The real problem at Harvard

This isn’t a column about Claudine Gay, who resigned as Harvard’s president earlier this week. She’s been all over the news because — let’s face it — journalists are obsessed with the Ivy League.

It’s about Carole Hooven.

Never heard of her? I didn’t think so. But Hooven’s story speaks volumes about the real problem at Harvard, and in American universities more broadly: the lack of academic freedom for diverse perspectives.

We’ve heard the word diverse a lot since Gay stepped down because she was Harvard’s first African American president. I don’t know if she was targeted by her right-wing critics because of her race, as her defenders alleged. Nor do I know if her record of lifting unattributed passages from other scholars should have disqualified her for the presidency.

Here’s what I do know: Harvard talks a good game about diverse views, but it doesn’t actually protect them. And that’s very bad news for higher education.

Hooven had to learn this lesson the hard way. She was a lecturer in the department of evolutionary biology at Harvard when she went on Fox News in 2021 to promote her new book, T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. During the interview, she said that there are just two biological sexes: male and female.

Hooven made a point of distinguishing sex from gender, which can assume many different forms. “We can treat people with respect and respect their gender identities and use their preferred pronouns, so understanding the facts about biology doesn’t prevent us from treating people with respect,” she said, repeating the term respect three times.

No matter. The director of her department’s diversity and inclusion task force took to Twitter (now X) to denounce Hooven’s “transphobic and hateful” comments. “This dangerous language perpetuates a system of discrimination against non-cis people,” the director added. “It directly opposes our Task Force work that aims to create a safe space for scholars of ALL gender identities and races.”

After that, the digital outrage machine kicked in. Students drew up a petition denouncing Hooven, who quickly became a pariah at Harvard. She walked around campus with her head down, fearing that someone might recognize her “as the ‘transphobe’ from whom students needed to be protected,” Hooven wrote.

Nor could Hooven teach her popular lecture course, because no graduate students would agree to serve as her teaching assistants. Who wants to be associated with a bigot?

Never mind that scholars are deeply divided on whether sex is a binary, as Hooven claimed. Indeed, when the controversy broke, a Harvard colleague told the campus paper that sex was a contested topic and “super complex.” But nobody on campus wanted to explore those complexities; instead, they wanted Hooven’s head.

And they got it. “Another person in the same situation might have stayed on, but I could not,” Hooven wrote. Her mental health deteriorated, and she resigned.

And here’s the kicker: No member of the Harvard administration spoke up for Hooven. That included Gay, who was the dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the time.

The issue came up during Gay’s fateful testimony before a congressional committee on antisemitism last month, when Rep. Tim Walberg (R., Mich.) pressed her about Hooven. “In what world is a call for violence against Jews protected speech, but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?” Walberg asked.

Gay replied that Harvard supports “constructive dialogue, even on the most complex and divisive issues.” But the case of Carole Hooven demonstrates the opposite, of course. The meaning of sex is hugely complex and divisive, and Harvard did not support Hooven’s effort to dialogue constructively about it. Instead, it threw her under the bus.

Harvard did not support Hooven’s effort to dialogue constructively. Instead, it threw her under the bus.

Likewise, Gay’s resignation letter said all the right things about the university’s “enduring commitment to open inquiry and free expression in the pursuit of truth.” If that were true, Hooven would still be teaching there. Harvard forsook that principle in the service of protecting students from “harm,” as Hooven wrote, which is what academic censors always trot out when they want someone to shut up.

But don’t tell that to America’s overwhelmingly liberal professoriate, which continues to insist that all the censorship comes from conservatives like Elise Stefanik and Ron DeSantis. “There is a right-wing political attack on higher education right now,” warned Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors. “For presidents to be taken down like this, it does not bode well for academic freedom.”

She’s right. But we’ll never rebut the growing conservative challenges to academic freedom if we’re restricting it ourselves. Although Gay quit the Harvard presidency, she’s still on the faculty. And Hooven is not.

We can’t blame that on the right-wing politicians we love to hate. The fault, dear professors, is not just in our conservative stars. It’s in ourselves.