Pete Hegseth: Pete Hegseth here. I'm here to tell you about another freedom-loving company.

Micah Loewinger: Donald Trump is cultivating a cabinet of influencer politicians and they're out to sell. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Harvard is the nation's oldest and richest university, but last fall, that offered no protection when a social media-fueled fight over Harvard and its new president broke out.

Elise Stefanik: And Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?

Christopher Rufo: Claudine Gay is now gone. We've exposed the DEI regime and there's much more to come.

Micah Loewinger: Tune in for the first episode in a miniseries that we produced with the Boston Globe about the leadership crisis at Harvard and what it spells for universities writ large. It's all coming up after this.

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Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. For the last couple of weeks, the headlines have runneth over with the president elect's cabinet picks. From a man who likes to drink at work and is accused of sexual assault for secretary of defense to a senator who proudly confessed to shooting her dog for Homeland Security Chief, this ain't your father's cabinet. And other than being underqualified for their proposed positions, there's something else that a lot of Trump's picks have in common.

Micah Loewinger: This is sound from a video that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Secretary of Health and Human Services nominee, shared with his 3.2 million followers on TikTok.

Drew Harwell: He's standing in this room in a nondescript location covered in sweat. He's surrounded by these fairly young, 20, 30-somethings.

Micah Loewinger: Drew Harwell, Washington Post tech reporter, wrote about the video, which is an advertisement for a game called Boxbollen.

Drew Harwell: It's like a little bouncy ball that you strap to your head and he's just like airboxing this bouncy ball and then he gets a high score and everybody cheers.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: This is Boxbollen and the ideal stocking stuffer. When I'm on the road, I try to use it as often as I can because it keeps up my hand eye coordination and it gives me a workout.

Drew Harwell: It's a popular piece of sponsored content on TikTok. You'll see this from Chloe Kardashian and Bill Gates doing this, but it's just so strange because this is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, right?

Micah Loewinger: Yes, it's kind of unbecoming of a potentially incoming government official.

Drew Harwell: It's not just RFK, but it's people like Dr. Oz, Mehmet Oz, a celebrity doctor, a longtime TV personality who Trump has named to run Medicare and Medicaid. He online is the celebrity endorser of something called iHerb.

Dr. Mehmet Oz: I'm Dr. Oz. I'm so excited to partner with iHerb. What is iHerb? They're an online health and wellness store that sells tens of thousands of high quality products.

Drew Harwell: And even days after he was named to lead the agency, he was telling people, hey, if you're stressed from Thanksgiving, buy this adaptogen called ashwagandha.

Dr. Mehmet Oz: Ashwagandha, which regulates metabolism and calms how your brain reacts to stress. It also seems to help with my exhausted thyroid, which I'm not alone with this problem, so I can keep up with my relatives better during our annual Thanksgiving football game. Happy Thanksgiving.

Micah Loewinger: You have Pete Hegseth, the former Fox and Friends weekend co-host tapped by Trump for Secretary of Defense, who not only talks his book The War on Warriors, but also shills for this soap that kind of looks like a grenade.

Pete Hegseth: Bam. This company is called One Man Army. They love the country. They're patriots, they're anti-woke, and they're 100% American-made.

Micah Loewinger: These people are not just like political-facing figures, but they are in every way influencers. They have big audiences, they have big followings, and they use that attention and capitalize on it in a way that allows them to, yes, sell products, get promotional sponsorships, get money on the side and boost their own personal brands. In addition to RFK Jr, Pete Hegseth, Dr. Oz, we also have Matt Gaetz, who just after withdrawing his name from the attorney general nomination, signed up for Cameo, which is the site where you can pay influencers and celebrities to record personalized messages.

Drew Harwell: Yes, and it's wild because within hours of Matt Gaetz stepping down from consideration for attorney general, this huge role, he seemingly immediately went on Cameo, created an account, and people are paying him $500 or more for a two minute roast or advice or like birthday thing.

Matt Gaetz: Hey, Jacqueline, it's Matt Gaetz. Happy 57th birthday.

Micah Loewinger: I went to his page and found this one, which he appears to have filmed while driving on the highway.

Matt Gaetz: It sounds like you've had quite a ride over these last 57 years, and you've got an amazing--

Micah Loewinger: The Cameo pivot was pioneered famously by George Santos, who's made a killing on the site since he was expelled from Congress last year.

Erin Burnett: Tonight, George Santos's second act. Hundreds of requests to record personalized videos on the website Cameo. His fee has now jumped to $350, and Santos is loving it.

George Santos: My favorite TS song is definitely going to be Trouble. I knew you were trouble when you walked in. That's me. Bye.

Micah Loewinger: Then there's Kash Patel, Trump's pick for FBI director. Back in 2021, after serving in the first Trump administration and earning notoriety as a conspiracy theorist obsessed with the Deep State, Patel struggled to find his second act.

Elaina Plott Calabro: When Kash Patel comes out of the administration, he is incredibly frustrated that, as one source told me, he's not getting offers from places like Raytheon or Boeing seats on their boards.

