ANNOUNCEMENT: 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. Announcer Potts: Our speaker this morning is Claudine Gay, the Wilbert A. Collett Professor of Government and of African and African American Studies and former president of Harvard University. Then a diminutive woman in those recognizable chunky glasses rose to the lectern. Claudine Gay: Good morning. She told a story. Claudine Gay: 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. ILYA MARRITZ: 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. Claudine Gay: 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. ILYA MARRITZ: 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. Claudine Gay: 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. (laughter) ILYA MARRITZ: Gay said she realizes now that her mother told the story “less as entertainment than as evidence.” What a person will do, when circumstances become intolerable. Claudine Gay: 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. ILYA MARRITZ: 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 not even for 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 — Randall Kennedy: a black woman was made president of Harvard University. ILYA MARRITZ: Randall Kennedy is a professor at Harvard Law School. He’s written many books on race and the law. Randall Kennedy: 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. ILYA MARRITZ: Kennedy heard the whispers and insinuations that she was chosen for her race. He thinks this is true, to a point. But also – so what? Randall Kennedy: 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. ILYA MARRITZ: We’re gonna 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. Noah Feldman: I’m a Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at the Law School ILYA MARRITZ: 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. Noah Feldman: There’s no very exact count, but people’s estimates at the time put the number of Jews up at 20 percent 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. ILYA MARRITZ: President Lowell fretted that the character of Harvard was changing, and wrote there was an urgent need “to prevent a dangerous increase in the 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. Noah Feldman: 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. ILYA MARRITZ: Diversity not to bring people in. But to keep them out. This is the moment when Harvard moved to an admissions system that looks 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 on its own student body. Noah Feldman: 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 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. ILYA MARRITZ: 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. SCOTUS Announcer: First case on today’s calendar is number 76811, Regents of the University of California against Bakke. ILYA MARRITZ: In the late 1970s, a white plaintiff named Allan 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. ILYA MARRITZ: This was sometimes called affirmative action. But it wasn’t clear whether it was constitutional. Archibald Cox: Mr. Chief Justice, may it please the Court, Noah Feldman: The Bakke case involved a challenge to affirmative action. In which the challengers claimed that affirmative action violated the equal rights of white students who had the same scores as black students who were being admitted on the basis of their being an addition to diversity. ILYA MARRITZ: Among the nine justices, there was a clear divide. Noah Feldman: 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. ILYA MARRITZ: That left one swing Justice, Lewis Powell. A white Virginian. And a 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. Archibald Cox: Certainly the objective of improving education. Uh, through greater diversity His name was Archibald Cox. Here he is arguing for Harvard at the Supreme Court. Archibald Cox: 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. ILYA MARRITZ: 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. Randall Kennedy: you can tell just from the tenor of my voice, I remember him with tremendous fondness and respect and admiration. if he was being, you know, sort of portrayed in a movie, the directions would say you want a person who looks like a Boston Brahmin. ILYA MARRITZ: Cox was partial to bowties 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, 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. Cox: So that they, other, younger boys and girls may see, 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 lawyer, and John’s father became a doctor. This is essential if we are ever going to give true equality in a factual sense to people … Randall Kennedy: And what Archibald Cox says was the community that we want to facilitate is a community in which, uh, individuals come here, they are 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, don’t, doesn’t, won’t that happen best if there is some degree of curated difference? ILYA MARRITZ: It’s not about repairing past wrongs. But about who’s in the classroom. At that time, there was something novel about this idea. Randall Kennedy: diversity