Claudine Gay, who resigned as president of Harvard University Tuesday, was brought down by a virtual mob, its pitchforks updated to the blogs, tweets, and hate-filled emails that now perform the role of an actual mob. You don’t have to care about Harvard as an institution or about the nuances of academic norms of citation to be concerned about this. It represents a dangerous intrusion of partisan politics into higher education. Such intrusions are a harbinger of larger problems for democracy.
Gay was accused of many misdeeds: her initial public response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, her legalistic responses to grandstanding questions by politicians during the Dec. 7 congressional hearings, and accusations of plagiarism in her academic work. Each one of these incidents raises deep issues of the limits of freedom of speech and the protection of students and intellectual property.
Divergent opinions on each of them can be heard in conversations around Harvard’s campus. Some, including me, have criticized her for bowing to the pressure of rich alumni and politicians on issues of free speech and institutional neutrality. Others have been critical because they believe her messaging and responses to Congress characterize a double standard in the treatment of minority populations and views. Everyone at Harvard agrees that plagiarism is a serious academic offense. As with any accusation of wrongdoing, the offense must be carefully considered and the evidence properly examined before judgment is passed. This is what happens, for example, when students are accused of misconduct at Harvard, and it is what has happened when prominent scholars at Harvard have been accused of plagiarism.
But none of this carefully considered judgment or debate around the merits of issues happened in the case of Gay. She was relentlessly targeted by politicians, rich alumni, and partisan media using her as a sacrifice in a larger political struggle and attacking her at every opportunity so that it became impossible for her to lead effectively. She was gone a mere six months into her presidency.
A mob is characterized by a lack of deliberation — instead a public outcry acts as judge, jury, and, sometimes, executioner. From the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, rarely does history look back kindly on the actions of a mob. Mob leaders gain their power because they manipulate genuine and often legitimate attitudes held by the public. We now look back at Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attacks on universities and other American institutions as a disgraceful episode in American history, where a demagogue ruined the lives of innocent people because of their unpopular ideas or associations. But it is important to remember that McCarthy didn’t invent the ideas that he used to shamelessly attack professors — he harnessed a widespread panic about communism that was based in the very real conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Similarly, opportunistic politicians like Representative Elise Stefanik of New York and loud billionaires with large social media followings are harnessing genuine worries about antisemitism to attack universities for political or personal gain. To a student of history, such mob-like attacks shouldn’t come as a surprise. The founders of the American constitutional system, looking back at past examples of mob rule, thought of them as almost inevitable, and anticipated that such problems could reach into even our most esteemed institutions. James Madison, in Federalist 55, said that “passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob…” Madison and others tried to design a government that guarded against these passions.
Harvard, as a symbol of detached elitism, is an easy target for these passions. Indeed, Harvard is often worthy of disdain. And, frankly, it is hard to defend Harvard from an angry public in this case because genuine plagiarism should be punished and because almost nobody will be satisfied with a nuanced institutional response to an issue like war in the Middle East, where people have deep attachments and legitimate worries. So why should anyone be concerned when the mob comes for the president of Harvard?
First, because the mob can silence legitimate debate and criticism. The United States is intimately involved in a war in which more than 23,000 people have been killed. Americans should be debating this war. At places like Harvard, where leaders are trained and influential people are found, all voices should be heard.
Second, attacks on universities are a symptom of the larger problem of global democratic decline. From Hungary and Poland to India, Turkey, Mexico, and Venezuela, autocratic leaders from both the left and right have been attacking universities, seeking to bring to heel what they view as sources of opposition. The attacks begin with populist diatribes against universities as elitist and teachers of dangerous ideologies, followed by threats, bullying, and, eventually, assaults on university independence: the replacement of universities’ leadership, the removal of “dangerous” professors, and new regulations on what may and may not be taught on campus. Prominent universities in India, Hungary, Turkey, and elsewhere have been bullied into silence.
If it weren’t so serious, it would be laughable to believe that Stefanik, who has allied herself with Donald Trump, an apologist for Nazis, has suddenly become concerned with antisemitism. Rather, for Stefanik, concerns about antisemitism are a way to harness resentment against elite institutions to advance a political agenda.
Harvard is an easy target for battles in the culture war that defines much of American politics because of its overwhelmingly liberal makeup. In fact, I agree with critics who have said Harvard is largely hostile to conservative political thought. But the danger of such attacks goes beyond Harvard. One only need look at historical and recent examples of democratic decline to see that attacks on universities often precede the erasure of democratic liberties.
Regardless of where one stands politically, at a time when the value of American universities is under attack, we should recognize them as among our greatest national assets: emulated across the globe; responsible for our great advancements in science, medicine, arts; and tied to our national defense and the general education of our citizens living in a functioning democracy. When politicians cynically exploit fears in order to harness a mob — especially easy in our modern times of social media and cable news outrage — and when these fears are used to attack universities, places where reason and slow debate are supposed to be the norm, we should all pause and try to resist these forces. The stakes are much greater than a single university president.
Ryan D. Enos is a professor of government and director of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University.