Don't praise Harvard just yet

Boston Globe

18-04-2025

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Given the options, we should all be relieved to see Harvard's leadership show some fight. But Harvard does not deserve praise, at least not yet. Harvard has spent much of the past 18 months
To earn the public's praise, and to deserve its nonprofit status, Harvard needs to do more than defend itself. With an endowment of more than $50 billion, it is time for Harvard — and peers like
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It is disappointing that there hasn't been aunified front. One explanation is that universities have become anti-democratic institutions more invested in their endowments and rankings than producing knowledge for the common good. Formal power tends to reside in external, and largely unaccountable, boards of trustees whose interests often diverge from the institution's educational missions. This denies core institutional stakeholders — like faculty, staff, students, and communities — any meaningful role in university governance. These dynamics are crippling universities' resolve to defend their communities, their values, and democracy itself.
Juxtaposed to this inaction, a groundswell of higher education workers is uniting around a basic call: We need our universities to fight, together. By one recent estimate,
Faculty governing bodies are also urging their universities to unify. The Rutgers University Senate recently called on all Big 10 universities to enter a NATO-like
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Such statements are not limited to individual universities. Earlier this month, nearly 5,000 professors endorsed a
The Trump administration is open about its desire to leverage funding to exert '