Title: The Harvard Plan: The Finale.

Brooke Gladstone: On this week's On the Media, the leadership crisis at Harvard and the backlash to decades of diversity efforts didn't begin or end with the resignation of its first Black president last year.

Randall Kennedy: Diversity wasn't much of an important political term in the 1970s. Integration was a much bigger term. Nobody was buying stock in diversity.

Archibald Cox: There is no racially blind method of selection, which will enroll today more than a trickle of minority students in the nation's colleges.

Lewis Powell: I refer, in my opinion, to the Harvard admissions program as one example of how race properly, in my opinion, may be taken into account.

Chris Rufo: True free speech has been curtailed on many campuses and conservative voices have been shouted down.

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

Brooke Gladstone: Stay tuned for the gripping finale of our series, The Harvard Plan.

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

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. For the past two weeks, we've brought you The Harvard Plan, our series, produced with the Boston Globe, about the crisis in American higher education. We focused on our country's oldest and richest college and as you've heard, a place where the very idea of diversity has come under a lot of screen scrutiny of late. Actually, though, diversity has always been associated with Harvard. How do you think Elle Woods got into Harvard Law in Legally Blonde?

Speaker 8: She does have a 4.0 from CULA, and she got a 179 on her LSATs.

Speaker 9: A fashion major?

Speaker 10: Well, sir, we've never had one before. Aren't we always looking for diversity?

Brooke Gladstone: In The Social Network, it's how the Mark Zuckerberg character rationalizes getting snubbed by an exclusive social club after his friend Eduardo gets an invitation.

Jesse Eisenberg: It probably was a diversity thing, but so what?

Brooke Gladstone: There is no movie yet that describes the particular pickle that Harvard and other universities now are in. College is becoming an increasingly politically coded place. President-elect Trump says they have to change or else. The Boston Globe's Ilya Maritz was a visiting fellow at Harvard last year during the brief, troubled tenure of the university's first Black leader. He picks up this hour with Claudine Gay, the woman whose critics called a diversity hire.

Micah Loewinger: The brutal takedown of Harvard's first and only Black president seemed to register very little on the Harvard campus. This surprised me. It happened during winter break. Sure, people were away. When they came back, I expected to see posters for assemblies and talks about what it all meant. I waited and nothing happened. I started to feel like a house guest in one of those families where they don't discuss uncomfortable things. I wondered what it must feel like to be Claudine Gay.

On taking office, she had moved herself and her family into the grand mansion where Harvard presidents live. As a political scientist, she must have been delighted by the fact that it was once the home of Elbridge Gerry, the Founding Father who gave us the term gerrymandering. Within months, Gay was moving again, back out of the mansion. One day last April, I noticed Gay's name on the signboard outside Memorial Church. She would be speaking there, so I went.

Preacher: Welcome to the Appleton Chapel of our Memorial Church for our daily service of morning prayers.

Micah Loewinger: People arrived in ones and twos until there were about 70 of us seated in two banks of pews facing each other. Sunlight streamed in through the east windows. Preacher: Our speaker this morning is Claudine Gay, the Wilbert A. Collett Professor of Government and of African and African American Studies and former president of Harvard University.

Micah Loewinger: Then a diminutive woman in those recognizable chunky glasses rose to the lectern.

Claudine Gay: Good morning.

Congregation: Good morning.

Micah Loewinger: She told a story.

Claudine Gay: When my mother emigrated from Haiti to the United States, she came as a live-in nanny for a family here in the Boston area. The agreement with her and with the agency that had placed her was that the family would help her enroll in English language courses as the first step in her journey to college and eventually to a nursing career.

Micah Loewinger: Claudette Gay, Claudine's mother, was quickly disappointed. Her household responsibilities grew and grew until the job came to feel like indentured servitude. There were no English classes. She felt trapped, but she wasn't stuck.

Claudine Gay: She quietly began making weekly trips to the post office, each time sending off a small package, small enough to fit in her purse, to an address in Brooklyn where an older sister lived.

Micah Loewinger: One day Claudette walked out of the house and got on a Greyhound bus to New York. Years later, she would tell this story to her daughter, Claudine.

Claudine Gay: What I heard was an epic adventure story, and it elicited in me a mix of pride in my mother's ingenuity and envy that my own life was devoid of drama.

[laughter]

Micah Loewinger: Gay said she realizes now that her mother told this story less as entertainment than as evidence. What a person will do when circumstances become intolerable.

Claudine Gay: Though mind and body may feel unsettled by change, the soul delights in the act of starting over, even when the destination is not clear.

Micah Loewinger: One day, I imagine, Claudine Gay's portrait will hang on a wall someplace at Harvard. People will walk by, maybe stop, and wonder who she was and why she was in the job for not even one full year. I've been puzzling over this since I watched her flame out. What did it all mean? I have come up with two answers to that question, and I'm going to give you both of these answers in this episode. The second answer, which we'll get to a little later this hour, is all about the present political moment, polarization, social media, and the Trump-Vance administration's plans to attack universities. Their words, not mine.

