Harvard Faculty Adjust to Teaching in the Political Hot Seat

As Harvard spends another year under the glare of a political spotlight, its instructors face a new challenge: teaching students about the same topics that draw furious headlines.

The moment has been particularly acute for faculty whose fields of study involve subjects, like the history of slavery or the Israel-Palestine conflict, that have become political footballs for lawmakers and pundits beyond Harvard’s gates.

Aaron Jacobs, a postdoctoral fellow in the History department who teaches a course on policing in the United States, has spent a long time thinking about how to discuss a violent history that stretches from slave patrols and lynch mobs to modern-day police killings.

“This material affects students, and it affects students in asymmetrical ways, and it affects students in ways that are not always visible to me,” Jacobs said. “It’s a live experience.”

But now, Jacobs said, he is keenly aware of how his own curriculum has become subject to national debates.

“We’re in a political moment where these kinds of topics — where there is external pressure from the federal government, and great uncertainty about how university policies will respond to that pressure that may really dramatically shape what kind of work is possible to do,” he said.

Jacobs said his own approach to his curriculum has not changed, but he feels “real concerns” as to whether he and his colleagues will be “able to maintain consistent commitment to high level, rigorous teaching” as donors and the government wade into debates over what should be taught in Harvard classrooms.

Jacobs is not alone in his fears that “academic expertise is not being respected.”

In The Crimson’s annual survey of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences this spring, roughly half of respondents said they felt negatively about the state of academic freedom at Harvard. Pressure from the government, self-censorship, and pressure from donors were the most-cited concerns among respondents.

For some faculty, the pressure has become personal. Harvard professors have routinely found themselves singled out on social media and in right-wing news outlets for their research and teaching — and in the wake of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s killing earlier this year, universities faced strident demands to disavow affiliates accused of advocating political violence.

Harvard did not entirely escape the uproar. One Fox News story, published in early October this year, questioned why the University did not condemn three faculty who sat on a 2018 panel where a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill lecturer suggested that American politics under the first Trump administration might demand a response from activists that draws on tactics including “both violence and nonviolence.”

For History professor Walter Johnson, who studies slavery and the Civil War, the incident raised questions about how faculty can teach about violence without being accused of inciting it.

“I am not even certain how I am expected to feel safe lecturing about THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, which was, after all, involved violence against conservative loyalists and royalists, at this university,” Johnson wrote.

“Still less,” he added, the history of slave rebellions led by Nat Turner and John Brown.

Two years ago, Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel created a new flashpoint in campus debates — and a new challenge for faculty who wanted to openly discuss the Israel-Palestine conflict. Harvard stepped in with a slew of new rules aimed at keeping students’ interactions respectful, but some instructors worry that the University’s administrative interventions could backfire.

Professor of Modern Jewish Studies Shaul Magid — whose course on modern Jewish thought discusses nationalism and Zionism — said he worries that Harvard’s adoption of a common but polarizing definition of antisemitism last winter will make it harder for him to teach.

The definition, written by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, is accompanied by examples that describe certain criticisms of Israel as antisemitic. Though Harvard administrators privately assured some professors who teach on the Israel-Palestine conflict that their speech would remain protected, Magid remained skeptical.

“It’s not a constructive frame into which one can teach a course on antisemitism or Zionism” — or anti-Zionism, Magid said. “If one is not allowed to talk about that subject because of fear that they could be reprimanded for transgressing the IHRA document, I think it does not promote the production of knowledge really, which is what universities are about.”

Concerns about speech at Harvard aren’t new. Over the past decade, some faculty have complained that Harvard’s left-leaning campus majority creates an echo chamber where more conservative views are shunned.

Epidemiology professor Tyler J. VanderWeele faced calls from students in March 2023 for Harvard to fire him or bar him from teaching over a 2015 amicus brief he signed that opposed the constitutional right to gay marriage. The experience showed him that the culture at Harvard has “become one of greater self-censorship,” VanderWeele said.

Even when VanderWeele taught a large statistics course — which, he said, involves “presumably less controversial topics” — students would take offense over how he worded questions, he recalled.

And Psychology professor Steven A. Pinker, a co-president of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, said the University has at points made concessions to a “culture of victimhood — where people gain status by claiming to be victims and demanding that authorities like deans, universities, human resources departments punish the aggressors on their behalf.”

Harvard has spent several years attuned to concerns like VanderWeele’s and Pinker’s, and programs like Harvard College’s Intellectual Vitality Initiative have tried to draw students into difficult conversations. Several Harvard schools have also adopted nonattribution policies for classroom discussions in order to encourage students to open up.

VanderWeele said he thinks campus initiatives have helped address some cultural problems at Harvard.

“While there are real difficulties and challenges at present, I do think some of the changes and discussions around these matters over the last couple of years have been helpful,” he said. “So I’m hopeful that we’re moving in the right direction.”

But VanderWeele said he sees campus facing “a particularly difficult stretch with Harvard under the Trump administration.”

“The conservative professors that I know are horrified by the pressure that the Trump administration has been putting on the University,” Pinker said. “They don’t think that that is a way that will widen the range of discussion, if anything, the other way around.”

Some faculty say the political climate has created a tenser atmosphere for students, too. And a few have started to think in new ways about how to ensure students feel ready to learn and speak about tense topics in class.

When Harvard’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors sued the Trump administration this spring, the group’s complaint included statements from two faculty members who said noncitizen colleagues and students had become more reluctant to speak publicly and teach about politics and world events.

Social Studies lecturer Jonathan Hansen’s approach to teaching has shifted as he has become “more highly attuned” to the “problem of teaching violence in a very violent context,” he said.

Hansen teaches Social Studies 98ND: “Justice and Reconciliation After Mass Violence,” a seminar that teaches students how to think about violence, its legacies, and reconciliation.

“I used to march into the classroom to teach class,” Hansen said. “Now, I’m constantly checking in on people. In fact, I’ll just admit that the climate in the country is so fraught right now. I’m of course very conscious of the kids’ own emotions just walking into a class of any kind.”

Magid even developed his own classroom nonattribution policy last year to make sure students felt free to express themselves.

“Because there were all kinds of doxxing issues and things, I did make a rule that students were not allowed to record in the classroom and that they were not allowed to post anything that was said in the classroom on social media using anybody’s name,” he said.

“Students respected that,” he added.

—Staff writer Victoria D. Rengel can be reached at victoria.rengel@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VictoriaRengel_.