Harvard Has Almost No History of Fighting Fiercely

Why Harvard President Alan Garber's brave stance this week is so very remarkable.

T.H. Matteson, “Examination of a Witch,” 1853.

As a Harvard undergraduate Tom Lehrer (Harvard ‘46) wrote a very funny satirical song titled “Fight Fiercely Harvard,” the gist of which was that Harvard was too hoity-toity to be especially fierce, on the football field or anywhere else. When applied to the university administration, that accusation was entirely correct, as I found out yesterday when I set about looking for a precedent for Harvard, as an institution, showing anything like the cojones that Harvard President Alan Garber demonstrated this week in standing up to President Donald Trump.

My curiosity arose from my inability (as a Harvard College graduate, class of 1980) to complete the sentence, “Not since ….” I jotted down six episodes of moral challenge in American history since Harvard’s founding and queried various historians and other Harvard experts. I was especially fortunate to find Andrew Schlesinger, author of Veritas: Harvard College and the American Experience (2005), which focused on precisely this question. The answer turns out to be that yes, there is a precedent for Harvard taking a moral stand at substantial risk to itself, but that this happened well before your great-great grandfather was born. You can read my findings here.

I was so busy with this task yesterday that I forgot to alert my readers to another New Republic piece, posted Tuesday, explaining why Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is not going to save Wall Street from the depredations of Trump’s economic policies. Sorry, he just isn’t. You can read that piece here.