I am honored to be here today celebrating your achievements and grateful for this opportunity to speak after 11 years of silence at these Literary Exercises—sitting where President Garber is right now. And I am honored to join a long line of distinguished PBK orators stretching back to the eighteenth century. As a historian, I was curious to explore this tradition of oratory—to get some insight into what has been on the minds of PBK speakers over the years. The recent batch of addresses that I heard from my perch on this stage was about anything and everything—atheism, environmentalism, the tyranny of technology. But over the sweep of almost two centuries, an overwhelming number of PBK talks have converged on a single theme. These early titles sum it up: “The Connection between Intellectual and Moral Cultures, between Scholarship and Character, Literature and Life” (1844), or, more succinctly: “The Dangers and Duties of Men of Letters,” (in 1809. Of course, Harvard and PBK were then only for men), or “The Cause of Science and Letters,” (1826). Or, most famously, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1837 address, “The American Scholar,” which is now enshrined as a classic of American literature.
Emerson did not speak here in Sanders—it wasn’t built yet, so that PBK tradition did not begin until 1876. Emerson addressed an overflowing audience in the First Parish Church just across Mass. Ave. from Johnston Gate. But even if we have moved a few hundred yards east and two centuries ahead, we stand in a long line of descent from Emerson, still contemplating the answers to questions he and his audience pondered nearly two centuries ago.
You have been selected as the intellectually most distinguished of your class, chosen not just for what you have achieved in your specialized area of study, but chosen because you have demonstrated your ability to range across fields of learning. Your work has earned you this designation as scholars, as intellectuals—whatever particular vocation you may ultimately choose to pursue. And, as PBK orators have intoned for centuries, that involves burdens and responsibilities. I am far from the first PBK speaker— even in recent years—to invoke Emerson and his address. Many of his words about the character and duties of the scholar resonate now long after they were first uttered. The “office of the scholar,” he proclaimed, is to guide others “by showing them facts amidst appearances.” A scholar must not be the “parrot of other men’s thinking.” A scholar must be “free and brave.” As you are welcomed into the community of scholars that is PBK, this is what you are asked to be.
But I want to spend my few minutes on a closely related but slightly different question. I want to connect the who you must be as PBK scholars, to where you have been these past four years, to the place that nurtured you as the scholars you have become—although I note that a significant portion of your presence was virtual rather than physical! But digital or actual, you have been a Harvard student, a member of something called a university. And you are here today honored as among its most esteemed products.
What is a university? We have been taking its existence and its essence for granted, even as attacks on its character and purposes have over several decades steadily, if gradually, mounted. I spoke about rising criticism of universities more than a decade and a half ago in my inaugural address as president in 2007. But the acceleration of these attacks is no longer slow. It is deliberate and it is determined, and it is now enlisting many whom we had come to think of as staunch allies. The upheavals of this past academic year arising from the tragic situation in the Middle East have provided the occasion for those already hostile to the culture of American higher education to escalate their criticisms. The polarizations of race, religion, and politics that grip our country have in recent months focused unceasingly on universities. One might even suggest that universities have become a primary symbol for these larger divisions, as well as the theatre in which they are being acted out. But this is not just theatre; it represents a genuine and existential threat to the foundational assumptions that have long governed American higher education.
We should from the outset understand what is at stake. American higher education has since at least the 1940s been preeminent in the world. It has often been described as our country’s most successful “industry.” In the 2024 [London] Times Higher Education World University Rankings, seven out of the top 10 institutions named were in the United States; 13 out of the top 20. University research discoveries have been central to American prosperity; its graduates have led the most important institutions of our government, economy, society and culture. At this moment we are sitting in the center of the biotech capital of the world—a place that will bring health and longer lives to people across the planet. It is here because universities are here. Why are people working so hard to denigrate and destroy them?