wasn’t much of an important political cultural term in the 1970s. There were other terms. Integration was a much bigger term. Diversity, 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. ILYA MARRITZ: Thanks in large part to the US Supreme Court. Speaker: Mr. Justice Powell will announce the judgment of the court. There is no opinion of the court supported by a majority. ILYA MARRITZ: Justice Powell’s one-man opinion carried the day. Noah Feldman: And in that opinion, Powell said, diversity. is the rationale that justifies affirmative action. Not remediating past discrimination, but having a diverse class. Again Noah Feldman. Noah Feldman: One justice, Justice Lewis Powell, wrote a narrow opinion, only for himself, that became the law because it was the narrowest opinion upholding affirmative action. ILYA MARRITZ: 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. Justice Powell: 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. ILYA MARRITZ: Sometimes also called The Harvard Plan. Justice Powell: 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 Admissions Committee has not set target-quotas for the number of blacks, or of musicians, football players, physicists or Californians to be admitted in a given year. Noah Feldman: So in that moment in 1978, Harvard’s diversity admission policy became the law of the land. ILYA MARRITZ: The difference it made is still much debated. 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 see diversity in TV and movies and panel discussions. It’s so everywhere, you notice when it’s missing. Again, Randall Kennedy 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 people of color. ILYA MARRITZ: Diversity doesn’t dwell on history, it’s inclusive. Randall Kennedy: And so everyone, the whole community is going to be uplifted through diversity at least in theory, everybody gets a role in the show. ILYA MARRITZ: 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. Noah Feldman: 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 ILYA MARRITZ: The decision came down June 29th 2023. Justice Roberts: The question in these cases is whether Harvard and UNC’s programs are permissible under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. We conclude that they are not. ILYA MARRITZ: Two days after that, Claudine Gay formally assumed the job of Harvard president. Incredible timing. Noah Feldman: 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, 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. ILYA MARRITZ: Diversity is on the ropes. And race based affirmative action is legally dead. So: what now? Randall Kennedy: For me, racial affirmative action, I wrote a book defending it, I’ve been defending it. ILYA MARRITZ: And then Kennedy said something that I did not expect. Randall Kennedy: 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. Ad Break- ILYA MARRITZ: Not long ago I got a glimpse of all that 45 years of race conscious admissions has accomplished. Holley: So this is called the Harvard Black Alumni Weekend. ILYA MARRITZ: Mount Holyoke college president Danielle Holley. Holley: It started, I think we had the first one maybe 20 years ago or so ILYA MARRITZ: Remember Holley 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. Holley: And so there are over a thousand alums this weekend, Black alums, who are here, um, to celebrate together. ILYA MARRITZ: We spotted Alvin Bragg, the District Attorney of Manhattan, and an actress from Riverdale. Holley: oh, there’s Soledad O’Brien right there ILYA MARRITZ: I hadn’t really prepared for all the famouses. But. Yeah, of course. Holley: 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, so if you cut off access to Harvard, you’re cutting off access to leadership in this country. ILYA MARRITZ: In the days before the Black alumni weekend, colleges were 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 a Black woman lawyer might become the President of the United States. Holley told me it was former Attorney General Loretta Lynch who brought the most fire, in her talk. Holley: 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. ILYA MARRITZ: And then. We see one more famous person. Holley: Oh, but here’s President Gay right here, behind us. ILYA MARRITZ: 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. Holley and I sort of hover nearby, waiting for an opening. crosstalk ILYA MARRITZ: Holley wants a selfie. I just want to introduce myself. I’m Ilya. This is a globe. Oh, hi! ILYA MARRITZ: In person, Gay is warm and relaxed. Here, this weekend, she’s been celebrated. It’s wonderful to see you. ILYA MARRITZ: While I stand a little to the side, the women kibitz. I notice that they’re now holding hands, swinging their arms. We would love to have you come. Yeah, yeah. Next year, I’m on sabbatical. I know you’re on sabbatical, but whenever, it doesn’t even have to be a, but like, whenever. Yeah, yeah. Yes, yes. We started on the same day. I know, yes ILYA MARRITZ: After Gay moved on, Danielle Holley told me she had expected this weekend to be something like a reckoning, a family conversation. Holley: 