Micah Loewinger: Elaina Plott Calabro profiled Kash Patel for the Atlantic.

Elaina Plott Calabro: And so without those sort of plummy salaried positions, he starts cobbling together various other income streams in large part through the selling of merchandise, cash branded merchandise, a lot of the proceeds of which he says goes to a foundation he started called the Kash Foundation, the mission of which is really vague and details of which are very hard to come by, even in filings with the IRS, and the merch, I should say, really runs the gamut. You have your Kash crew polo tees, you have your Kash scarves, Rhino tanks, basically anything that can be branded with KA$H, Kash Patel has probably sold it. There's Kash wine.

Micah Loewinger: Six bottles of official Kash wine for $233.99.

Elaina Plott Calabro: But as of this recording, I believe it out. There was a market for it. Another thing he did that I think is useful to mention, he did a lot of endorsement deals with these QAnon-friendly, fringe-friendly companies. He would peddle on his truth social profile these pills that claim to, if you've gotten the COVID vaccination, maybe flush the spike proteins out of your system. There's no evidence that these do what they say they do, but he has marketed them quite extensively. All of this to say is that he was able to effectively commodify his relationship with the former president, but it's also following a model set by Donald Trump himself.

Donald Trump: He's a big name influencer, but I said to him, knowing nothing about influences, I said, who is the biggest of all the influences?

Micah Loewinger: Here's Trump on Flagrant, a comedy podcast in October, recounting a discussion with one of his aides. Who is it? You, sir.

Trump's Aide: It's true.

Donald Trump: I said, Me? I never thought of it. He said, you're the biggest. You have hundreds of millions of people. You have more people than anybody else by far.

Micah Loewinger: This blurring of politicians and influencers is part of a larger phenomenon that media studies professor Sophie Bishop calls influencer creep. Here's Drew Harwell.

Drew Harwell: Not too long ago, we saw influencers as this side group of dilettantes, basically, right? People who were good at self-promoting online but were not traditional media people. They weren't singers, actors, they were just influencers, but what they were really good at was building an audience, building a following online, posting really regularly. A lot of those tactics are now being picked up by these traditional media figures who never had to do stuff like that before, but are now adopting those tactics because they were. Politicians are seeing influencer creep too. They know that attention is a currency in the modern era and that one way to do that is to reach people through their phones and online because we're all online all the time.

Micah Loewinger: These platforms allow them to speak our language. It allows them to kind of interact with us in a light and often superficial way, which is not consistent with the gravity of their power, right?

Drew Harwell: Yes, exactly. What we really need to do to politicians is to evaluate who they are as a political leader and not just like a sharer of memes on TikTok. We've always expected those people to make decisions based off of what's right for the American people and not necessarily like what company landed a partnership deal with them.

Lauren Boebert: Hey, Cameo, it's your girl from Colorado, Lauren Boebert. I am so excited to be joining another platform where I can connect directly with supporters.

Micah Loewinger: Unfortunately for Republican Representative Lauren Boebert, a House rule that prohibits paid speaking gigs forced her to shut down her Cameo account shortly after she launched it last month, and it remains to be seen whether incoming White House officials will observe similar rules and norms or apply them evenly. During his first term, Trump's counselor, Kellyanne Conway, got a slap on the wrist for telling Fox News viewers to buy Ivanka Trump's fashion line.

Kellyanne Conway: Go buy Ivanka stuff is what I would tell you. I hate shopping, but I'm going to go get some on myself today. It's a wonderful line. I own some of it. I'm going to give a free commercial.

Micah Loewinger: Of course, there are also more lucrative and less public ways for politicians to cash in and abuse their power. Trump's first term Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price both resigned in corruption and ethics scandals. Neither were influencers. Meanwhile, members of Congress in both parties are free to own and trade stocks despite reviewing non public information for a living. As far as we can tell, from his Cabinet picks so far, Trump seems to be prioritizing loyalty, charisma, and reach above all else. Drew Harwell.

Drew Harwell: I think about people like Vivek Ramaswamy, former pharmaceutical executive, now big right wing influencer, who will be helping Elon Musk with this promise to slash trillions off the government budget. How they're going to do that, we still don't really know, except that Ramaswamy has said they're going to do a DOGE podcast where they're going to lay out in very colorful detail what they want to slash and why. That marketing vessel is going to push out Trump views relentlessly and there's going to be a big audience for it. It's going to get social media traction. He doesn't have to go through a middleman of traditional media, people testing the bounds of it, asking questions about it, having that adversarial relationship. They have the microphone. They can say whatever they want and frame it however they want.

Micah Loewinger: We've heard similar plans about sidestepping legacy media from Trump's inner circle.

Donald Trump Jr.: We had the conversation about opening up the press room to a lot of these independent journalists.

Micah Loewinger: Here's Donald Trump Jr. on Triggered, his podcast.