Let’s consider some of the dimensions of this attack. One prong has been directed at undermining belief in the value of college. There has been a dramatic shift, occurring sharply beginning in 2015, in Americans’ confidence in college and in their belief that it matters. In the 2010s, 99 percent of Republicans and 96 percent of Democrats expected their children to go to college; now half of American parents would prefer that they not. And this decline in faith in American higher education occurred overwhelmingly among Republicans. By 2023, only 19 percent of Republicans said they had a lot of confidence in higher education. In 2012 a majority of voters with a bachelor’s degree supported Romney; in 2016, only 36 percent of college graduates voted for Trump. College is becoming a partisan cause—with enormous potential damage both to students and the nation. A college graduate still makes two-thirds more than a high school graduate over the course of a lifetime. The 45 percent of Gen Zers who believe a high school diploma is all you need have been grievously misled about their economic—and life—prospects. College graduates have better health and longer life expectancy, they are more likely to vote, and are 64 percent more likely to describe themselves as happy. Economists estimate that declining college attendance, which is already well underway, will yield a severe shortage of degree holders and $1.2 trillion lost in economic output by the end of the decade. To oppose college is to individually and collectively shoot ourselves in the foot.
An essential factor fueling hostility toward higher education is that college costs too much. Americans currently owe a daunting $1.7 trillion in college debt. For all our invocations of the mantra of “access and affordability,” we have not succeeded in reining in cost, even when significant increases in financial aid at some well-resourced institutions have somewhat restrained the price. But we must also recognize that this rise in price and rise in debt are in part the result of a marked defunding of higher education, especially in the years since the Great Recession. Public universities have transferred a growing percentage of the cost of tuition from the state to families. Just to offer just one example: in 1960, 78 percent of the budget of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor came from the state. Now it is 13 percent. The shift in our understanding of college from a common good to a private good—part of the shift in our society toward the privatization of everything—has left students to rely increasingly on loans to cover the increases in tuition that this transformation has required. Or perhaps to decide not to attend college at all.
In the case of private institutions, I would suggest we might regard the tax on university endowments as another form of defunding higher education. Its passage in 2017 was overtly acknowledged by many Republicans to be punitive, a means of expressing their rising objections to what they saw as the liberal bias of higher education. The fact that no tax was considered for the often substantial endowments of religious groups, museums, or other nonprofits seems telling. So does the inclusion in the GOP endowment tax bill of a provision that would have explicitly exempted the conservative bastion, Hillsdale College. So does the successful effort by Senator Mitch McConnell to shield Berea, a small but well-endowed Christian college in his home state of Kentucky, from the levy. The debates around the endowment tax cast many of America’s finest universities as negative forces, as drains on society, not as powerful engines of its betterment.
By the time of these discussions, the partisan split in views about higher education had taken firm hold. Seventy-nine percent of Republicans nationwide recently said that a major problem in universities was professors bringing their liberal political and social views into the classroom. Only 17 percent of Democrats agreed that this was a frequent or dangerous occurrence. Statistics about political allegiances of faculty indicate there are five Democratic professors for every Republican. But what does such a statistic mean in practice? It seems likely that increasingly partisan views about higher education are as much cause as effect of these divides. And do we assume that connection with one political party or another necessarily implies a distortion of what is being taught? There are many sectors of America’s society and economy in which political affiliations lean heavily in one or another direction. I would, for example, expect the members of the Business Roundtable to be skewed toward one party.
A B.A. has neither an R or a D attached to it. The lives of Republicans and Democrats alike are improved by college attendance, just as the well-being of our society as a whole is advanced by the work of free and independent universities. The fear that higher levels of education may correlate with Democratic voting should not become a reason for advocating ignorance.
Universities must resist being portrayed in this partisan light by reinforcing their support for the ideals of free speech and by continually strengthening their dedication to the open exploration of ideas. Just as judges are expected to transcend political leanings in their loyalty to the rule of law, so the culture of a university requires loyalty to what we might call the rule of truth. The essence of a university requires it to stand above the political fray, to uphold the value of rational argument and exchange as the pathway to finding and refining the best ideas. This does not mean that its students and faculty cannot have their own political loyalties. But these must not silence or marginalize other perspectives or undermine the principles of academic freedom and rigor in the classroom or in research. We in higher ed have been far from perfect in this regard. Frank disagreement and respectful argument are an ideal, not, alas, always a reality. And as our nation has become more polarized, and social media has made it possible to turn any interaction into an occasion of public shaming and cancelling, it takes more courage to disagree with your peers, not to mention, if you are reticent or fearful, with your professors. I know from you and your classmates that you have sometimes found it challenging to express disagreement with what seemed to you prevailing views in classrooms or in dining halls. In recent months deeply felt divisions over a raging war have made maintaining a dedication to communicating across differences especially difficult. But I also know how so many of you have remained committed to rational and dispassionate exchange as you have listened to one another and reached for understanding. Think of Emerson; a scholar must be “free and brave.” And a university must do everything it can to support an environment that makes that possible.
