Harvard president admits faculty activism is a problem

Characteristic of ‘excellent teaching’ used to be not letting personal views influence class, Garber says

Political activism in the classroom has become a problem among faculty at Harvard University, its President Alan Garber said on a recent podcast.

Garber, whose contract was extended in December, said higher education “went wrong” when institutions began allowing faculty to engage in activism in the classroom and in their research, and he is working to steer Harvard back in the right direction, The Harvard Crimson reports.

His remarks come on the heels of the high profile departure of longtime Harvard Professor James Hankins who criticized the institution for, among other things, its focus on identity politics.

Last week, on an episode of the Shalom Hartman Institute’s “Identity/Crisis Podcast,” Garber said it used to be that “one of the characteristics of excellent teaching” was not allowing personal views to influence classroom discussions.

Good professors would “present alternative points of view fairly,” and they would not allow their personal opinions to color their research, he said.

When Garber worked as a policy research leader at Stanford University, he said the faculty and staff “would never take a policy position, for a variety of reasons, one of them, and maybe most importantly, it would call into question the objectivity of our work.”

In recent years, however, he said he has noticed a “generational shift in views about a number of issues, including free speech.” Younger faculty insist that “some voices that have not been traditionally heard need to be elevated,” Garber said.

“If you were to speak to older faculty, like around my generation, the idea that some views should not be expressed or that certain speakers should get priority because of historical grievances of some kind—that’s anathema,” he said. 

Since becoming president, Garber said one of his main goals has been “to remove the bias of personal opinion from the classroom,” according to The Crimson:

One example of professors espousing political views, Garber said, was the rise of anti-Israel sentiment among a body of disproportionately left-wing faculty in the aftermath of Oct. 7.

“This gets back to what I was talking about with speech,” Garber said. “It did happen in classrooms that professors would push this.”

Garber said the rise in anti-Israel beliefs occurred in tandem with a rise in antisemitism on college campuses. Though Garber has dismissed attempts by the Trump administration to use antisemitism as a justification for its pressure campaign against the University, he has not denied its presence on Harvard’s campus.

But Garber argued that the most pervasive form of antisemitism is not overt speech or protest violations, but social exclusion — what he described as “social shunning” that is “nearly impossible” to police or punish.

As an example, Garber said he heard accounts from Israeli students who said conversations abruptly ended after they disclosed their nationality.

In regard to what he is doing about it, he brought up Harvard’s institutional neutrality position, adopted under his leadership in 2024, as well as updates to its campus free speech and protest policies.

“We’re not about the activism. We’re not about pushing particular points of view,” he said. “You should be logical, firmly grounded in the evidence and rigorous in how you approach these issues.”

Over the past year, some of Harvard’s most prominent faculty, including Hankins and Steven Pinker, have criticized the institution for straying from its primary mission: the pursuit of knowledge. 

Hankins, in an essay about his departure published last week in Compact, said one of the problems is that Harvard has been rejecting brilliant minds simply because they are white males.

In a post Monday on X, he wrote that DEI in hiring is still a problem at Harvard.

Meanwhile, investigations by The College Fix and others have exposed massive leftist bias among faculty at Harvard and other Ivy League institutions. One Fix analysis found federal Democratic candidates and groups received 96 percent of total donations from Ivy League professors in the 2022 midterm elections.

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