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? ILYA MARRITZ: 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 it’s gaining ground. I want to re-introduce someone we met in the first episode of this series. Sam Lessin, Harvard College class of ‘05. California venture capitalist. Friend of Mark Zuckerberg’s. Lessin: You know, I’m, I’m a, I’m a stereotypical Silicon Valley guy. ILYA MARRITZ: Lessin 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. Lessin: I’m the one who’s wrong and that sucks. ILYA MARRITZ: If you think of Bill Ackman or Chris Rufo as the clean-cut Harvard grads who fanned the flames of outrage… Chris Rufo: Does Harvard value veritas and truth or does Harvard value DEI and having the right race and gender symbolism at the top … Bill Ackman: I wanted her to be fired because of values of her leadership, failures ILYA MARRITZ: Lessin shares some of their views, but his approach is different. Sam Lessin: 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 the interesting balance to play in terms of saying no i want substantive change and revival. I don’t just want to be mad. ILYA MARRITZ: Lessin 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 as 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 thousand subscribers and counting. Lessin is talking with donors about how they can leverage their dollars for accountability. Sam Lessin: we believe the school needs to refocus on academic excellence, um, you know, improving governance. Real free speech and free inquiry. Like, there’s a bunch of themes we have ILYA MARRITZ: Notice diversity is not one of the core values. Lessin thinks it’s a mistake to try to solve bigger social problems through university admissions policies. He’s OK with what the Supreme Court did. More than OK. Sam Lessin: 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, that’s crazy, right? ILYA MARRITZ: By the way, Lessin’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 the kind of classroom environment where students learn from each other is more difficult to achieve today with people growing up online. Sam Lessin: 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. 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, it’s oil and water, right? Is what’s going on. Ilya: You’re a Facebook guy. I mean, do you blame Sam Lessin: No, Ilya: social media. Sam Lessin: 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 it’s fun. It’s easy. You say, oh, it’s that person’s problem, right? Ilya: OK, 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. Lessin told me, in his ideal world, universities would be “monasteries of truth.” Less online, more focused on IRL debate and discussion. Sam Lessin: They defend the truth, they search out the truth, they look for the best of the best to do that, betraying 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? Ilya: Well, sure. But especially after what happened to Claudine Gay…that is increasingly hard to do. Elise Stefanik: Good evening Milwaukee! ILYA MARRITZ: Representative Elise Stefanik, the tormentor of college presidents, took a victory lap in primetime at the Republican National Convention last summer. Elise Stefanik: Who saw that Congressional hearing with the college presidents of so called elite universities? ILYA MARRITZ: As if to declare: yeah, college is political now. Suck it up. Elise Stefanik: Oh wait, they are former presidents. ILYA MARRITZ: This year, Republicans campaigned against universities. – It’s a big change. They used to talk about making college more accessible. Now they’re saying, college itself is bad. Trump: the time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical left. ILYA MARRITZ: And this little nugget from then-candidate Donald Trump made Hilary Burns, the Globe’s higher education reporter, sit up straight. Trump: Our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system. ILYA MARRITZ: Accreditation. A secret weapon. Hilary Burns: 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. ILYA MARRITZ: Accereditor is this totally obscure job. Hilary Burns: You really only pay attention to the accreditor when a college closes. That’s where you get the alert from, the accreditor. ILYA MARRITZ: Accreditors come under the oversight of the Department of Education. Hilary Burns: they are like the quality assurance. They, 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, like 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 okay. Trump: 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. ILYA MARRITZ: Trump, 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. Ilya: do universities have like a plan to deal with this? Are they ready for this? Hilary Burns : Um, 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 the stuff we’ve already talked about that impacts their finances and their academic freedom, but also their students and their professors and their employees are being threatened with Trump’s, many of Trump’s immigration policies. ILYA MARRITZ: Trump has said he’d deport foreign students who join pro-Palestine protests. And many universities have responded. Hilary