The first answer has to do with the long and surprising history of a very potent, very American concept, one that was developed at Harvard and spread to the world, diversity. Let's start there. When Claudine Gay was announced as Harvard's next president, there was grumbling because she hadn't published many articles or a book. This observation goes hand in hand with a belief I also heard as I reported this story, that Gay was a diversity hire. People who know Claudine Gay professionally, as a colleague, describe her with words like thoughtful, intelligent, and good listener. She was lowkey, low drama, and you could argue that those qualities made her not the best pick for this moment in time. Still.

Randall Kennedy: A Black woman was made president of Harvard University.

Micah Loewinger: Randall Kennedy is a professor at Harvard Law School. He's written many books on race and the law.

Randall Kennedy: Now, I'm sorry that her tenure was so short and that it was cut off in such a terrible way, but I don't think it should be forgotten that a Black woman was president of the most famous university in the United States. Part of making that happen was diversity consciousness.

Micah Loewinger: Kennedy heard the whispers and insinuations that she was chosen for her race. He thinks this is true to a point, but also, so what?

Randall Kennedy: There are going to be some people who are going to look at that and snicker and make that part of a deficiency story. "Well, she must be deficient." I think that's ridiculous. I look at the social forces that made her presidency possible as, on balance, a good thing.

Micah Loewinger: We're going to go deep now on Harvard and diversity because the conversation didn't begin with Claudine Gay. It stretches back decades, actually, a whole century. In fact, you could say the whole idea of diversity in education was developed at Harvard and spread from there to all corners of the country. To walk us through this history, our guides are Randall Kennedy, who you just met, and his colleague, another Harvard law professor, Noah Feldman.

Noah Feldman: I'm a Felix Frankfurter professor of law at the law school.

Micah Loewinger: Feldman pointed me to the very beginning of the diversity conversation. It goes back to a time before there were many Black or brown people at Harvard. The discussion then was about Jews, and it wasn't pretty. At the start of the 20th century, Jews were arriving in America in large numbers from Eastern Europe. By the 1920s, their sons were taking the Harvard entrance exam and getting in, and people at Harvard did not like it.

Noah Feldman: There's no very exact count, but people's estimates at the time put the number of Jews up at 20% of the population. This led to concern and backlash from, among other people, A. Lawrence Lowell, who was the president of Harvard at the time.

Micah Loewinger: President Lowell fretted that the character of Harvard was changing and wrote that there was an urgent need to prevent a dangerous increase in their proportion of Jews. What to do about it became a high priority, but Lowell's initial proposals to simply cap the number of Jews admitted didn't fly with the faculty. It was too much of a blunt instrument.

Noah Feldman: He, with the assistance of advisors, came up with an alternative strategy. This was a strategy they called the diversity strategy. What it set out to do was to make Harvard a national university, drawing on people from all over the country.

Micah Loewinger: Diversity, not to bring people in, but to keep them out. This is the moment when Harvard moved to an admissions system that looks more like what we know today, with interviews for applicants, an emphasis on character, and an effort to recruit from all over the nation. Tools that enabled the school to have more of a say in its own student body.

Noah Feldman: The point of this plan, the diversity plan, was to say, by making it a national school, we'll draw in people from Nebraska and Iowa. Still men, of course, at the time. The idea was that the university would then be more diverse nationally, and by magic, it would also have very many fewer Jews because it wouldn't have urban ethnic Jews.

Micah Loewinger: It worked. Jews continued to get into Harvard, but in smaller numbers. Hang on to Harvard's concept of diversity as a key principle in admissions because a few decades later, it comes into play again in a big Supreme Court case.

Lewis Powell: First case on today's calendar is number 76811. Regents of the University of California against Bakke.

Micah Loewinger: In the late 1970s, a white plaintiff named Allan Bakke claimed he'd been denied admission to the University of California Davis Medical School because of his race. Many colleges and universities had begun considering an applicant's background in response to the civil rights movement. They felt it was time to give opportunity to more minority students.

Lewis Powell: Mr. Cox, you may proceed whenever you're ready.

Micah Loewinger: This was sometimes called affirmative action, but it wasn't clear whether it was constitutional.

Mr. Cox: Mr. Chief Justice, may it please the court.

Micah Loewinger: The Bakke case involved a challenge to affirmative action in which the challengers claimed that affirmative action violated the equal rights of white students who had the same scores as Black students who were being admitted on the basis of there being an addition to diversity. Among the nine justices, there was a clear divide. Four justices said essentially affirmative action should be unconstitutional as a violation of equal protection. Four justices said affirmative action should be perfectly constitutional because we have a history of racial exclusion and discrimination in the United States and admitting students to remediate that history of discrimination is totally legitimate and doesn't violate equal protection.

