“No government,” Garber answered in his prepared statement, “should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.” The Trump administration responded immediately with a freeze on more than $2 billion in grants. President Donald Trump even threatened on Truth Social to take away Harvard’s tax-exempt status.
More than other universities, Harvard is expected to issue moral edicts all the time, but until now these pronouncements were cost-free. In February 2022, Harvard denounced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because, sure, why not. In September 2021, Harvard announced its divestment of fossil-fuel investments, which sounded slightly self-sacrificing, but the truth was fossil fuels were no longer a particularly profitable investment. Forty-nine years have passed since I matriculated, and during all that time I never once heard anybody refer to any kind of “finest hour.” Until now. Did Harvard have one before it stood up to Trump?
Salem witch trials. Harvard’s involvement here was minimal, but not helpful. In 1689, Cotton Mather published a book titled Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions that helped create hysteria by alleging instances of “Bewitched or Possessed persons in New-England.” The Salem accusations surfaced three years later. Mather was a Harvard graduate, but more significantly, he was the adult son of Harvard President Increase Mather (after whom Harvard’s present-day Mather House is named).
Slavery and the Civil War. Three years and two Harvard presidents ago, a university committee issued a report on Harvard’s legacy of slavery. For 147 years after its founding in 1636, Harvard administrators, faculty, and staff enslaved more than 70 people. The university and its donors also maintained “extensive financial ties to slavery,” principally in the Caribbean. In 1850, Harvard Medical School admitted three free Black students, but after objections from alumni and students, the school’s dean, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (father of the jurist) cravenly expelled them.
Harvard students and faculty fought bravely for the Union. A “Harvard regiment” (the 20th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry) suffered more casualties than almost any other. Robert Gould Shaw (Harvard 1860; no degree) famously led the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the first all-Black regiment. After the war, Harvard built a grand Romanesque building, Memorial Hall, to commemorate the university’s 176 Union dead. But that didn’t constitute any act of bravery on the part of university administrators.
But Lowell’s more lasting legacy was to lead the Lowell Commission, a three-person group appointed by Massachusetts Governor Alvan T. Fuller to advise him on whether to spare the lives of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who’d been convicted for murder on extremely flimsy evidence in a trial rampant with judicial misconduct. Sacco and Vanzetti were almost certainly innocent, but the commission, which Lowell dominated, recommended that the execution go ahead. The columnist Heywood Broun (Harvard ’10; no degree) later commented, “What more can these immigrants from Italy expect? It is not every prisoner who has a president of Harvard University throw on the switch for him.” Broun recommended that “the institution of learning in Cambridge, which once we called Harvard, be known as Hangman’s House.”
The Berkeley sociologist Robert Bellah (Harvard 1950) said in a 2005 letter to The New York Review of Books that Harvard’s reputation for saying the wrong thing while doing the right thing was, in his experience, charitable. In the fall of 1954, Bellah wrote, while he was a graduate student in sociology and Far Eastern languages, he was called into the office of McGeorge Bundy, then dean of Harvard’s faculty of arts and sciences. Bundy told him he’d learned Bellah had been a member of the Communist Party and that Bellah would be obliged to name names to the FBI. Bellah replied that he’d be glad to discuss his own activity (he was indeed a member from 1947 to 1949) but that he wouldn’t identify others. That’s what Bellah did when the FBI picked him up off the street a few days later.
Taking into account his experience as well as Furry’s in his New York Review letter, Bellah concluded:
That’s a severe judgment, but one that Bellah certainly earned.
Some Harvard professors of government traveled to Washington to give Henry Kissinger a piece of their mind about the Vietnam War, putting at risk at most a few consulting contracts. Michael Kinsley (Harvard 1972), who would later be editor and columnist at The New Republic, followed along and wrote a hilarious send-up for the Harvard Crimson (part one, part two).
I relate these episodes at length not to undermine Harvard but to underscore the unusual nature of Garber’s stance. What’s especially notable is that most of these earlier episodes took place before the federal government, at the instigation of Vannevar Bush, became a major funder of university research. (During the McCarthy period, this had scarcely begun.) “A private university like Harvard is naturally conservative, and inclined to support what the government wants,” Holly Brewer, a professor of American history at the University of Maryland, told me. But the pressure Trump is applying to Harvard is unprecedentedly foul. It’s good to see my alma mater stand up to it. Let the bivouac in Harvard Yard resume.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( A Short History of Harvard Not Being Brave (Until Now) )
Also on site :