Burns: they want all international staff, faculty, and students getting back to campus before Trump takes office in January, um, just in case they can’t get them back here. Hilary Burns: What I’m hearing from higher education watchers and lawyers who are working on this is the universities are doing the work behind the scenes, like, quietly, because they don’t want a target on their back. ILYA MARRITZ: The tools, the pressure points, were always there. But it’s new that there are politicians willing and empowered to use them. AD BREAK JD Vance: So much of what we want to accomplish… ILYA MARRITZ: Vice president elect JD Vance. JD 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. ILYA MARRITZ: 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.” JD Vance: 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. ILYA MARRITZ: Next, Vance explains the concept of “redpilling.” If you don’t know it— JD Vance: 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. ILYA MARRITZ: The writer-directors of the film are siblings, and transwomen and critics of Donald Trump. Still, there is an idea in their movie … that people on the right love. JD Vance: 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. ILYA MARRITZ: 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. JD Vance: A pogrom started on social media. The guy was turned into the Great Satan… ILYA MARRITZ: And it’s effective because, you know, enough of it is true, or feels right. JD Vance: A paper came out suggesting that gender transition surgeries and hormonal therapies for adolescents… ILYA MARRITZ: When I was at Harvard, I had a class where the students routinely reached for words like colonialism or oppression. I found that annoying. JD Vance: …a young student who invited a bunch of students over to his house in a joking way, has been threatened by the Diversity Bureaucracy at the Yale Law School. ILYA MARRITZ: Vance speaks with the fluency of an insider; he graduated Yale Law School in 2013. JD Vance: I really want to, I really want to end this on an inspirational note. ILYA MARRITZ: I’m including the end of his speech because it contains this weird historical coda. Vance says he looked for a quote from scripture or from history. JD Vance: And the person whose quote I ultimately had to land on was the great prophet and statesman, uh, Richard Milhous Nixon. ILYA MARRITZ: Vance releases a little smile and his eyes sweep the room. As if to say, are you ready for the mic drop? JD Vance: And there was a wisdom in what Richard Nixon said approximately 40, 50 years ago. He said, and I quote, the professors are the enemy. ILYA MARRITZ: 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. Richard Nixon: The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it. ILYA MARRITZ: Not long after Nixon said those words, the special counsel investigating Watergate requested some of his oval office tapes. Nixon resisted. And 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 bowties 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. Margaret Brennan: 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. ILYA MARRITZ: CBS’ Margaret Brennan had JD 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. Margaret Brennan: 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 Victor Orban’s approach in Hungary. ILYA MARRITZ: 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 before Orban intervened. Margaret Brennan: Is that what you’re advocating be done in the United States? JD Vance: 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. Margaret Brennan: I don’t want taxpayers controlling education, necessarily. Is that what you’re advocating for, federal government? JD Vance: Margaret, what I’m advocating for is for taxpayers to have a say in how their money is spent. Ilya Marritz: Does JD Vance admire Hungary because it’s producing like better graduates and like finer research and like more medical breakthroughs? ILYA MARRITZ: I went back to Hilary Burns – the Globe’s higher education reporter Hilary Burns: I have not heard anything about that. I think we’ve only heard that he admires what happens to the government kind of um, policing what’s taught and how the universities run. Ilya: There’s no shortage of Governments around the world, uh, at this moment, and there have been many in the past, what do we know about universities in authoritarian systems? Hilary Burns: So I asked a professor I spoke with over the summer, a CUNY professor, Benjamin Head, about, like, why is it that universities are among the first targets for authoritarian leaders? and his answer was quite simple. He said, um, because professors tend to tell them they’re wrong. Who likes that? Ilya: laughs Hilary Burns: And he’s, he went on to say, you know, people in academic institutions raise uncomfortable questions like that’s what they’re paid to do. The nature of those uncomfortable questions makes academia like an attractive, a convenient target. And he added that the fact universities tend to lean to the left adds to the fact that makes them an easy target. So I think that it’s safe to say