That left one swing justice, Lewis Powell, a white Virginian and Harvard law grad class of '32. Powell was not ready to go with the four justices who supported affirmative action on the grounds of history, but he was also unwilling to close the door on the notion that the applicant's personal background could play some kind of role. He found a middle way in arguments made by Harvard, specifically by a slow-talking patrician Harvard law professor who was a bit of a legend.

Lewis Powell: Certainly the objective of improving education through greater diversity.

Micah Loewinger: His name was Archibald Cox. Here he is arguing for Harvard at the Supreme Court.

Archibald Cox: There is no racially blind method of selection, which will enroll today more than a trickle of minority students in the nation's colleges and professions.

Micah Loewinger: Randall Kennedy got to know Cox when Kennedy joined Harvard Law School in 1984 fresh from clerking for Justice Thurgood Marshall. There hadn't been many Black people on the faculty and Cox took an interest in his young colleague.

Randall Kennedy: You can tell just from the tenor of my voice, I remember him with tremendous fondness and respect and admiration. If he was being portrayed in a movie, the directions would say, you want a person who looks like a Boston Brahmin.

Micah Loewinger: Cox was partial to bow ties and semi-rimless readers, but what he was famous for was being fired by President Nixon. Just a few years earlier, Cox was a special prosecutor investigating Watergate. He had refused to drop a subpoena for recordings Nixon secretly made of his own conversations in the White House, and he was canned. That gave Cox a particular kind of gravitas as he went before the Supreme Court and sketched Harvard's idealistic vision for higher education as a vehicle for social advancement open to all.

Archibald Cox: So that the other younger boys and girls may see, yes, it is possible for a Black to go to University of Minnesota or to go to Harvard or Yale. I know Johnny down the street and I know Sammy's father. He became a liar and John's father became a doctor. This is essential if we are ever going to give true equality in a factual sense to people.

Randall Kennedy: What Archibald Cox says was the community that we want to facilitate is a community in which individuals come here, they're selected to come here, and a lot of the learning comes from people learning from one another. Well, for people to learn from one another, won't that happen best if there is some degree of curated difference?

Micah Loewinger: It's not about repairing past wrongs, but about who's in the classroom. At that time, there was something novel about this idea.

Randall Kennedy: Diversity wasn't much of an important political, cultural term. In the 1970s, there were other terms. Integration was a much bigger term. Nobody was buying stock in diversity. Then in the '70s, the '80s, the '90s, into the 2000s, diversity becomes more and more and more influential as an idea.

Micah Loewinger: Thanks in large part to the US Supreme Court.

Lewis Powell: Mr. Justice Powell will announce the judgment of the court. There is no opinion of the court supported by a majority.

Micah Loewinger: Justice Powell's one-man opinion carried the day.

Noah Feldman: In that opinion, Powell said diversity is the rationale that justifies affirmative action. Not remediating past discrimination, but having a diverse class.

Micah Loewinger: Again, Noah Feldman.

Noah Feldman: One justice, Justice Lewis Powell wrote a narrow opinion only for himself that became the law because it was the narrowest opinion upholding affirmative action, a majority of one.

Micah Loewinger: Although the University of California was the school whose policies were being challenged, it was Harvard and law professor Archibald Cox who supplied the blueprint for race-conscious admissions to Justice Powell. Here's Powell at the Supreme Court.

Lewis Powell: I refer, in my opinion, to the Harvard admissions program as one example of how race properly, in my opinion, may be taken into account.

Micah Loewinger: Sometimes also called The Harvard Plan.

Lewis Powell: I will quote briefly from the description of the Harvard program, a copy of which is in the appendix to my opinion. Here I quote in substance, "The admissions committee has not set target quotas for the number of Blacks or musicians, football players, physicists--"

Noah Feldman: In that moment in 1978, Harvard's diversity admission policy became the law of the land.

Micah Loewinger: The difference it made is still much debated. Either way, universities adopted this approach. Student bodies did become more diverse. In 1991, Barack Obama graduated from Harvard Law. In time, corporate America embraced diversity. You can see diversity on TV and in movies and panel discussions. It's so everywhere you notice when it's missing. Again, Randall Kennedy.

Randall Kennedy: The diversity rationale says, actually, the people that we are selecting are bringing something very special and very good to the table. I think this may be the very first time in the history of the United States in which a policy, a racial policy actually valorized people of color.

Micah Loewinger: Diversity doesn't dwell on history. It's inclusive.

Randall Kennedy: Everyone, the whole community is going to be uplifted through diversity. At least in theory, everybody gets a role in the show.

Micah Loewinger: In higher education specifically, affirmative action has always had its critics. In 2022, the Supreme Court heard a major challenge to considering race in college admissions. The plaintiff said that like Jews decades earlier, Asian Americans had become too successful for some people's comfort. Race-based affirmative action was used to keep their numbers down. The defendants were the University of North Carolina, a public institution, and Harvard. Noah Feldman says that was no accident.