Donald Trump Jr.: If the New York Times has lied, they've been adverse to everything. They're functioning as the marketing arm of the Democrat Party. Like, why not open it up to people who have larger viewerships, stronger followings?

Micah Loewinger: As one Trump insider told Politico last month, "I could very well see a press briefing room where Maggie Haberman sits next to Joe Rogan."

Drew Harwell: You know, I think in a situation like that, it will be interesting to see because they do have different goals.

Micah Loewinger: So, Drew, how should the press go about covering and thinking about politicians who are increasingly becoming more like influencers every day?

Drew Harwell: Yes, it's a good question. My first thought is that we have to take this seriously. It is a big part of American culture and life. It is bigger in many people's lives than the traditional media, and we just have to take it seriously and part of that is understanding it, immersing ourselves into it. People are not hypnotized into listening to Joe Rogan. They turn it on because it does something for them. They get something out of it. Same thing with Don Jr's podcast. So I think part of it is just accepting that this influencer creep situation is not going away and that's going to be affecting how people understand our democracy for a long time.

Micah Loewinger: Drew Harwell is a technology reporter for the Washington Post and author of the recent article Trump and Allies Blur the Lines between Politician and Influencers. Drew, thank you very much.

Drew Harwell: Yes, thanks.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, a behind the scenes look at what went on after the presidents of three of the most exclusive universities in the country were hauled up in front of Congress.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

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Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. On December 5, 2023, the presidents of three private universities went before Congress for a hearing titled Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism. This took place against the background of almost wall-to-wall coverage of the pro-Palestinian campus protests following the Hamas attack on Israel and Israel's subsequent war in Gaza. As a fact-finding exercise, the congressional hearing deserved a D-, but as TV, A+ must watch. Here's Harvard's then president Claudine Gay being questioned by Representative Elise Stefanik.

Elise Stefanik: So based upon your testimony, you understand that this call for intifada is to commit genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally, correct?

Claudine Gay: I will say again, that type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me.

Elise Stefanik: Do you believe that type of hateful speech is contrary to Harvard’s Code of Conduct or is it allowed at Harvard?

Claudine Gay: It is at odds with the values of Harvard.

Elise Stefanik: Can you not say here that it is against the Code of Conduct at Harvard?

Brooke Gladstone: Within weeks, two of the three presidents at that hearing had resigned, Gay among them, and more college presidents have since quit, worn out by the demands of their increasingly trying jobs. Meanwhile, university critics are on the rise. Stefanik, Harvard class of 2006, was nominated by President-elect Trump to be the next American Ambassador to the United Nations, and then there's incoming Vice President JD Vance.

JD Vance: We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.

Brooke Gladstone: Like Stefanik, he knows them from the inside.

JD Vance: I'm an alumnus of Yale Law School at the ridiculous-- Thank you. Boo.

Brooke Gladstone: The story of Harvard's leadership crisis is the subject of a new three part series we produced in collaboration with the Boston Globe. Ilya Marritz, our former colleague and occasional fill-in host, is the host of this series, and over the next three weeks, we'll investigate the forces that brought down Harvard's president and revealed the plan that the incoming administration and others have for all institutions of higher learning in America. We're calling the series The Harvard Plan. Here's Ilya.

Ilya Marritz: Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America. The governing board calls itself the oldest corporation in the Western hemisphere. If Harvard were a human being, its endowment alone would make it the 18th richest billionaire on the Forbes list. I spent a year at Harvard as a visiting journalist on a fellowship. From the moment I arrived, I kept noticing how much people at Harvard think about power. Analyzing it, quantifying it, forming the people who will hold it. Just this past semester, the course catalog included more than 250 classes with the word leadership in their description.

Leadership, as I eventually figured out, is Harvard speak for power. When I first got there in the fall of 2023, I'd go to the main library and roam the stacks, inhaling the scent of old books. And on my way back out, I'd pause at the top of the granite steps and look across the yard crisscrossed by footpaths, workers were hanging banners, building a stage for a big party. Harvard was about to inaugurate a new president. Nobody knew then that the aftermath of that celebration would be a spectacular torching of Harvard's reputation. That Harvard's own assumptions about how power works, its own blind spots, would be used against it by a bunch of Harvard grads, and then one Friday in September, the brass band struck up a tune and the celebration began.

Sonya Groysman: I think no one expected that it's going to be so rainy.

Ilya Marritz: This is my friend Sonya Groysman. She's a journalist from Russia. She and I went to the inauguration together. We sat on folding chairs as it started to drizzle.

Sonya Groysman: And I remember us saying something like, oh, it's like at Harry Potter, remember?

Ilya Marritz: It really did look like Hogwarts with all these professors in colorful robes and mortarboard caps passing by. When Harvard's new president, Claudine Gay, swept past, I snapped a photo. I still have it on my phone. Here is a black woman with short hair, in chunky glasses, smiling, waving. Her body language says, thank you for throwing me this party. You really shouldn't have. If her inauguration had a one word theme, it was finally.

