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…
BY JOHN K. WILSON On January 19, 2024, PEN America held a major summit on free expression at Harvard University. But it seems top administrators at Harvard are the ones who really need a lesson on the topic, since that same day they announced a new “Guidance on Protest and Dissent” that restricts the right…
BY ALAN SINGER An earlier version of this blog post appeared on the Daily Kos. We are reposting it here with permission of the author. Many of us have seen the congressional sound bites. MAGA superstar Elise Stefanik made mincemeat out of Ivy League college presidents Claudine Gay of Harvard, Liz Magill of the University of…
BY JOHN K. WILSON The presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT testified on Capitol Hill on December 5, 2023, at a hearing on “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism,” and the bipartisan political backlash with demands for their resignations is unprecedented in the history of higher education, including the forced resignation of Penn president…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Every solution offered by a college or university faces a pending crisis in a different way. Wealthy institutions have the resources to weather challenges by kicking the can down the road, often for decades. That’s why it is significant that Harvard University last week issued a warning about its financial constraints…
BY HANK REICHMAN Fresh from the embarrassment of rescinding a fellowship to whistleblower Chelsea Manning while welcoming disgraced Trumpers Corey Lewandowski and Sean Spicer, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government has again privileged spokespersons for the right while denying their opponents a voice. Thursday and Friday the school will host a conference on “The Future of…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following op-ed was published today in the Harvard Crimson over the bylines of Jason Beckfield, Joyce E. Chaplin, and Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and signed by 159 members of the Harvard University faculty. We, the undersigned faculty, write to protest the University’s decisions to overturn Michelle Jones’s admission to the Ph.D.…
BY HANK REICHMAN It’s a pretty safe assumption that a trans woman like Chelsea Manning, who served seven years in military prison for leaking classified documents revealing U.S. government involvement in torture, is not someone who can normally expect to be named a Visiting Fellow at Harvard. But on Wednesday the university’s John F. Kennedy…
BY HANK REICHMAN Early yesterday morning Harvard University and its striking food service workers reached a tentative agreement, which, if approved by union members in a vote scheduled for today, will bring to an end a 22-day strike that garnered national attention. (For previous posts on this blog about the strike go here, here, here,…
BY HANK REICHMAN In an update to my previous post on the continuing strike of food service workers at Harvard University, I called attention to a walkout by hundreds of Harvard students on Monday in support of the strikers. As the students and workers rallied, Kennedy School of Government lecturer Timothy P. McCarthy, a Harvard…