David Remnick: For six months on this program, we've been dealing with the massacre of October 7th and the war on Gaza and its horrific human consequences. With so much death and suffering on the ground, it would be a mistake to let our interest in and our debates about domestic protests somehow overwhelm our attention. Yet you'd have to go back to the Vietnam War era to see a protest movement as widespread as what's happening now from coast to coast.

The scenes of arrests are familiar from that era, but some of the dynamics of what's happening now on campuses. Protests against Israel's prolonged bombing of Gaza and counter-protests denouncing Hamas and the calling for the release of hostages, the charges of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and doxing, student against students sometimes. Well, in some important ways, this is quite different from what we saw during Vietnam.

Randall Kennedy: In 1968, students are mad at McNamara or LBJ.

David Remnick: Or the administration.

Randall Kennedy: That's right. They're mad at the grownups, they're mad at adults. It's outward-looking.

David Remnick: I talked the other day with Randall Kennedy, a professor at the Harvard Law School.

Randall Kennedy: What you have going on now, you have people who are no longer speaking to one another. You have a situation in which somebody goes down a hall and sees a colleague walking down the hall and they turn around because they don't want to say anything to the colleague because if we talk about this, all bets are off. This is--

David Remnick: I should interrupt and say that that is not limited to anyone. It includes Jewish friends who are having a hard time talking to each other.

Randall Kennedy: Oh, absolutely. You have here various sorts of clashes. Their identities are deeply invested in this. What's going on in campus today, it's not an abstraction. It's a person who was once your friend. The emotions that are on campus today, there's more rawness than I've seen. This is my 40th year as a legal academic. I have seen nothing like what has transpired this year.

David Remnick: Today, we're going to focus on just one emblematic campus, Harvard University, where much of the unrest began. I'll talk more with Law Professor Randall Kennedy, and also former Harvard President Lawrence Summers, and with these two reporters.

Tilly Robinson: Hi, I'm Tilly Robinson.

Neil Shah: I'm Neil Shah. Together, we cover the administration of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

David Remnick: They're reporters for the Crimson, that's the newspaper put out by Harvard students that's independent of the university. Robinson and Shah have been covering the protests from the very start. Neil, I wonder how you interpret this. We want what seems to be sometimes contradictory things on a college campus like Harvard. Students should have free speech, including protests, of course, but at the same time, they have to have the ability to learn without being harassed or subject to any prejudice or threats. What has actually been happening on the Harvard campus?

Neil Shah: These contradictory moments where two groups of people interpreted something very differently marked a lot of the campus tensions throughout the entire fall semester, pretty much, right? The phrase "from the river to the sea", many of the pro-Palestine activists on campus saw this as political rhetoric, whereas many of the more pro-Israel activists on campus saw this as hate against Israel. Those contradictions are key to understanding all of this because, oftentimes, when you speak with pro-Palestine activists who have been accused of doing hateful things, they don't always seem to interpret it as such.

David Remnick: How do you mean?

Neil Shah: People who have been accused of spreading hateful rhetoric, they often don't feel as if it is hateful rhetoric because, to them, this is political speech being used to further their activist cause as opposed to them actually having hatred for Jewish students on campus.

Tilly Robinson: Yes. I think adding onto that a bit. I would say that while there have been unambiguously hateful incidents, both against Jewish students and against Muslim or Arab students or pro-Palestine activists, it's not clear to what extent those represent a systemic problem. It's also true that a number of Jewish students have helped lead pro-Palestine protests.

I think that's something where it has been a tense time and students have tried to have dialogue over and negotiate differences in how they see the world, even as they respond to tragedies and crimes overseas, and there is no one narrative. In some respects, I think Harvard's campus has actually been comparable to, or even calmer than that of many other universities that are also experiencing protests and that are also experiencing pressure as they try to navigate this moment.

David Remnick: Now, let's talk about the congressional hearing with former President Claudine Gay and the subsequent plagiarism charges, which eventually led to her resignation. The charges were pushed by Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist. Rufo has said the following, "My primary objective is to eliminate the DEI bureaucracy in every institution in America and to restore truth rather than racialist ideology as the guiding principle of America." That's Christopher Rufo. How does that relate to this whole affair at Harvard?