Felix Matos-Rodriguez: This community is thrilled by her historic appointment as Harvard's first black leader and its only second women president.

Ilya Marritz: Gay's parents immigrated to the United States from Haiti.

Natalie Sadlak: Many students felt that this moment called us to repair past harms.

Ilya Marritz: One speaker after another talked about this event as historic, as a kind of correction.

Natalie Sadlak: Many look to our next president to guide us through this reckoning. We are lucky enough to have found that person in President Gay.

Ilya Marritz: As a scholar, Gay studied black participation in politics. Later she became an administrator, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. So here was change, grafted onto tradition.

Meredith Hodges: I invite President Emeritus Lawrence Summers to present two silver keys, which represent the opening of doors to knowledge and truth.

Ilya Marritz: For much of the ceremony, Larry Summers, probably the most famous living former Harvard president, was sitting with his fingertips pressed together, looking grim. Now he rose to give Gay a pair of very oversized keys on a ring, and she held them up for everyone to see. There is something about this moment. It's not only the visual of a new president who looks different from her predecessors, it's also the timing. Harvard had just lost a major legal challenge to its admissions policies that went all the way to the Supreme Court. At stake, the future of race based affirmative action.

Chief Justice Roberts: We'll hear argument next in Case 20-1199, Students for Fair Admissions versus the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Mr. Norris.

Ilya Marritz: The court ruled against the university, overturning almost five decades of precedent. The ruling would set the guidelines not only for Harvard, but for nearly all colleges and universities.

Penny S. Pritzker: Madam President, the chair is yours.

Claudine Gay: Thank you. And thank you for soldiering through the rain.

Ilya Marritz: The theme of Gay's inaugural speech was courage. The courage to ask why? Why not? The courage to pose the questions that lead to research breakthroughs and great insights without directly addressing the Supreme Court. Gay said Harvard has a commitment.

Claudine Gay: To draw from a deeper pool of talent and provide our institution with the excellence it deserves and our diverse society with the leaders it needs and expects.

Ilya Marritz: But what really stands out, watching it now after everything that's happened, is that Claudine Gay's speech kind of anticipates what's to come.

Claudine Gay: We are in a moment of declining trust in institutions of all kinds. Of endless access to information, but doubts and conflict about whom and what to believe. Of political polarization so extreme that gridlock is preferred to pragmatic collaboration.

Ilya Marritz: Her read on this is pretty precise, but her ideas for rebuilding trust are hazy.

Claudine Gay: It lies partly in our courage to face our imperfections and mistakes, and to turn outward with a fresh and open spirit—meeting a doubtful and restless society with audacious and uplifting ambitions, present in both the research--

Ilya Marritz: It was Friday, September 29, 2023.

Larry Summers: President Gay, you got this.

Ilya Marritz: Anything seemed possible.

Larry Summers: And we got you.

Ilya Marritz: This series is about what happes next, about the very strange, very fast sequence of events that led to the premature end of Claudine Gay's presidency and a pretty major change of direction across American institutions. The same institutions Gay worried were losing public trust. More university presidents quit, more companies backed off efforts aimed at diversity and racial reconciliation. The thing that set it all off, a letter from a group hardly anyone had heard of, about a war thousands of miles away.

Noah Feldman: Imagine that you came from Mars and said I'm trying to learn about you strange people on Earth.

Ilya Marritz: Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman.

Noah Feldman: And I know that on October 7th, Hamas attacked Israel. And I know that three months later, give or take, Claudine Gay resigned the presidency. And I know there's some connection. But what was it again? It would take a whole podcast or a whole book to try to explain it. And even then, the Martian would still say, probably, "Gosh, you people, you're living in a very strange and complicated world."

Ilya Marritz: Most of the voices you're going to hear in this series come with advanced degrees, many of them Harvard degrees. These denizens of the successfactory have much in common, but this crisis divides them.

Randall Kennedy: I was deeply saddened. I still am deeply saddened by it. I thought that she was mistreated.

David Wolpe: I wanted her to be fired because of failures of leadership, failure to stop an emergence of antisemitism on campus.

Danielle Holley: Because of gender and race, you don't get any credits. All those credits you think you've been building up for years, the credits are always at zero.

Ilya Marritz: Before I came to Harvard, I covered Donald Trump and extremism and the fraying of democratic institutions. I went to do this fellowship and go back to college to get away from all that, but it felt like those same forces followed me to the university. They became impossible to ignore, and so I got to work trying to understand what the heck just happened.

Hilary Burns: So it was over the weekend. It was Saturday night.

Ilya Marritz: This is my Boston Globe colleague Hilary Burns, who covers higher education.

Hilary Burns: I was in Vermont, not working, but obviously, the news of October 7th was all over the news.

Newscaster: We have breaking news out of Israel this morning, where Hamas has launched a surprise attack within Israel's borders overnight.

Newscaster: Thousands of rockets were fired into Israel as gunmen infiltrated several border towns and bases, kidnapping civilians and soldiers.

