It is easy to lose sight of what is really driving the dispute between the White House and Harvard University. In a polycrisis, root causes tend to blur. So, as the clash heats up and the drumroll builds, three important clarifications deserve emphasis.
First, the battle is fundamentally about who should curate the living and learning environments on our college campuses. In my view, Harvard had absolutely no choice but to strongly object to the kind of control Washington sought to exert. No respectable campus leaders would relinquish their independence and academic freedom by granting federal officials the power to control admissions and hiring, constrain campus activism, police viewpoints, eliminate staff functions, or reshape disciplinary policies and procedures.
Harvard wisely sniffed the Faustian bargain embedded in the demands of those bent on remaking campus life with an ideological chain saw. Recognizing that overreach as a stunning affront to their autonomy, Harvard opted to retain sole responsibility for the quality of the educational experience they have offered since 1636.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Second, listening to government officials, one might think this conflict is part of some lofty federal quest to revive meritocracy in America, with diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, being racially profiled as the super villain. But they signaled their broader, more seasoned disaffection with higher education long ago.
Candidate Donald Trump said he wanted to “reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left,” and JD Vance repeatedly called universities “the enemy”… dedicated to “deceit and lies … .” More recently, Trump allies promised to put universities into “a contraction … a recession … declining budgets … an existential terror.”
This is far from a noble reembrace of meritocracy. Targeting Harvard for radical reform is part of a broader authoritarian quest to align all higher education outcomes with a Project 2025-style, DEI-free America.
And note how this White House consistently ignores the compelling evidence that DEI efforts have actually enhanced our meritocracy. Also, by any reasonable standard, Trump is not the ideal spokesman for a reinvigorated meritocracy. His Cabinet choices are less indicative of a meritocracy that anoints our best and brightest than they are of a kakistocracy that appoints our worst and dimmest.
Third, some may conclude that the White House’s conflict with Harvard is all about battling the recent resurgence of antisemitism. But even if that were true, it is ghastly myopic, as the long tradition of America’s campus-based hate reveals.
The sudden opening of white higher education in 1969 was largely stimulated by the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder on April 4, 1968. Since most campuses had already admitted their classes when King was shot, out of pangs of conscience many spent the next year recruiting in cities and schools they had previously shunned. They were so successful, the fall of 1969 remains, to this day, the biggest single leap forward for diversity on the most selective campuses in higher education history. But the newly enrolled Black students immediately discovered just how unwelcome they were.
During the 1970s, Black student activism surged on campuses because relevant courses were sparse and racial incidents were countless. Black students experienced harassment, racial slurs, bullying, intimidation and violence. Nationally, campus strife spiked in the 1980s on the watch of President Ronald Reagan. By 1988, the ubiquitous racial volatility resulted in PBS’ “Frontline” focus titled, “Racism 101.”
A 1990 report from the National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence estimated that nearly 1 million American college students were victims of ethnoviolence annually, mostly in the form of anti-Black hatred. By 2001, a Justice Department report highlighted how campus racism’s persistence compromised the physical and emotional safety of Black students.
Unsurprisingly, as the incidents multiplied, Capitol Hill officials never compelled any college presidents to come to Washington to get grilled about their mishandling of the campus racial climate. Nor did any megadonors publicly threaten to withhold investments until conditions improved. The racially divisive climates simply became “the weather,” remaining noteworthy, yet barely newsworthy. African American students could not, on their own, detoxify their academic journey.
Recognizing this, campus administrations finally began adding support services, diverse staff and faculty, and new educational offerings, all to reduce the exorbitant bandwidth taxes regularly paid by Black and other marginalized students.
That collective work to improve campus racial climates grew into what we now call “DEI.” However imperfect, DEI efforts have sought more equitable and inclusive treatment for students on campuses neither designed nor developed with them in mind. The actual DEI moniker did not gain traction until 2007, with the formation of higher education’s first association of diversity officers, the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education.
Meaningful campus-based DEI work remains necessary because multiple racial climate issues remain immovable. In fact, the incessant campus conflicts were highlighted in a 2014 independent film, “Dear White People,” which then became a Netflix series in 2017.
Think about that. Community leadership diligence caused diversity to begin stabilizing in white higher education by 1970, but campus leadership negligence caused the intractability of campus racism to begin stabilizing in American popular culture by 2017.
By 2021, the most frequently reported campus hate crimes were still based on race (47%), and more recent instances of anti-Black campus violence remain fairly easy to find.
At no point since campus racial conflicts peaked in the 1980s did a sitting U.S. president use executive orders, followed by “Dear Colleague” Letters to root out race-based campus hatred and harassment. And no Republican ever threatened to remove a college’s accreditation because of its insufficient response to anti-Black campus hate.
These clarifications raise key questions for this White House.
If you truly abhor campus discrimination, why target antisemitism only? Why ignore the long history of anti-Black campus hate that still persists in many ways? Inspired by America’s highest ideals, why not nobly demand that leaders optimize campus life for all students? And why eliminate DEI, the very effort that has, for decades, stymied the campus hatred you claim to detest?
Ultimately, the federal dispute with Harvard will be settled with a moral compass, because it is really about the direction of progress. This White House thinks our true greatness is somewhere in the past. But in American higher education, the past is largely defined by a heinous brand of uniformity, inequity and exclusion … or the very cancer a chemotherapy called diversity, equity and inclusion was invented to cure.
So, rather than defame and eliminate DEI, it makes sense to prune, refine, and bolster it enough to fully harvest its intellectual fruits. Indeed, we should stay the course until America finally exemplifies King’s beloved community where superiority, hate, treacherous governance and graft have no place.
John S. Wilson Jr., author of Hope and Healing: Black Colleges and the Future of American Democracy, is an alumnus and former president of Morehouse College. He is also an alumnus and former trustee at Harvard University.
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