Harvard, Penn, MIT’s Presidents Show Elite University Failures Post-Oct 7th

Not all Ivy League schools are botching their responses to the Hamas massacre.

Hamas’ attack on Jewish civilians and the ensuing war in Gaza are exposing the leadership void at elite universities. In testimony on Wednesday before Congress, the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and MIT highlight the incompetence and failure to provide an intellectual and moral framework for furthering the debate and understanding on this Middle Eastern conflict.

Widespread institutional failure has brought into sharp relief the few college administrations that have managed to navigate the crisis without sacrificing free inquiry, free expression, or campus safety. Among the Ivies, none has done it better than Dartmouth.

In the days following the attack on Israel, Dartmouth faculty from the Jewish Studies and Middle Eastern Studies programs united to organize two forums to discuss in an academic setting the history of the conflict as well as the recent horrors. They aimed to create not a “safe space” but a “brave space”—one where Dartmouth students could ask questions, process emotions, think, and learn. The venues reached full capacity, with more than 1,600 viewers watching remotely.

Having provided students with a fruitful and peaceful avenue for learning and exploration, the administration had enough respect for its students and itself as a place of learning to distinguish between intellectual debate and mayhem—a line toward which too many college presidents have turned a blind eye. When two pro-Palestinian Dartmouth students threatened administrators and engaged in criminal trespassing, they were promptly arrested.

Entering the school year, one could just as easily envision the New Hampshire campus descending into the same chaos engulfing Cambridge or Philadelphia. Dartmouth ranked 240 out of 248 in FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings. Newly appointed president, Dr. Sian Leah Beilock, however, has made it her mission to reverse the college’s recent decline. At her September inauguration as the school’s 19th president, Dr. Beilock championed the need for civil discourse on campus, announcing a new program called the Dartmouth Dialogue Project, which would “teach the skills of open, honest, and respectful communication” in and out of the classroom.

In the leadership seminar I’ve instructed for decades with Bucknell students, we discuss one of Mahatma Gandhi’s guiding principles: “satyagraha,” a Sanskrit word loosely translating into “truth force.” Satyagraha requires our thoughts, words, and actions to be aligned—in other words, it asks us to practice what we preach, to walk our talk.

Universities give the president, faculty, and the board of trustees a role in setting the culture and defining the university’s mission. But in that shared governance model, the president is always the lead dog. It is the responsibility of the president to step up and create a brave learning culture that encourages faculty to have these kinds of professional forums and discussions with students. Dr. Beilock is perhaps the only president in the Ivy League who is walking the talk.

The schools appearing before Congress this week are home to some of the world’s brightest scholars in Jewish and Middle Eastern studies. There is nothing stopping their presidents from affording their scholars a microphone to lead young students in discussions to understand more deeply the complex history, geopolitics, or current events without descending into mob violence; that they have failed to do so reveals what can happen to institutions—even those with seemingly limitless resources and brainpower—when they lack Gandhi's satyagraha.

As Congress investigates higher education’s mishandling of recent campus protests, they should not only look at what went wrong, but also look at what went right. It’s not just the response to Oct. 7 that warrants examination, but the campus cultures that led to violent reactions. Dartmouth’s President Beilock took the first step. Who’s next?

William R. Gruver is a Dartmouth College and Columbia University alumnus, professor emeritus at Bucknell University, an emeritus trustee at Berea College and Winston S. Churchill Senior Fellow of the Open Discourse Coalition, an alumni-founded nonprofit dedicated to promoting a variety of viewpoints at Bucknell University.