Last week, The Crimson revealed a large-scale fundraising campaign by senior administrators intended to transform the ideological makeup of Harvard’s faculty, ostensibly to provide “viewpoint diversity.” Per this plan, some 20 to 30 new professors could be appointed “at the University level” — which suggests, not by field experts at the department level, a sharp departure from the normal course of faculty appointments — and “embedded across schools and departments,” in an apparent attempt to dilute our professoriate’s purported liberal bias.
Amid a hiring freeze and a hurried retreat from almost everything that smacks of affirmative action or DEI, what could explain the University’s eagerness to embrace one, and only one, special form of diversity?
Fundamentally, this hiring push is part of a broader effort to diminish the authority and autonomy of the faculty. It would weaken a robust tradition of peer review and increase administrative control over University affairs.
Recent evidence suggests that Harvard’s upper administration sees its own faculty as a problem that needs to be solved. In December, University President Alan M. Garber ’76 blamed faculty activism — not the Trump administration’s lawsuits and attacks, not the doxxing of students, and not the numerous other reasons previously raised by the professoriate — for having chilled free speech on campus.