Noah Feldman: You didn't need Harvard, which is a private university. They added Harvard to that same case because they wanted the oomph of being able to say diversity came from Harvard, diversity was bad from the start.

Micah Loewinger: The decision came down June 29th, 2023.

Noah Feldman: The question in these cases is whether Harvard and UNC's programs are permissible under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. We conclude that they are not.

Micah Loewinger: Two days after that, Claudine Gay formally assumed the job of Harvard president. Incredible timing.

Noah Feldman: To my mind, not at all a coincidence that the Supreme Court strikes down the diversity rationale. Then almost immediately, the attacks on Claudine Gay start to depict her as "a diversity candidate" with the intent of undermining her. For critics of diversity, depicting a president who was already in a lot of trouble as a diversity candidate was a way of weakening diversity as a cultural category that can be used positively for anybody else in the future.

Micah Loewinger: Diversity is on the ropes, and race-based affirmative action is legally dead, so what now?

Randall Kennedy: For me, racial affirmative action, I wrote a book defending it. I've been defending it.

Micah Loewinger: Then Kennedy said something that I did not expect.

Randall Kennedy: Is it the last word? No, I don't think it's the last word. It may very well be that there are superior alternatives. It's even possible. It's even possible that the Supreme Court of the United States decision, which I don't like, it's possible that that decision will lead to better policies in the future. Life is just complicated like that.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, Black alumni of Harvard get together to process everything that just happened.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

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

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. We're back with The Harvard Plan, our collaboration with the Boston Globe. The series started with a deep dive into the short and troubled leadership of Claudine Gay, but it soon became clear that there were much bigger forces at play in the crisis over America's institutions of higher learning. Here's reporter Ilya Maritz.

Danielle Holley: How's everything going?

Ilya Marritz: How are you?

Daniel Holley: Great to see you.

Ilya Marritz: Not long ago, I got a glimpse of all that 45 years of race-conscious admissions has accomplished.

Danielle Holley: This is called the Harvard Black Alumni Weekend.

Ilya Marritz: Mount Holyoke College President Danielle Holley.

Danielle Holley: It started, I think we had the first one maybe 20 years ago or so.

Ilya Marritz: Remember Holley from our first episode? She became a college president on the same day Claudine Gay did. We're sitting on a bench outside the Harvard Science Center. It's college weather, sweaters, autumn leaves, and all around us, Black Harvard grads in their 40s, 50s, and upwards are hanging out in little clusters as undergrads come and go on foot and on scooter.

Danielle Holley: There are over 1,000 alums this weekend, Black alums who are here to celebrate together.

Ilya Marritz: We spotted Alvin Bragg, the District Attorney of Manhattan and an actress from Riverdale.

Danielle Holley: Oh, there's Soledad O'Brien right there.

Ilya Marritz: I hadn't really prepared for all the famouses, but yes, of course.

Danielle Holley: Whether it's Justice Jackson or President Obama or Eric Holder or Loretta Lynch, every major leader who's Black American in this country, the road to that leadership runs through the Ivy League schools and Howard. If you cut off access to Harvard, you're cutting off access to leadership in this country.

Ilya Marritz: In the days just before the Black Alumni Weekend, colleges started releasing the numbers on their first post-affirmative action classes. At some schools, Black admissions are down a lot. Other places, there's no big change. At Harvard College, the percentage of Black freshmen is down 4 percentage points. At Harvard Law School, just recently, we learned Black admissions are down by more than half. No one I talked to at this gathering seemed to have an answer for what the post-affirmative action world should look like. Again, this was September when it seemed possible that a Black woman lawyer might become the president of the United States. Holley told me it was former Attorney General Loretta Lynch who brought the most fire in her talk.

Danielle Holley: We will not back down from the notion that we belong here. There's a sense that many of us have sacrificed quite a bit personally to contribute, build this place up.

Ilya Marritz: Then we see one more famous person.

Danielle Holley: Oh, but here's President Gay right here, behind us.

Ilya Marritz: Claudine Gay is making her way across the plaza. People keep stopping her, wanting to talk. She's wearing Crimson flats and a very colorful dress. Holley and I hover nearby, waiting for an opening. Holley wants a selfie. I just want to introduce myself. In person, Gay is warm and relaxed. Here this weekend, she's been celebrated. While I stand just a little to the side, the women kibitz. I notice they're now holding hands, swinging their arms.

Danielle Holley: We would love to have you come to Mount Holyoke.

Claudine Gay: Next year. I'm on sabbatical next year.

Danielle Holley: I know you're on sabbatical. I'm like, but whenever. It doesn't even have to be it, but whenever. We started on the same day.

Claudine Gay: I know.

