If It Rights the Ship, Harvard Can Inform a New Renaissance

As the last spasm of America’s decade-long cultural convulsion plays out at Harvard, we find ourselves at an extraordinary moment in time.

The embers of the global War on Terror still smolder in Syria, Somalia, and elsewhere. A sleepy Europe has suddenly awoken to find itself threatened. The Middle East is, again, on fire. The South China Sea is contested. Piracy on the high seas is on the rise. The global economy appears to be teetering on the brink of a crisis born of wars, the pandemic, and the consequences of, in effect, free money for years. Piles of plastic, rising sea levels, and a myriad of other changes force us to reconsider how we occupy the planet.

New tools in biology present both promise and threat to human health. Artificial intelligence offers both relief and peril to human cognition, while destigmatized psychoactive drugs cloud our minds or lull them into eternal slumber. Social media and the digital incarnation of America’s free press can potentiate new cultural conflicts on a timeframe of just minutes.

Meanwhile, at Harvard, we oscillate between playing a role and getting played in all this chaos.

After the great plagues, Europe birthed a Renaissance in which art, science, and cultural enlightenment changed the world. Might we at Harvard now find ourselves in the midst of the hard reset required to support a more global Renaissance-like period?

Harvard's role in such a cultural rebirth would be best fulfilled if it serves as a forum for the rigorous examination of competing and controversial ideas. But is Harvard organized for such a role?

The last decade suggests the traditional architecture of academic departments, schools, and top-down initiatives won’t capitalize well on the creativity of the University’s main effort, the faculty. If a resurrection of classical learning and free debate is to happen at Harvard, we might be better served by a new organizational model.

While the number of academic departments, at least within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, has grown over the last two decades, these focused disciplines draw headlines for impactful work less often than Harvard’s interdisciplinary institutes, which include the Broad Institute, the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

These institutes draw from across Harvard’s schools and FAS’ departments to break away from the specialized, reductionist model of academic training and research. They are also noteworthy because of their independent fundraising and more agile, responsive administration fitted to the specific needs of their faculty.

Most of these institutes, however, focus on the STEM fields. As students vote with their feet, moving away from the humanities, Harvard might consider solving these problems with institutional initiatives that are even more radically transdisciplinary — where the arts, sciences, engineering, and humanities can come together, as they did in da Vinci’s Renaissance.

To prepare for the future, Harvard should think big. Exciting new ways to organize research and learning are a necessary step in securing its place in the post-pandemic era of new scholarship. The drama at Harvard that seems to have reached a crescendo since Oct. 7 may be part of the hard cultural transformation required to reorder the University’s priorities and prepare for the times ahead. Some of the grittiest work of this cultural transformation is still yet to come.

What kind of leader will be strong enough to restore confidence in the integrity of Harvard’s scholarship and pursuit of excellence?

To get Harvard through its current turmoil and set it on an azimuth toward a promising future may require a leader like John R. Silber, the controversial, pugilistic president who saved Boston University from crisis after the ’60s. Such a leader would prioritize a vision of institutional excellence over chasing popularity by adopting fleeting political trends.

Harvard’s leadership will have to be committed to restoring faculty faith in the administration, realigning its focus, and fostering a culture and ethos in which faculty support is prioritized. For their part, faculty are going to have to step up and embrace their roles as leaders and exemplars of excellence and open-mindedness. And students will have to toughen up and accept accountability for performance standards and civil behavior.

The next president will have to realize that their primary responsibility is protecting academic freedom and open inquiry on this campus. Everything else should be required to support an ecosystem that is more akin to an intellectual cage match than a campfire singalong.

Such a president will undoubtedly differ from those to which we have become accustomed. They will have to dismantle inefficiencies and neutralize influential cliques that have compromised the primary purpose and standards of this university and build new initiatives for a future that might be a century in the making.

The president, as the University’s chief cultural officer and public face, will also have to navigate an institutionally neutral Harvard in such a way that its American citizenship is not just its heritage, but its guide for the future. Certainly, this person will need, and deserve, our support.

There are two kinds of people at Harvard: The people who help earn its reputation, and the people who live off it. With a combination of grace and grit, we can all be the former — the kind of people who can push us forward in the journey to restore Harvard.

There should be no guarantee of comfort at Harvard. It requires a great amount of grit to pursue excellence. Empathetic and innovative (at least for Harvard) forms of University-wide governance, perhaps in the form of a faculty senate, are going to require significant work and patience, but could very well be the right path forward for Harvard.

If we falter, we might join the ranks of Oxford and Cambridge, great universities whose glory days seem to be in the past.

Kit Parker is the Tarr Family Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

His piece is part of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard’s column, which runs bi-weekly on Mondays and pairs faculty members to write contrasting perspectives on a single theme. Read the companion to Parker's piece here.