Ilya Marritz: Within hours, Hilary Burns heard that a Harvard student group had put out a letter that was getting noticed.

Hilary Burns: I remember thinking people were going to be very angry about this.

Ilya Marritz: The letter was written by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and originally co-signed by 33 other Harvard student organizations, and it blamed Israel entirely for the attack. "Today's events did not occur in a vacuum." The statement reads. "For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open air prison. In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel's violence. The apartheid regime is the only one to blame."

Hilary Burns: I knew that this issue in particular had been so divisive and contentious over the years before this. It caused a lot of rifts at Harvard in the past.

Ilya Marritz: By Monday, the letter had gone viral. Some people said it was anti-Semitic.

Hilary Burns: I mean, there were members of Congress, Larry Summers, prominent alumni tweeting, it was making international headlines.

Newscaster: Tonight, there is growing backlash to a letter signed by nearly three dozen student groups at Harvard, which solely blamed Israel.

Newscaster: Now executives in finance and tech want the students blacklisted. Several groups and individual students have already apologized, revoking their support of the letter.

Hilary Burns: And at that point Monday, during the work hours, Harvard administration had not yet put out a statement at all.

Ilya Marritz: Claudine Gay spent the previous night at Hillel, the Jewish student center on campus. The place was packed. Some students demanded that Harvard respond to the letter from the Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee with some kind of official condemnation. Gay told them that in her view, statements don't bring healing. Showing up in person can. The next day, seeing no public statement, former Harvard president Larry Summers, the man who gave Gay the ceremonial keys to knowledge and truth, took to X to criticize the university for its silence. An official statement signed by Claudine Gay and the university's deans appeared later that day. Harvard leadership had, in fact, spent much of the weekend hashing out the wording. Summers responded on Bloomberg TV.

Larry Summers: In the same way that previous leaders flew the Ukrainian flag over Harvard Yard after Putin's invasion, I thought it was appropriate for there to be a strong Harvard statement condemning, in the strongest possible terms, Hamas terrorism.

Ilya Marritz: Harvard's statement on the Hamas attack actually came out faster than Harvard's earlier condemnations of Russia's invasion of Ukraine or the killing of George Floyd, but those letters showed passion, moral clarity. This was much more removed. Some saw it as anti-Israel for not mentioning the hostages, not using the word terrorism, and for drawing a kind of grammatical equivalence between Israel and Hamas. The following day, under pressure, Claudine Gay put out another statement aimed at diffusing the outrage. Take two is short and clear and signed only by her.

Hilary Burns: She said that that statement does not speak for Harvard. It really separated her from that student statement that had angered so many people.

Ilya Marritz: If that was supposed to close the book on this episode, now trucks had started circling campus.

Sera Congi: A digital billboard parked right outside Harvard University is attracting a lot of attention. The names and faces of Harvard students are displayed under the title Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.

Ilya Marritz: Some of the students being called out hadn't signed the letter or even known about it.

Hilary Burns: Students were really freaked out and afraid, and at that point, we were seeing alumni on Twitter, including hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, doubling down on this and saying Harvard needs to release the names of students affiliated with this statement, so we know on Wall Street not to hire them. Some students did lose job offers.

David Wolpe: She called me.

Ilya Marritz: Around this time, Rabbi David Wolpe received a phone call. Wolpe was a visiting scholar at Harvard's Divinity School, but before that, he led a large diverse congregation in Los Angeles. In that role, he had to be attuned to potential disputes and balance the wishes of more liberal American-born members with those of more conservative Iranian-born congregants. BLM lawn sign, no. Gay marriages, yes. So, Rabbi Wolpe's phone was ringing. He picked up.

David Wolpe: She said, this is Claudine Gay. She said she realized that the campus was exploding with this and this was not her expertise.

Ilya Marritz: More acutely than the content of the call, Wolpe remembers this.

David Wolpe: She was clearly deeply shaken. I mean she was very emotional on the call. She was having a hard time, and who wouldn't in her position?

Ilya Marritz: Gay asked Rabbi Wolpe to join a task force in antisemitism. He said yes, of course. She also asked him for a reading list.

David Wolpe: Books that would give her both the history of the conflict and also some deeper understanding of Jewish history and why Jews feel the way they do in response to what's been going on. I made a suggestion of a couple of books. I don't know that she ever got the time to read them, but I did make the suggestions.

Ilya Marritz: It's hard to imagine now, but that October and into November, it was still possible to kind of ignore the noise. I didn't really notice any protests. The students in my classes just wanted to get ahead. Still, things were happening.

Hilary Burns: There were a couple incidents that were very high profile.

Ilya Marritz: The Globe's Hilary Burns.

Hilary Burns: Including the one at the business school where there was a peaceful die in, where people were just lying on the ground holding signs calling for a ceasefire and a student walk through the crowd like filming students, and some kind of altercation happened.

Ilya Marritz: In this video which was posted online, a person who has been identified as an Israeli student is kind of mobbed by a big group of of people holding up keffiyehs, shouting what sounds like shame.