Neil Shah: You're right. The initial allegations of plagiarism against Claudine Gay were not made in an anonymous complaint submitted directly to the university. Rather, they were reported on by Christopher Rufo and a journalist by the name of Christopher Brune. They were largely being pushed forward in conservative publications. Then since then, there have been four anonymous complaints, one against Gay, and then three against other Black women at Harvard who have been studying race.

Tilly Robinson: The beauty of what Chris Rufo is doing, if we can call it that, is we don't have to speculate as to his motivations.

Neil Shah: Right.

David Remnick: He is so on the record constantly about his motivations.

Tilly Robinson: Right. I think it's when we look at the initial plagiarism allegations against Claudine Gay, which he played a role in releasing, he said in a tweet that, "He saved the Claudine Gay plagiarism materials over the past week waiting for the precise moment of maximum impact." He very clearly saw the plagiarism allegations, whatever their substance, as a way to undermine her presidency. That comes in the context of his campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs on college campuses against the use of affirmative action in hiring and admissions, and against disciplines that academically study race and social justice, which he refers to frequently as grievance disciplines.

Neil Shah: For instance, when Rufo reported on the most recent plagiarism complaint, the most recent anonymous plagiarism complaint against Harvard Sociology Professor Christina Cross, he tweeted, "Let's not ignore the pattern. This is the fourth Black female CRT/DEI scholar to be accused of plagiarism at Harvard. We need further research, including a control group of more rigorous fields, but initial reports suggest that the grievance disciplines are rife with fraud."

David Remnick: What he is suggesting is Black professors are particularly susceptible to this. What people on campus are saying by contrast is that he's obviously targeting Black professors and administrators in a way that is racist.

Neil Shah: Right.

David Remnick: Now, the right in the US, this has been going on for decades really, the right in the US seems to describe Harvard and universities like it as liberal bastions, even radical bastions full of, particularly in the humanities, full of left-wing students and professors who don't allow open conversation and debate. How accurate or not is that from your point of view as students, much less reporters?

Neil Shah: Well, I study computer science, so I'll let Tilly take that one.

David Remnick: Okay. Tilly?

Tilly Robinson: All right. Well, I guess I'll say--

David Remnick: Tilly, what do you study?

Tilly Robinson: Social studies. That's Harvard's interdisciplinary degree across several social sciences for me, mostly government history and economics. The Crimson conducts an annual survey of faculty at Harvard, and repeatedly, we find that Harvard's faculty are overwhelmingly liberal. On the other hand, I think the question of the state of free speech at Harvard is something that, like everything we've been discussing today, is contested. I personally have never felt unfree to speak, but the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has ranked Harvard last in their rankings of free speech on university campuses in America. The faculty we've spoken to almost uniformly call this an exaggeration.

On the other hand, again, everyone we've talked to does say there are real problems with free speech on campus. Some attribute that to a culture of self-censorship or of students being reluctant to say things in front of certain faculty members or in front of their peers. On the other hand, other people and other faculty have located the larger threat to academic freedom in the question of how outside figures, including donors and politicians in the federal government, are approaching matters at Harvard. They say that they're concerned that outside pressure will lead to the suppression of certain viewpoints on campus. There's a mix in terms of how much people think, how much people talk up Harvard's problems to internal issues versus external forces.

David Remnick: Lastly, from your point of view, what do you think the media across the country is getting wrong in all of its coverage of everything we've been talking about?

Tilly Robinson: I think that the thing that's underemphasized is that student protesters and others are responding to real substantive things in the world. We still have people holding vigils after the bombing of Al-Shifa Hospital. Similarly, there's still hostage posters that get taped up around Harvard Yard. Student protesters aren't just concerned because they feel that their voices are being suppressed on campus or because they feel their peers are threatening them. They're concerned because of the immense violence that happened in Israel on October 7th, and that has been happening in Gaza in the months since.

I think that when the media narrative shifts to focus on universities, it does engage really important questions of student safety, of academic freedom, and of the purpose of higher education in America. I think, I worry that sometimes that becomes a distraction from the actual events that are playing out in the Middle East and that sometimes the motivations for campus protest and for campus discourse are underemphasized in coverage.

David Remnick: Tilly Robinson and Neil Shah are reporters for the Crimson, the Harvard student newspaper. They're both sophomores.

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