Will Harvard Bend or Break?

There would be debate about who struck the match that lit the fuse that spiralled around campus, but the sequence of events was plain enough to everyone who saw it burn. On October 9, 2023, two days after Hamas-led fighters from Gaza invaded Israel, killing twelve hundred people and taking more than two hundred hostages, Claudine Gay, the new president of Harvard University, exchanged e-mails with a small group of colleagues to draft a suitable response. Should they call the attacks “violent”? (Too charged, they decided.) Should they denounce a letter, signed by more than thirty student groups, which called Israel “the only one to blame”? The matter seemed delicate, and the administrators took time to work over their language. That night, they published a statement so widely dismissed as anodyne that Gay released another one, taking a stand against the violence, the next day. By then, Larry Summers, a former president of the university, had broken the norms of that role to blast the current leadership for inaction; Bill Ackman, an alumnus with a hedge fund, had picked up the criticism; and Elise Stefanik, a Republican in Congress, had condemned students’ “vile anti-Semitic statements.” Two months later, Gay was at the Capitol, addressing the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. It was the start of what one professor described to me as “an endlessly metastatic sense of crisis over the course of the whole year.” Gay, who appeared on Capitol Hill in thick-rimmed glasses and a jacket that resembled gessoed canvas, sat beside the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and M.I.T., who had also been summoned to give testimony. The questions that the committee posed, on alleged antisemitism on campus, had an air of ritualistic repetition. At one point, Stefanik asked whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated the schools’ rules of bullying and harassment. Gay joined the other presidents in saying that her administration allowed freedom of speech but would take action over anything more. “Antisemitic rhetoric, when it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation—that is actionable conduct,” she said. Stefanik pressed her. “Again,” Gay answered, “it depends on the context.”