After the turmoil of the last several months, do you think the Board of Overseers should step in to reassure donors? If so, how?
I think the role of the Overseers is more about advising the University and less about contact with donors. To me, if we’re advising the University, I’m not sure I want to be in contact with the donors, because I think that the donors are already exerting too much influence as it is.
Do you think the current Board of Overseers election process is fair? Would you support lowering the write-in candidate signature threshold?
I got a couple emails asking who I thought should be nominated for the Board of Overseers. And I think that that’s an important step, instead of it being a secret thing where eight people get chosen for five spots. I have no idea how I was chosen.
Being on the emails that Sam Lessin sent out, there were clearly some things that you never want to happen to an election, where there’s some debate over whether votes were counted correctly, or how hard it was to get your vote in. So I think that the whole thing we definitely need to take a look at.
As Harvard now prepares to select Claudine Gay’s permanent successor, would you like to see any changes relative to the search process that selected Gay?
Because there’s been so much controversy about President Gay, it could be useful in the search to have a little more transparency and input from more people about who makes that final list and what criteria they’re being chosen for.
For example, I’ve read criticisms that President Gay only had something like five papers published.But to me, being a university president has nothing to do with how many papers you’ve published. I’m not an academic, so maybe that isn’t one of the things that I hold up as the true metric by which your whole being is measured. But there’s a lot to being a president of a university that is far more than just what papers are published.
Recently, Harvard has grappled with campus antisemitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Palestinian racism. In light of these issues, what is your perspective on the current state of campus culture?
It seems like there’s some big problems. And I think that things need to start from treating everyone with dignity and respect, because that transcends all cultures and times and places.
When you are going to a university campus, the university should be protecting you. They should be making sure you’re safe. It should be a place where you can have respectful dialogue about anything, whether it’s controversial or not. But having it descend into hate speech and some of the things that we saw with outside people coming in and attacking the students is absolutely not appropriate. Harvard really needs to get those things under control.
Do you support Harvard committing to institutional neutrality? In what areas should Harvard remain neutral?
In order to be a successful university, where the primary job is learning and research, you have to be neutral most of the time. That said, there’s things like apartheid in South Africa. Universities got involved in that, and it helped change the tide there. There are just things that are fundamentally wrong, that at a certain point, if the universities make a statement, that’s important. I think it has to be really extreme cases, though.
As a follow up to that, in what kinds of cases would you support Harvard making statements? Do you have any specific examples?
Something like apartheid is a great example. The obvious one right now is the Israel-Hamas war because of how charged that is — how awful it is. For us sitting here in the U.S., it’s pretty hard to understand all of the complicated things going on there, so I’m not sure I would support Harvard making a statement there except that we’re against murder. People shouldn’t be dying, they shouldn’t be starving. Beyond that, I don’t know.
The University of Chicago, perhaps the most high-profile school to follow a policy of institutional neutrality, has cited that policy to reject calls from student activists to divest from certain financial interests, including in fossil fuels. Do you believe a policy of institutional neutrality should extend to investment decisions?
It’s the Corporation’s job to figure that out. It certainly is a powerful way to send a message. We live in an incredibly capitalist country, and some of the time the only way to actually get any kind of change is to take the money away from the people who are doing things you don’t agree with. But I think that neutrality is really important, so I’m not sure that I have a great answer for you.
How can Harvard respond to attacks against its credibility, or the credibility of higher education more broadly, if it is to be institutionally neutral?
When attacked, Harvard should put out a statement that corrects the facts and goes on with being the institution it is. A lot of what Harvard does speaks for itself, but I think you need to correct the misinformation that is being thrown at Harvard in a very public way and leave it at that.
As I’m sure you know, Harvard will soon complete its first admissions cycle following the Supreme Court’s landmark decision curtailing the use of race in college admissions. As the University looks to maintain diversity at the College, do you support Harvard ending preferences for legacies and the children of donors?
The goal of admissions is to make the best Harvard community you can. I went to public school in Colorado, where the majority of the kids were just trying to get through high school, and I got to Harvard, and there were all these people that were interested in all these things, and did all kinds of extra stuff, and I thought that was amazing. I loved that kind of stuff. And so, to me, the students that should be at Harvard are the ones that are bringing all of that to the table, and the intellectual curiosity in all kinds of things.
I don’t think having a parent who gives a bunch of money to the school is any indication of whether you’re going to be a good community member or that you’re really smart. It’s total nonsense to me. I understand that you could be at a university where it’s really important to get donor money. We have a huge endowment, we don’t have to do that.
For legacy students, I don’t see why that necessarily could count for something in terms of adding to the Harvard community, so I’m not really in support of legacy admissions either.
The past decade has seen a number of allegations of serious misconduct against tenured Harvard professors, ranging from repeated sexual harassment to falsification of data and other research misconduct. Still, to date, there are no known cases of Harvard revoking a professor’s tenure. In what cases, if any, do you believe revoking tenure is justified?
Tenure is a mark that you are a great professor and that the University is investing in you for a good long time. If you break that trust by doing some of the things you’re talking about, I think there needs to be serious consequences. It's not a free ride — tenure is not a free ride — there needs to be checks and balances to make sure that you’re still holding up your side of that deal that you should be at this institution for life.
Do you support the creation of an Ethnic Studies department?
I do, yes. Ethnic studies isn’t just the study of ethnicity and race and cultures. It’s about the power that is inherent to those ethnicities and the power structure that we live within.
We’re in this world of “us versus them,” and I’m not even gonna listen to you if I decide you’re the “them.” So the study of that power, I think, is incredibly important for bringing things down from the rhetoric we hear and the polarization.
When I was at Harvard, I got to meet all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds — the kids of presidents to someone who made it out of Compton. That’s really important, and you don’t want that to just happen when you’re walking across Harvard Yard, so you want to ensure with diversity and ethnic studies that people are getting these broad ranges.
