley went to the law school.

And they have something else in common. They were both new on the job last year. I started on July 1st, 2023, the same day as Claudine Gay started. Holly watched the hearings with a growing sense of disbelief. All three presidents, like her, were at the beginning of their tenures. And yet... They were being accused of basically creating an atmosphere of hatred inside of universities that they had not led before.

So how could they, either one of them, be responsible, right? And there was something in the particular discourse around Claudine Gay that felt familiar. Holly says the scrutiny is intense if you're a Black woman and a First. The jury is always out, right? There's a sense that even though you hold that position, that it's really not yours, right?

You are temporarily holding the reins, but you're still an outsider. Daniel Hawley and Claudine Gay didn't really know each other. They'd met once on the sidelines of a one-week summer camp that Harvard runs for new college presidents. I know, I had no idea.

What's really interesting is that this seminar included an almost two-hour session on handling the kind of out-of-nowhere crises that can undermine a new president. Crisis management, of course, in the summer of 2023 was mostly COVID-related. We were thinking about what happens with the next pandemic. But we did not spend a lot of time thinking about kind of what happens in a crisis of the kind that we had over the last year in higher ed.

An emotionally fraught, social media-fueled bleep storm where donors are in revolt and public statements are everything just wasn't on the radar. When that actually happened, Holly took an approach that was totally different from Harvard's. She refused to say anything publicly except to release a letter. It's now become known around here, we call it the statement on statements.

The letter explained that although past presidents of Mount Holyoke had weighed in on big issues of the day, starting now, the school would only speak on subjects that directly concerned it.

This had been Holly's own policy for a decade, going back to her previous job as dean of the law school at Howard, a historically Black university. I came to Howard July 1st of 2014, which was only a few weeks before Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson. Immediately, people said, well, are you going to issue a statement on behalf of the law school about the killing of Michael Brown? I said, no, I'm not going to do that because...

My duty is to educate lawyers who will then turn around and make real transformation in the criminal law system. So I don't have time to write or do what I considered at the time to be performative statements.

Like at Howard Law School, Holly's no-statements rule at Mount Holyoke made some people angry. Students accused her of condoning genocide through her silence. There were complaints from alumni. If donors were not upset and didn't threaten to take money away, that would be a surprise. I think the question is, how do you react?

What I learned from Danielle Hawley is that when you're a new president, you don't get a lot of grace. The donors may not know you or trust you. It's a fragile time, and you need the board to show a united front with its chosen president. For Hawley, it's like, bear with me here. We are going to manage this crisis in a certain way. When we come out on the other side of the crisis...

I will come visit you and talk to you about not what happened this week, not what happened this month, but what happened over the course of a year or what happened over the course of 18 months. But that's easier to say when you're an experienced president. Claudine Gay was five months into the job when she went before Congress. She and the other two presidents gave almost identical answers on the question of whether a call for genocide violated university speech codes.

That moment echoed across social media, open to wild interpretation. And now, their jobs were at stake. Two days after the hearing, the MIT board put out a letter of support full of praise for its president, Sally Kornbluth. She's still in the job today. At the University of Pennsylvania, it was clear that the board was done with President Liz McGill. She resigned.

The world should know that Liz McGill is a very good person and a talented leader who was beloved by her team. She is not the slightest bit anti-Semitic. This is Scott Bach. He was chair of the board of trustees at UPenn. He resigned that position right after Liz McGill and made this letter public. Working with her was one of the great pleasures of my life. Worn down by months of relentless external attacks, she was not herself last Tuesday.

As for Harvard, the board was initially silent. Claudine Gay seemed to be alone.

She apologized in the pages of the Harvard Crimson. "I am sorry," she said. "Words matter." It wasn't totally clear what she was apologizing for, though. She had been guided to give legally meticulous answers. The advice came from a trusted Harvard insider, Bill Lee, Harvard College class of '72. Lee is a partner at a major law firm and a former leader of the Harvard Corporation. He represented Harvard in the big affirmative action case it had just lost at the Supreme Court.

As the crisis deepened, the Harvard Corporation increasingly turned to him. One person told me he was like a field general. It's possible that someone else, a fresh outside voice, would have counseled Gay differently. Rabbi Wolpe, remember, he was the one who suggested Gay quote from the Jewish sages. He was disappointed by the lack of passion she showed. A law professor told me Gay could have given the answers Congress wanted to hear and then amended her testimony later for the record.

But that's not what happened. Bill Lee declined our requests for comment. So did the current first fellow of the Harvard Corporation, Penny Pritzker, class of 1981, who led the group that hired Gay. After the hearing, a full week passed before the Harvard Corporation made a statement in support of Claudine Gay. But by then, a new crisis was upon them.

I just think it is newsworthy that the president of the most famous university in the world plagiarized. The university says Claudia Gay has now asked that corrections be made to her 1997 dissertation because of what it called inadequate citations. Harvard is committed to DEI and Claudia Gay's race protected her from losing her job. It's outrageous. That's next time.

That's it for this week's show. The Harvard Plan is a collaboration with the Boston Globe. The production team includes Ilya Meritz, Emily Botin, Kristen Nelson, Jasmine Aguilera, and Regina D. Heer. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender, Candace Wong, and Katerina Barton.

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 Olinger.

And before we end the show, I'd like to direct your ears elsewhere. I just listened to my friend and colleague David Remnick's conversation with the brilliant Jonathan Blitzer about the rhetoric and reality of Donald Trump's promise to deport millions and why documented immigrants here legally are also likely to be targets. It was sobering and real, and it helped me think about what to expect in the year to come. If

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