Danielle Holley: We were the new presidents together.

Claudine Gay: Yes, I remember.

Ilya Marritz: After Gay moved on, Danielle Holley told me she had expected this weekend to be something like a reckoning or a family conversation.

Danielle Holley: It hasn't been that at all. I think it's really been more about, wow, look what this community has been able to do and look what the institution for years believed was important for it to do. I think the question is, does the institution still believe that?

Ilya Marritz: There is a movement in the opposite direction to take the Supreme Court's decision and the DEI backlash and decisively lock racial diversity out of the university's goals. It's gaining ground. I want to reintroduce someone we met in the first episode of this series. Sam Lessin, Harvard College Class of '05. California venture capitalist, friend of Mark Zuckerberg's.

Sam Lessin: I'm a stereotypical Silicon Valley guy.

Ilya Marritz: Lessin is the one who used to defend Harvard when his friends complained about trigger warnings and political correctness. He had an awakening after Hamas attacked Israel.

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

Ilya Marritz: If you think of Bill Ackman or Chris Ruffo as the clean-cut Harvard grads who fanned the flames of outrage.

Bill Ackman: Does Harvard value veritas or truth, or does Harvard value DEI?

Chris Rufo: True free speech has been curtailed on many campuses, and conservative voices have been shouted down.

Ilya Marritz: Lessin shares some of their views, but his approach is different.

Sam Lessin: There's a lot I respect about Bill Ackman, a lot of the good I think he's done. I also think from a purely political how do you fix things perspective, there's a difference between the aggressive yell at things versus give people paths forward. I think that's the interesting balance to play in terms of saying no, I want substantive change and revival. I don't want to just be mad.

Ilya Marritz: Lessin takes meetings from a standing desk at home. He has the kind of just rolled-out-of-bed hair some people would pay a lot of money for. He's running a marathon, not a sprint. We checked in a bunch of times while I was working on this series. He has a plan. He's been circulating a 97-page slide deck about how Harvard should change. There's a weekly newsletter with 20,000 subscribers and counting. Lessin is talking with donors about how they can leverage their dollars for accountability.

Sam Lessin: We believe the school needs to refocus on academic excellence, improving governance, real free speech, and free inquiry. There's a bunch of themes we have.

Ilya Marritz: Notice diversity is not one of the core values. Lessin thinks it's a mistake to try to solve bigger social problems through university admissions policies. He's okay with what the Supreme Court did. More than okay.

Sam Lessin: I actually believe this was the right decision, which is how can we as a society say that it should matter what the color of your skin is in terms of who gets into college. That's crazy.

Ilya Marritz: By the way, Lessin's father and sister went to Harvard too. I asked him about that. He told me doing away with legacy admissions is "a valid conversation." He worries that the kind of classroom environment where students learn from each other is more difficult to achieve today with people growing up online.

Sam Lessin: They created a sense of identity and purpose and meaning by being extreme. You say, "Oh, now we want you to go to college and we want you to be in a diverse community and work with all these people that you're not going to agree with completely." They all come in like atoms just bouncing off of each other. You're supposed to learn to learn from people you don't agree with. It's oil and water is what's going on.

Ilya Marritz: You're a Facebook guy. Do you blame social media?

Sam Lessin: The answer is, I think it's like such a simplistic read. People love scapegoats because it's fun.

Ilya Marritz: I put him on the defensive a little. He said it's not social media per se, but the underlying technology and what it enables. Lessin told me in his ideal world, universities would be monasteries of truth. Less online, more focused on IRL debate and discussion.

Sam Lessin: They defend the truth. They search out the truth. They look for the best of the best. To do that, they train the best, et cetera. In that world, I think it'd be great for them to be set up in such a way that they have incredible independence from any politics.

Ilya Marritz: Well, sure, but especially after what happened to Claudine Gay, that is increasingly hard to do.

Representative Elise Stefanik: Good evening, Milwaukee.

Ilya Marritz: Representative Elise Stefanik, the tormentor of college presidents, took a victory lap in primetime at the Republican National Convention last summer.

Representative Elise Stefanik: Who saw that congressional hearing with the college presidents of so-called elite universities?

Ilya Marritz: As if to declare, yes, college is political now, suck it up.

Representative Elise Stefanik: Oh, wait, they are former presidents.

Ilya Marritz: This year, Republicans campaigned against universities. It is a big change. They used to talk about making college more accessible. Now they're saying college itself is bad.

Donald Trump: The time has come to reclaim our once-great educational institutions from the radical left.

Ilya Marritz: This little nugget from then-candidate Donald Trump made Hilary Burns, the Globe's higher education reporter, sit up straight.

Donald Trump: Our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system.

Ilya Marritz: Accreditation, a secret weapon.

Hilary Burns: No one knows what accreditors do or what they are, and they certainly have never been the topic of a political campaign. I think it has everyone on edge.