Much is at stake in dedicating ourselves to being good and true speakers and generous listeners. And much is at stake in how and what we teach. Academic integrity entails the obligation that faculty have to their fields of inquiry—to what I have called a “rule of truth” that evaluates the debates defining their disciplines—and it entails their obligation to the students who seek to comprehend what it is we know and how we know it. These are substantive questions of knowledge, method, and fact that are fundamentally academic, not political, in nature; they require expertise and judgment about subject matter and educational goals and a faculty committed to these purposes. That is why the long-held right of universities and their faculties to decide what they should teach is so precious.
Precious but under threat. The state of Indiana, for example, has recently passed a law requiring faculty to teach a “variety of political or ideological frameworks.” Does that mean a biology professor must teach creationism? Or a historian offer a portrait of our past that erases terrible injustices like slavery in service of painting an unrelievedly celebratory notion of the American experience? Or perhaps, given the strictures introduced against teaching what has been demonized as CRT [critical race theory], will a historian be required to present a colorblind version of American history from which race is excluded altogether? To mandate what is often hailed as “viewpoint diversity” can mean presenting material that is just plain wrong. Does a politician know more about biology than a biologist? About history than a historian?
In a number of states, the effort to align curriculum with partisan desires has been indirect: just ignore existing faculty who have been appointed through careful vetting processes based in values of intellectual excellence, just circumvent existing structures and standards for course evaluation and curriculum development. Instead parachute in an independent institute established by a governor or a legislature to create a parallel curriculum more suited to reigning political prejudices. Especially chilling has been the effort by the state of Florida to completely transform New College, a small liberal arts college within the state university system, by appointing a new—and explicitly conservative—board of trustees, driving out 40 percent of the faculty, and remaking the institution, in the words of a governor’s aide, into the “Hillsdale of the South.”
I have been arguing for the right of universities to establish their curricula and decide who will teach their students by means of carefully established processes that ground such decisions in intellectual expertise. Such structures are designed to shield universities—students and faculty alike—from direct political intervention, from becoming the handmaidens of a political party or a political agenda. Imperfectly, no doubt. But this must be our goal. We should not be permitting, and certainly not celebrating, a governor or a legislature or a member of Congress who is designing courses or degree requirements, hiring faculty, or proudly claiming responsibility for firing university presidents.
I have been making a case for why universities must endeavor to maintain independence and distance from the partisan scrum. The value of university autonomy has been foundational to university excellence. Universities need the independence to imagine beyond the societies in which they find themselves—to pursue discoveries that will build a future that the present cannot imagine—to transcend and even challenge the status quo. And universities need to be free to criticize the powerful—be they politicians or plutocrats. Universities must have the freedom to think the unthinkable. Like the faculty and students that comprise them, they too must be free and brave. American universities’ independence has made them strong; it has made America strong. We have seen elsewhere that when autocrats seek to consolidate their authority, they frequently endeavor to control or even—in the recent example of Hungary—banish strong universities.
American higher education is endangered. Universities have rightly been reminded of the imperative to live up to their own values, to be accountable to the rule of truth that I have described. They need now more than ever to be their best selves. But they also need to defend themselves against attacks that are uninformed, undeserved, or rankly partisan, attacks that are explicitly designed to weaken and marginalize a set of institutions that are foundational to American democracy and to the well-being not just of Americans but of people around the globe. Universities are intended to change people, to enable them, to quote the inscription on the Dexter Gate to Harvard Yard, to “grow in wisdom”; universities are designed to question prevailing ideas and assumptions; they are meant to create discomfort, to grapple with the uncertainties and complexities of what they don’t know as well as the realities and the meaning of what they do. Universities have a purpose that transcends struggles for political power or advantage, that flies in the face of the political opportunism that has fueled so many recent attacks.
We who have been nurtured and shaped by universities, we who proudly embrace our identities as scholars “free and brave,” must acknowledge, to borrow from that early PBK oration, both the “dangers” and the “duties” that lie ahead. We must be champions of the promise and purposes of higher education—of the “rule of truth” that it stands for both inside and outside these gates.