authoritarian governments target the people who are establishing truths and who are studying and researching controversial and difficult topics. Like that, 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. ILYA MARRITZ: In the new administration, uncooperative colleges could lose access to federally-backed student loan programs. To research grants. Endowment taxes could grow. Danielle Holley: we absolutely are thinking about that, ILYA MARRITZ: I went back to Mount Holyoke President Danielle Holley, one more time. Danielle Holley: how would we self fund, for example, our entire financial aid system ILYA MARRITZ: 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. Danielle Holley: You know, if there’s no funding for Pell Grants, if there is complete privatization of the loan, uh, 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. ILYA MARRITZ: Holley had read some of Vance’s words before, but hadn’t seen the speech. So I played some of it for her. Danielle Holley: 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. JD Vance: 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. Danielle Holley: Right? So if the truth is malleable, 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, right? ILYA MARRITZ: It lines up with something Holley recently noticed: when people find out what she does for work, they’re sometimes skeptical, or even hostile. Danielle Holley: I’ve had people in airports and on airplanes ask me like. So what do you teach? And, you know, what are, 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, as a harm to the republic, as a harm to their values and to their communities. ILYA MARRITZ: She says it started in 2020 or 2021… Danielle Holley: that’s when you began to hear a lot of this. And remember Ron DeSantis, of course, in Florida ILYA MARRITZ: 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 faculty left the school. There was a lot of cheerleading for this on Fox News and other places. Ilya: Um, you know, it’s early days. We don’t, we don’t know how much of a focus it’s going to be in the end. We don’t know what the new administration is going to maybe kind of look at first. But please get as concrete as you can. Like, with this institution, what are you going to do if somebody comes to you and says, you have to change the way that you’re teaching? Like, are there compromises that you can make? Danielle Holley: 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. Ilya: Do you think most college presidents are going to take the same position as you? Holley: Absolutely not. Holley: 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 One institution, I would absolutely be positioning, I think, my university to probably keep as much federal funding as possible. Lessin: 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? ILYA MARRITZ: Again, Sam Lessin, silicon valley guy and alumni activist. I followed up with him after the election. Lessin: 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. Ilya: Um, a few years ago in a speech, JD Vance, you probably have seen it, has said, has said we need to attack the universities. He said professors are the enemy. Do you have any concern about that kind of rhetoric? Sam Lessin: 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? ILYA MARRITZ: Lessin contrasted Kamala Harris’ careful, more scripted media strategy, with that of her opponents… Sam Lessin: people make fun of Trump for spitballing live for hours. It’s actually a very reasonable strategy… ILYA MARRITZ: Before landing on what he thinks of Vance’s words. Sam Lessin: Yeah, that’s a little, 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, I, I, 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. ILYA MARRITZ: In Sam Lessin’s world, JD 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 Holley’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 Holley. Danielle Holley: We need to watch carefully for the next four years. Who 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. ILYA MARRITZ: 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: 1. we know social media fuels instant judgment…that’s kryptonite for institutions that like to go slow 2. attacking things is a way to build your own power. That’s not a left or right thing. It’s just how things work 3. 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. CREDITS- A lot of people helped me to make this series. This list is incomplete, but it includes Ann Marie Lipinski and everyone at the Nieman Foundation My 2024 Nieman fellows and affiliates including Denise and Mike Cetta Andrea Patino Contreras and Will Moose Ian Coss and Kelsey Tyssowski Jed Willard Rebecca Lavoie Many professors administrators alumni and others at Harvard who were 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 Fernandes, Adrian Walker, Aidan Ryan, Hilary Burns, Andrew Ryan, Jen Peter, and Nancy Barnes. The Harvard Plan is a collaboration with the Boston Globe. The production team includes me, Jazmine Aguilera, Emily Botein, Regina De Heer, Jared Paul, Katya Rogers, and executive produced by the Globe’s head of audio Kristin Nelson.