Ilya Marritz: Accreditor is this totally obscure job.

Hilary Burns: You really only pay attention to the accreditor when a college closes. That's where you get the alert from, the accreditor.

Ilya Marritz: Accreditors come under the oversight of the Department of Education.

Hilary Burns: They are like the quality assurance. You can think of it as they work for the consumer and they do visits to colleges. They call out when colleges are doing something not good. Like we've seen colleges that have closed sometimes at the end when they're financially crunched, they start doing things that lessen the quality, and that's where the accreditor steps in and says, "This isn't okay."

Donald Trump: When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxists, maniacs, and lunatics. We will then accept applications for new accreditors who will impose real standards on colleges once again and once and for all.

Ilya Marritz: Trump, who is the founder of the now defunct, never-accredited Trump University, says he'll pressure schools to refocus curricula on Western civilization, American tradition, and of course, to get rid of DEI. There are other levers at his disposal. Investigations, taxes on endowments, cuts to research funding. It's all on the table. Do universities have a plan to deal with this? Are they ready for this?

Hilary Burns: Universities have been very quiet since the election. That's something I've been speaking with people about. Universities have so many fires they need to be watching right now. Not only it's their finances and academic freedom, but also their students and their professors, and their employees are being threatened with many of Trump's immigration policies.

Ilya Marritz: Trump has said he'd deport foreign students who join pro-Palestine protests, and many universities have responded.

Hilary Burns: They want all international staff, faculty, and students getting back to campus before Trump takes office in January, just in case they can't get them back here. What I'm hearing from higher education watchers and lawyers who are working on this is the universities are doing the work behind the scenes, quietly, because they don't want a target on their back.

Ilya Marritz: The tools, the pressure points were always there, but it's new that there are politicians willing and empowered to use them.

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Micah Loewinger: Coming up, JD Vance's plan to attack the universities looks to Viktor Orbán's Hungary for inspiration.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

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Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. We're back with the final part of The Harvard plan, our collaboration with the Boston Globe, looking at the growing battles over American universities. Earlier in this hour, we delved into the history of diversity in American college admissions, part one of Ilya's answer as to what exactly happened last year at Harvard. Now, we get to part two, the politics of our current moment.

JD Vance: So much of what we want to accomplish.

Micah Loewinger: Vice President-elect JD Vance.

JD Vance: So much of what we want to do in this movement in this country, I think, are fundamentally dependent on going through a set of very hostile institutions, specifically the universities.

Micah Loewinger: Vance gave this speech in 2021 when he was running for Senate from Ohio. Everything about it is blunt, starting with the title, The Universities Are the Enemy.

JD Vance: I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.

Micah Loewinger: Next, Vance explains the concept of red pilling. If you don't know it.

JD Vance: It comes from the movie, The Matrix, which, as I understand it, is made by a couple of people who do not share the politics of the people in this room.

Micah Loewinger: The writer-directors of the film are siblings and trans women and critics of Donald Trump. Still, there is an idea in their movie that people on the right love.

JD Vance: The basic idea is that once you see the way that knowledge is transmitted, once you see the way that public policy works in this country, it's very hard to unsee it.

Micah Loewinger: He runs the audience through some examples of campus Liberals taking things too far. This, of course, is the key ingredient in all conversion narratives about universities.

JD Vance: A pogrom started on social media. The guy was turning to--

Micah Loewinger: It's effective because enough of it is true or feels right.

JD Vance: People came out suggesting that gender transition surgeries and hormonal therapies for adolescents was, in fact--

Micah Loewinger: When I was at Harvard, I had a class where the students routinely reached for words like colonialism or oppression. I found that annoying.

JD Vance: A young student who invited a bunch of students over to his house in a joking way has been threatened by the diversity bureaucracy at Yale Law School.

Micah Loewinger: Vance speaks with the fluency of an insider. He graduated Yale Law School in 2013.

JD Vance: I really want to end this on an inspirational note.

Micah Loewinger: I'm including the end of his speech because it contains this weird historical coda. Vance says he looked for a quote from Scripture or from history.

JD Vance: The person whose quote I ultimately had to land on was the great prophet and statesman, Richard Milhous Nixon.

Micah Loewinger: Vance releases a little smile and his eyes sweep the room as if to say, "Are you ready for the mic drop? "

JD Vance: There was a wisdom in what Richard Nixon said approximately 40, 50 years ago. He said, and I quote, "The professors are the enemy."

[applause]

Micah Loewinger: The end. "The professors are the enemy." I want to underline what a choice this is. President Nixon said those words not in public, not in his speech, but in a secret recording made in the Oval Office in 1972, right after he won a landslide re-election. The tape was only released to the public in 2008. You'd have to be a Nixon scholar or a fanboy to really know about it.

Richard Nixon: The press is the enemy. The academy is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it.

