BY ALAN SINGER
Founded in 1636 as Harvard College, Harvard University is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. Today, as one of the elite American universities, it is at the center of much of the conflict over how a university should respond to protests over the war in Gaza. Claudine Gay was forced to resign as president after she was broadsided at a congressional hearing where Republican inquisitors equated opposition to Israeli actions with antisemitism. Wealthy university donors who support Israel’s response to the October 7 attack by Hamas were behind the demand that Gay resign her position. Some donors also issued a call for major firms to blacklist members of student groups that signed a letter describing Israel as an apartheid state.
The suppression of student and faculty protests did not stop with Gay’s resignation. Harvard administrators removed official recognition from the student Palestinian Solidarity Committee and the interim president placed protesting students on disciplinary leave. The Harvard Corporation, the universities governing body, then overruled the faculty and blocked degree conferral on students who were involved in the protest movement. Harvard’s social science dean provoked outraged responses across academia when he published an essay calling for limits on faculty speech that attracts “outside attention” that he believes “directly impedes the University’s function.” While he did not refer to Israel, Gaza, or Palestine in the essay, there is no questions that he was responding to protests over the war in Gaza.
Harvard University prides itself on “inspiring every member of our community to strive toward a more just, fair, and promising world.” Its purported goal is to develop “citizen-leaders” through “exposure to new ideas, new ways of understanding, and new ways of knowing.” However, an examination of Harvard’s history and the institution’s current behavior says these are definitely not ideals that the university lives by.
In the 1920s, Harvard administrators conducted a “secret court” to expose and remove students and faculty suspected of being homosexuals. Harvard administrators also instituted quotas to restrict the number of Jews admitted to the university and banned African Americans from freshman housing. During the Cold War, Harvard was part of a campaign to bar suspected communists from teaching at American colleges and universities, and in the 1950s, graduate students suspected of prior communist affiliation or who were accused on refusing to name names to the FBI lost financial support.
Probably the most contemptable example of institutional racism at Harvard and its sacrifice of academic integrity in favor of racism and political expediency was its role as the “brain trust” of the twentieth-century eugenics movement and campaigns to restrict immigration to the United States.
Prominent Harvard faculty provided the intellectual justification for racist ideology. Economics professor Frank W. Taussig promoted forced sterilization of “criminals and paupers” to protect society from “parasites.” Psychology professor Robert M. Yerkes published an introductory psychology textbook where he explained that “the cure for race deterioration is the selection of the fit as parents” and was involved in designing intelligence tests for the American army during World War I that tried to scientifically establish racial inferiority and superiority. Psychology professor William McDougall claimed that the “negro” race was incapable of producing “individuals of really high mental and moral endowments” and advocated for eugenic sterilization. Botanist Edward M. East, who taught at Harvard’s Bussey Institution, wrote that “races have arisen which are as distinct in mental capacity as in physical traits” and that “the negro is inferior to the white.” William Ernest Castle, who taught a course on “Genetics and Eugenics” at Harvard, argued in a book published by Harvard University Press that “from the viewpoint of a superior race there is nothing to be gained by crossing with an inferior race.”
Harvard leaders were major spokespeople for eugenics and immigration restriction. President emeritus Charles William Eliot was the vice president of the First International Eugenics Congress. In a 1912 address to the Harvard Club of San Francisco, Eliot argued that racial purity in the United States was being threatened by new immigrants and that “each nation should keep its stock pure.” A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard president from 1909 to 1933, was a prominent advocate for immigration restriction arguing “the need for homogeneity in a democracy” justified laws “resisting the influx of great numbers of a greatly different race.”
University faculty, through organizations like the AAUP, have fought hard to establish universities as forums for the exchange of ideas free from outside political pressure and control. The history of Harvard University and how fragile intellectual independence remains today underscores that campaigns to protect academic integrity (even at the most prestigious institutions), academic freedom, and faculty rights must continue be at the forefront of faculty struggles.
Alan Singer is a historian and teacher educator at Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York. His most recent books are Social Studies for Secondary Schools, 5th edition (Routledge, 2024) and Class-Conscious Coal Miners (SUNY Press, 2024).