Crowd: Shame, shame, shame.

Hilary Burns: We don't really know what to make of what happened. The prosecution of two pro-Palestinian graduate students who were charged with assault and battery and a civil rights violation is still playing out in the courts.

Ilya Marritz: For some Harvard alumni, this incident and others were a tipping point.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, a billionaire's tweet sets the wheels in motion for more drama on campus.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

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Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. You're listening to part one of the three-part series we made with The Boston Globe about the crisis at Harvard following the events of October 7, 2023. Before the break, we heard that for some in Harvard's community of alumni and mega-donors, the perceived absence of leadership when it came to the pro-Palestinian protests on campus was the final straw. The host of the series, Ilya Marritz, picks up the story.

Ilya Marritz: What is the Mark connection? You guys were friends at Harvard or what?

Sam Lessin: Friends could be overstated. We knew each other.

Ilya Marritz: Sam Lessin, class of 2005, is a tech executive who's worked at Facebook. He was at Harvard at the same time as Mark Zuckerberg, who did not graduate.

Sam Lessin: We knew each other in college. We became close years later.

Ilya Marritz: Lessin had been hearing murmurs about bad things happening at Harvard for a while, but he didn't buy it.

Sam Lessin: I started hearing, like everyone else, the trigger warnings, and then I'm like, wow, there are trigger warnings. Like we talked about some crazy stuff, and so you kind of get a sense that things are changing here or there. People worry about antisemitism, they worry about what can and can't be said, what does and doesn't happen on campus, disinvited speakers. You kind of see this drumbeat, but again, [unintelligible 00:33:56] last fall really was the one who defended the university pretty consistently and my friend rooting like yep. Look, this stuff is complicated.

Ilya Marritz: Lessin had given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Harvard in the past, but now he was questioning that.

Sam Lessin: I'm like, oh my God, I'm the one who's wrong here and that sucks.

Bill Ackman: I went up to campus and I met with hundreds of students in small groups and larger groups and they're like, "Bill, why is the president doing nothing? Why is the administration doing nothing? And that was really the beginning.

Ilya Marritz: This is tape from the Lex Friedman podcast. The guest is Bill Ackman, Harvard College Class of '88, MBA 1992, who'd given Harvard millions. He was on his own parallel journey. Ackman is a wildly successful hedge fund manager known for picking big public fights with companies he thinks are mismanaged. He once successfully browbeat Wendy's into selling off the Tim Hortons chain of donut shops. Reaching out to Harvard's leadership--

Bill Ackman: It reminded me of early days of activism where I couldn't get the CEO of Wendy's to return my call. I couldn't get the CEO of Harvard to take a meeting.

Ilya Marritz: Bill Ackman bailed on an interview with us last minute. Like Sam Lessin, he experienced a kind of awakening about Harvard.

Bill Ackman: They started talking to me about this oppressor, oppressed framework. I had not even heard of this. Basically, they're like, look, Israel is deemed an oppressor and the Palestinians are deemed the oppressed.

Ilya Marritz: Many of Harvard's critics once considered themselves liberal or center-left, but the crisis at Harvard worked like a wedge. You could see it prying off a segment of rich and influential supporters in real-time. The story was reaching critical mass and Congress got interested, specifically the Republican-controlled House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Near the end of November, Claudine Gay and two other college presidents agreed to testify in a hearing on antisemitism at colleges. Rabbi Wolpe, the guy who sent Gay the reading list, he texted her with an offer.

David Wolpe: I knew that she was going into the hearings and I thought I could help, and so I tried to persuade her to let me supply her with quotes from the Bible or the Talmud or the Jewish sages, something that would show that she was taking this seriously.

Ilya Marritz: Wolpe wanted Gay to succeed, but he had serious doubts about how Harvard was responding to the crisis. He had joined the Advisory Group on Antisemitism, which brought him face to face with a number of university leaders where Wolpe saw a five-alarm fire, he says Harvard just didn't.

David Wolpe: I don't want to speak specifically for President Gay, but it was from everything that we heard, some of it official, some of it unofficial. The corporation which is the board that oversees Harvard, the deans, everybody thought that it was going to eventually peter out and go away in part because they saw which was true that many students were not involved and didn't care and just came to class and so on. I don't think they realized that for the students who were involved, this was an epochal event.

Ilya Marritz: Still, Wolpe thought Gay would be well served to quote from a holy book when she went before Congress to show she was simpatico with the Jewish people and attuned to Jewish suffering. Did you have a specific quotation citation in mind?

David Wolpe: I think I had a couple that I thought of, but I don't really remember now what they were, but it's easy to find, relevant citations for peaceful interaction for learned debate or whatever. I don't know what I would have come up with.

Ilya Marritz: What did she say?

David Wolpe: She thanked me very much.

Ilya Marritz: She said thank you for the suggestion and that's it.

David Wolpe: Yes, basically.