Micah Loewinger: Not long after Nixon said those words, the special counsel investigating Watergate requested some of his Oval Office tapes. Nixon resisted. When the special counsel refused to drop his subpoena, he was fired. I tell you this because the special counsel was, of course, Archibald Cox. The same Archibald Cox, who wore bow ties and taught at Harvard Law School. The same Archibald Cox, who convinced the Supreme Court to uphold race-based affirmative action on the grounds of diversity.

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Margaret Brennan: I want to ask you about some of the things you've said about American universities. I know you've been very critical of them.

Micah Loewinger: CBS's Margaret Brennan had JD Vance on Face the Nation in August, shortly after he became the Republican candidate for vice president. By now, Vance had a specific model in mind for the change he wants to see.

Margaret Brennan: You gave an interview in February. You said the closest conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with the left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán's approach in Hungary.

Micah Loewinger: Hungary's strongman President, Viktor Orbán grabbed control of state universities, putting friends from his political party in charge of the foundations that run them. Gender studies have been banned. Hungary is now ranked lower for academic freedom than Sudan and just ahead of Uzbekistan, far below where it was when Orbán intervened.

Margaret Brennan: Is that what you're advocating be done in the United States?

JD Vance: Well, Margaret, what you're seeing in the United States actually is that universities are controlled by left-wing foundations, they're not controlled by the American taxpayer, and yet the American taxpayer is sending hundreds of billions of dollars to these universities every single year.

Margaret Brennan: I don't want taxpayers controlling education necessarily. Is that what you're advocating for, federal government control?

JD Vance: Margaret, what I'm advocating for is for taxpayers to have a say in how their money is spent.

Micah Loewinger: Does JD Vance admire Hungary because it's producing better graduates and finer research and more medical breakthroughs? I went back to Hilary Burns, the Globe's higher education reporter.

Hilary Burns: I have not heard anything about that. I think we've only heard that he admires the government policing what's taught and how the university is run.

Micah Loewinger: There's no shortage of authoritarian governments around the world at this moment, and there have been many in the past. What do we know about universities in authoritarian systems?

Hilary Burns: I asked a professor I spoke with over the summer, a CUNY professor, Benjamin Hett, about why is it that universities are among the first targets for authoritarian leaders. His answer was quite simple. He said because professors tend to tell them they're wrong. Who likes that?

Micah Loewinger: [laughs]

Hilary Burns: I think that it's safe to say authoritarian governments target the people who are establishing truths and who are studying and researching controversial and difficult topics. That's a playbook that we've seen throughout history. I think that's really concerning for anyone who cares about the truce or is in the truce business.

Micah Loewinger: In the new administration, uncooperative colleges could lose access to federally-backed student loan programs, to research grants. Endowment taxes could grow. Danielle Holley: We absolutely are thinking about that.

Micah Loewinger: I went back to Mount Holyoke President Danielle Holley one more time.

Danielle Holley: How would we self-fund, for example, our entire financial aid system?

Micah Loewinger: We're in a conference room because it's a women's college. Almost all the oil portraits on the walls are of women, which makes a nice change.

Danielle Holley: If there's no funding for Pell Grants, if there is complete privatization of the loan system that we have, how will we be able to help parents and students? We're lucky we're a small liberal arts college. We believe that we actually probably have the resources to self-fund for four years or however the defunding last, but many colleges and universities don't have that choice.

Micah Loewinger: Holley had read some of Vance's words before, but she hadn't seen this speech, so I played some of it for her.

Danielle Holley: It's breathtaking. It's truly breathtaking. When we ask the question of why universities, I think you heard a lot of it in that answer, which is they get to control what the truth is.

JD Vance: The universities, which control the knowledge in our society, which control what we call truth and what we call falsity, that provides research, that gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in our country.

Danielle Holley: If the truth is malleable, if the truth is just something that we play out on social media, but there is no actual truth, I think when you put universities in the bullseye, you're essentially putting concepts like knowledge and truth, even values, what is right and what is wrong, all of those things are being called into question.

Micah Loewinger: It lines up with something Holley recently noticed. When people find out what she does for work, they're sometimes skeptical or even hostile.

Danielle Holley: I've had people in airports and on airplanes ask me like, "What do you teach? What are you doing in terms of indoctrination of students?" Because again, we've become like the tobacco industry almost for some people. They see us as a harm to the republic, as a harm to their values and to their communities.

Micah Loewinger: She says it started in 2020 or 2021.

Danielle Holley: That's when you began to hear a lot of this. Remember Ron DeSantis, of course, in Florida.

Micah Loewinger: When Florida did its own strong arm reboot of education at one public college, the gender studies program was axed and more than a third of the faculty left the school. It's early days. We don't know how much of a focus it's going to be in the end. We don't know what the new administration is going to maybe look at first. Please get as concrete as you can. With this institution, what are you going to do if somebody comes to you and says you have to change the way that you're teaching? Are there compromises that you can make?

