BY ALAN SINGER
Based in 1636 as Harvard School, Harvard College is the oldest establishment of upper studying in the US. Right now, as one of many elite American universities, it’s on the middle of a lot of the battle over how a college ought to reply to protests over the warfare in Gaza. Claudine Homosexual was pressured to resign as president after she was broadsided at a congressional listening to the place Republican inquisitors equated opposition to Israeli actions with antisemitism. Rich college donors who assist Israel’s response to the October 7 assault by Hamas have been behind the demand that Homosexual resign her place. Some donors additionally issued a name for main companies to blacklist members of pupil teams that signed a letter describing Israel as an apartheid state.
The suppression of pupil and college protests didn’t cease with Homosexual’s resignation. Harvard directors eliminated official recognition from the scholar Palestinian Solidarity Committee and the interim president positioned protesting college students on disciplinary go away. The Harvard Company, the schools governing physique, then overruled the school and blocked diploma conferral on college students who have been concerned within the protest motion. Harvard’s social science dean provoked outraged responses throughout academia when he printed an essay calling for limits on college speech that draws “outdoors consideration” that he believes “instantly impedes the College’s operate.” Whereas he didn’t seek advice from Israel, Gaza, or Palestine within the essay, there is no such thing as a questions that he was responding to protests over the warfare in Gaza.
Harvard College prides itself on “inspiring each member of our group to try towards a extra simply, truthful, and promising world.” Its purported aim is to develop “citizen-leaders” by “publicity to new concepts, new methods of understanding, and new methods of realizing.” Nevertheless, an examination of Harvard’s historical past and the establishment’s present conduct says these are undoubtedly not beliefs that the college lives by.
Within the Twenties, Harvard directors carried out a “secret court docket” to reveal and take away college students and college suspected of being homosexuals. Harvard directors additionally instituted quotas to limit the variety of Jews admitted to the college and banned African Individuals from freshman housing. Through the Chilly Struggle, Harvard was a part of a marketing campaign to bar suspected communists from instructing at American schools and universities, and within the Fifties, graduate college students suspected of prior communist affiliation or who have been accused on refusing to call names to the FBI misplaced monetary assist.
In all probability probably the most contemptable instance of institutional racism at Harvard and its sacrifice of educational integrity in favor of racism and political expediency was its function because the “mind belief” of the twentieth-century eugenics motion and campaigns to limit immigration to the US.
Outstanding Harvard college supplied the mental justification for racist ideology. Economics professor Frank W. Taussig promoted pressured sterilization of “criminals and paupers” to guard society from “parasites.” Psychology professor Robert M. Yerkes printed an introductory psychology textbook the place he defined that “the treatment for race deterioration is the number of the match as mother and father” and was concerned in designing intelligence exams for the American military throughout World Struggle I that attempted to scientifically set up racial inferiority and superiority. Psychology professor William McDougall claimed that the “negro” race was incapable of manufacturing “people of actually excessive psychological and ethical endowments” and advocated for eugenic sterilization. Botanist Edward M. East, who taught at Harvard’s Bussey Establishment, wrote that “races have arisen that are as distinct in psychological capability as in bodily traits” and that “the negro is inferior to the white.” William Ernest Citadel, who taught a course on “Genetics and Eugenics” at Harvard, argued in a guide printed by Harvard College Press that “from the point of view of a superior race there may be nothing to be gained by crossing with an inferior race.”
Harvard leaders have been main spokespeople for eugenics and immigration restriction. President emeritus Charles William Eliot was the vp of the First Worldwide Eugenics Congress. In a 1912 tackle to the Harvard Membership of San Francisco, Eliot argued that racial purity in the US was being threatened by new immigrants and that “every nation ought to hold its inventory pure.” A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard president from 1909 to 1933, was a distinguished advocate for immigration restriction arguing “the necessity for homogeneity in a democracy” justified legal guidelines “resisting the inflow of nice numbers of a tremendously totally different race.”
College college, by organizations just like the AAUP, have fought onerous to ascertain universities as boards for the change of concepts free from outdoors political strain and management. The historical past of Harvard College and the way fragile mental independence stays right now underscores that campaigns to guard educational integrity (even on the most prestigious establishments), educational freedom, and college rights should proceed be on the forefront of school struggles.
Alan Singer is a historian and trainer educator at Hofstra College, Hempstead, New York. His most up-to-date books are Social Research for Secondary Faculties, fifth version (Routledge, 2024) and Class-Acutely aware Coal Miners (SUNY Press, 2024).