Claudine Gay: During these difficult days, I have felt the bonds of our community strain. In response, I have sought to confront hate while preserving free expression. This is difficult work, and I know that I have not always gotten it right.

Ilya Marritz: When the day comes and the C-SPAN camera is on her, Gay does not cite the Torah or the Talmud. She talks like the administrator she is.

Claudine Gay: We at Harvard reject antisemitism and denounce any trace of it on our campus or within our community. Antisemitism is a symptom of ignorance, and the cure for ignorance is knowledge. Harvard must model what it means to preserve free expression while combating prejudice and preserving the security of our community.

Ilya Marritz: For a hearing in which members profess to be alarmed about rising antisemitism, there is shockingly little fact-finding. Hatred of Jews is construed broadly to include contested terms like Intifada. Members of Congress don't want to hear about the fine points of balancing free expression with the need for public safety. For the three college presidents, it's a ritual beating lasting more than five hours.

Elise Stefanik: Dr. Kornbluth, at MIT, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate MIT’s code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment? Yes or no?

Ilya Marritz: If there's one part of this story that is probably very familiar to you, it's the barrage of confrontational questions from New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, Harvard College Class of 2006, currently President-elect Trump's nominee for Ambassador to the United Nations.

Elise Stefanik: Ms. Magill at Penn, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's rules or code of conduct? Yes or no?

Liz Magill: If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment. Yes.

Elise Stefanik: I am asking, specifically calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment?

Liz Magill: If it is directed, and severe or pervasive, it is harassment.

Elise Stefanik: So the answer is yes.

Liz Magill: It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman.

Elise Stefanik: It's a context-dependent decision. That's your testimony today, calling for the genocide of Jews is depending upon the context. And Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?

Claudine Gay: It can be depending on the context.

Elise Stefanik: What's the context?

Claudine Gay: Targeted at an individual.

Elise Stefanik: It's targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals. Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them? Do you understand that dehumanization is part of antisemitism? I will ask you one more time. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?

Bill Ackman: I was in the barber chair if you will, getting haircut.

Ilya Marritz: Bill Ackman, remember, the hedge fund guy, class of 88 was watching and multitasking.

Bill Ackman: I had a guy on my team send me the three-minute section. I said, cut that line of questioning. I put out a little tweet on that, and I call it my greatest hits of posts. It's got something like 110 million views. Everyone looked at this and said, what is wrong with university campuses?

Ilya Marritz: Rabbi Wolpe was watching, too, and he, too, had a tweet. Before he hit send, he called Claudine Gay to let her know he had decided to quit Harvard's Antisemitism Advisory Group. Then he shared the letter on social. It happened to be the start of that year's Festival of Lights.

David Wolpe: Resigning, a Hanukkah message.

Ilya Marritz: This tweet also went viral. Rabbi Wolpe read the letter to me.

David Wolpe: I believe Claudine Gay to be both a kind and thoughtful person. Most of the students here wish only to get an education and a job, not prosecute ideological agendas, but the system at Harvard along with the ideology that grips far too many of the students and faculty, the ideology that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil. Ignoring Jewish suffering is evil.

Ilya Marritz: Claudine Gay declined my invitation to do an interview. I ended up spending a lot of time talking with a different college president.

Danielle Holley: Hi, I'm Danielle Holley. Last name is H-O-L-L-E-Y. I'm the 20th president of Mount Holyoke College.

Ilya Marritz: Like Claudine Gay, Holley is a black woman who attended Harvard in the late 1990s. Gay got a PhD, Holley went to the law school, and they have something else in common. They were both new on the job last year.

Danielle Holley: I started on July 1, 2023, the same day as Claudine Gay started.

Ilya Marritz: Holley watched the hearings with a growing sense of disbelief. All three presidents like her were at the beginning of their tenures, and yet--

Danielle Holley: They were being accused of basically creating an atmosphere of hatred inside of universities that they had not led for years, so how could either one of them be responsible, right?

Ilya Marritz: And there was something in the particular discourse around Claudine Gay that felt familiar. Holley says the scrutiny is intense if you're a black woman and a first.

Danielle Holley: The jury is always out, right? There's a sense that even though you hold that position, that it's really not yours. You are temporarily holding the reins, but you're still an outsider.

Ilya Marritz: Danielle Holley and Claudine Gay didn't really know each other. They'd met once on the sidelines of a one-week summer camp that Harvard runs for new college presidents. I know, I had no idea. What's really interesting is that this seminar included an almost two-hour session on handling the kind of out of nowhere crises that can undermine a new president.

Danielle Holley: Crisis management, of course, in the summer of 2023 was mostly COVID-related. We were thinking about what happens with the next pandemic, but we did not spend a lot of time thinking about what happens in a crisis of the kind that we had over the last year in higher ed.

Ilya Marritz: An emotionally fraught-social media fueled bleep storm where donors are in revolt and public statements are everything, just wasn't on the radar. When that actually happened, Holley took an approach that was totally different from Harvard's. She refused to say anything publicly, except to release a letter.