Danielle Holley: No, there are no compromises to be made. For me, my job is to promote the mission of my institution and to make sure that the students here get the best education possible.

Micah Loewinger: Do you think most college presidents are going to take the same position as you?

Danielle Holley: Absolutely not. I think what we will see is that we will see many institutions, we see that already, who are scraping their websites. They're being very neutral. They're trying to stay under the radar. All of this, again, is understandable, as a college leader. If I were leading a large Research 1 institution, I would absolutely be positioning, I think, my university to probably keep as much federal funding as possible.

Sam Lessin: In the end of the day, who's going to defend the universities from the federal government, like from these entities? Normally, it'd be people like me.

Micah Loewinger: Again, Sam Lessin, Silicon Valley guy and alumni activist. I followed up with him after the election.

Sam Lessin: Who would say, let's pursue truth at all costs, stay out of these schools, et cetera? I'm at the point where I'm like, "Look, I still believe that intellectually, but practically speaking, you don't really have a leg to stand on." It's hard to defend the activities that have been happening on campus.

Micah Loewinger: A few years ago, in a speech, JD Vance said we need to attack the universities. He said professors are the enemy. Do you have any concern about that kind of rhetoric?

Sam Lessin: Here's my thing on rhetoric, is I think we live in this very split world at this point, where everyone's scared of everyone else.

Micah Loewinger: Lessin contrasted Kamala Harris's careful, more scripted media strategy with that of her opponents.

Sam Lessin: People make fun of Trump for spitballing live for hours. It's actually a very reasonable strategy.

Micah Loewinger: Before landing on what he thinks of Vance's words.

Sam Lessin: Yes, that's a little intense. Is it completely wrong? Are there some crazy liberal professors who are using their brands they're associated with as a political platform and are not pursuing truth? Yes, that is definitely true. Again, does it scare me as a one-off? Sure. If you plucked it out and said this is one point of platform, it's not great, but I don't think it's completely unreasonable in a spitballing sense. I think people need to give some grace to this different communication strategy.

Micah Loewinger: In Sam Lessin's world, JD Vance gets grace, but universities don't. They are under obligation to police their students, their professors, and administrators, to police themselves or risk being on the wrong side of the government. Harvard's new president, Alan Garber has told faculty he's worried. The Republican talk about significant increases in endowment taxes "keeps me up at night," the Harvard Crimson reported him as saying. Harvard has recently made some changes that may help it with the incoming administration. It did away with diversity statements for applicants to join the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. It adopted a policy on institutional voice similar to Danielle Holley's statement on statements. The new guidance says Harvard will only talk about stuff pertaining to Harvard and higher ed. Will it even do that? Again, Danielle Holley.

Danielle Holley: We need to watch carefully for the next four years, who will get in line, who will be ready to participate and cooperate with the notion that we must readjust our academic programs and academic freedom, what we teach in our classrooms to conform to what the current federal government wants us to do.

Micah Loewinger: At the beginning of this series, I told you that Harvard is all about power, studying it, forming the people who will hold it. I was skeptical, but also intrigued. I signed up for one of those power classes, a one-week course during winter break. 80 people in a classroom, UN-style horseshoe with name placards. We watched film clips, discussed readings, heard from speakers. It was great. That class started six days after Claudine Gay resigned. We never talked once about the grand power play that had just taken place at our own institution, at least not in class. I sat there the whole time wondering what lessons can be learned from what happened to Claudine Gay. Here are three that I landed on.

One, we know social media fuels instant judgment. That is kryptonite for institutions that like to go slow. Two, attacking things is a way to build your own power. That's not a left or right thing. It's just how things work. Three, anyone making a historic change should prepare for a backlash. If colleges and universities are going to survive and thrive, they need to look at the storm that blew through Harvard and start learning lessons fast.

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Micah Loewinger: A lot of people helped me to make this series. This list is incomplete, but it includes Ann Marie Lipinski and everyone at the Nieman Foundation, my 2024 Nieman Fellows and affiliates, including Denise and Mike Chetta and Andrea Patiño Contreras and Will Moose. Also, Ian Coss and Kelsey Tyssowski, Jed Willard, Rebecca Lavoie, many professors, administrators, alumni, and others at Harvard, who are patient with their time and generous with their knowledge, the Harvard Crimson for its excellent reporting and at the Boston Globe, special thanks to Mike Damiano, Shirley Leung, Deirdre Fernandez, Adrian Walker, Aidan Ryan, Hilary Burns, Andrew Ryan, Jen Peter, and Nancy Barnes. The Harvard Plan is a collaboration with the Boston Globe. The production team includes me, Jasmine Aguilera, Emily Botin, Regina de Heer, Jared Paul, and the Globe's head of audio, Kristen Nelson.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondiau 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: I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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