Danielle Holley: It's now become known around here. We call it the statement on statements.

Ilya Marritz: The letter explained that although past presidents of Mount Holyoke had weighed in on big issues of the day, starting now, the school would only speak on subjects that directly concerned it. This had been Holley's own policy for a decade, going back to her previous job as dean of the law school at Howard, a historically black university.

Danielle Holley: I came to Howard July 1st of 2014, which was only a few weeks before Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson. Immediately people said, well, are you going to issue a statement on behalf of the law school about the killing of Michael Brown? I said, no, I'm not going to do that because my duty is to educate lawyers who will then turn around and make real transformation in the criminal law system, so I don't have time to write or do what I considered at the time to be performative statements.

Ilya Marritz: Like at Howard Law School, Holley's no statements rule at Mount Holyoke made some people angry. Students accused her of condoning genocide through her silence. There were complaints from alumni.

Danielle Holley: If donors were not upset and didn't threaten to take money away, that would be a surprise. I think the question is, how do you react?

Ilya Marritz: What I learned from Danielle Holley is that when you're a new president, you don't get a lot of grace. The donors may not know you or trust you. It's a fragile time and you need the board to show a united front with its chosen president. For Holley, it's like, bear with me here.

Danielle Holley: We are going to manage this crisis in a certain way. When we come out on the other side of the crisis, I will come visit you and talk to you about not what happened this week, not what happened this month, but what happened over the course of a year or what happened over the course of 18 months. But that's easier to say when you're an experienced president.

Ilya Marritz: Claudine Gay was five months into the job when she went before Congress. She and the other two presidents gave almost identical answers on the question of whether a call for genocide violated university speech codes. That moment echoed across social media, open to wild interpretation, and now, their jobs were at stake. Two days after the hearing, the MIT board put out a letter of support full of praise for its president, Sally Kornbluth. She's still in the job today. At the University of Pennsylvania, it was clear that the board was done with President Liz Magill. She resigned.

Scott Bok: The world should know that Liz Magill is a very good person and a talented leader who was beloved by her team. She is not the slightest bit antisemitic.

Ilya Marritz: This is Scott Bok. He was chair of the Board of Trustees at UPenn. He resigned that position right after Liz Magill and made this letter public.

Scott Bok: Working with her was one of the great pleasures of my life. Worn down by months of relentless external attacks, she was not herself last Tuesday. Over-prepared and over-lawyered given the hostile forum and high stakes, she provided a legalistic answer to a moral question, and that was wrong. It made for a dreadful 30-second sound bite in what was more than five hours of testimony. I wish Liz well in her future endeavors. I believe that in the fullness of time people will come to view the story of her presidency at Penn very differently.

Ilya Marritz: As for Harvard, the board was initially silent. Claudine Gay seemed to be alone. She apologized in the pages of the Harvard Crimson. I am sorry, she said. Words matter. It wasn't totally clear what she was apologizing for, though. She had been guided to give legally meticulous answers. The advice came from a trusted Harvard insider, Bill Lee, Harvard College Class of '72. Lee is a partner at a major law firm and a former leader of the Harvard Corporation. He represented Harvard in the big affirmative action case it had just lost at the Supreme Court.

As the crisis deepened, the Harvard Corporation increasingly turned to him. One person told me he was like a field general. It's possible that someone else, a fresh outside voice, would have counseled Gay differently. Rabbi Wolpe, remember, he was the one who suggested Gay quote from the Jewish Sages, he was disappointed by the lack of passion she showed. A law professor told me Gay could have given the answers Congress wanted to hear and then amended her testimony later for the record, but that's not what happened. Bill Lee declined our requests for comment. So did the current first fellow of the Harvard Corporation, Penny Pritzker, class of 1981, who led the group that hired Gay.

After the hearing, a full week passed before the Harvard Corporation made a statement in support of Claudine Gay, but by then, a new crisis was upon them.

I just think it is newsworthy that the president of the most famous university in the world plagiarized.

The university says Claudine Gay has now asked that corrections be made to her 1997 dissertation because of what it called inadequate citations.

Harvard is committed to DEI and Claudiine Gay's race protected her from losing her job is outrageous.

Ilya Marritz: That's next time.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. The Harvard Plan is a collaboration with The Boston Globe. The production team includes Ilya Marritz, Emily Botein, Kristin Nelson, Jasmine Aguilera, and Regina de Heer. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wong, and Katarina Barton.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson, our engineer is Brendan Dalton, Eloise Blondio is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: Before we end the show, I'd like to direct your ears elsewhere. I just listened to my friend and colleague David Remnick's conversation with the brilliant Jonathan Blitzer about the rhetoric and reality of Donald Trump's promise to deport millions and why documented immigrants here legally are also likely to be targets. It was sobering and real, and it helped me think about what to expect in the year to come. If you've been wondering what all this could mean, I think you should go to New Yorker Radio and download the latest episode. It'll be worth it.

 

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