Overview
Harvard University, a symbol of excellence and prestige for nearly 400 years, has been under attack. The assault, by no means limited to the right-wing attacks on DEI, or the lawsuits brought by the Trump administration over billions of dollars in Federal funding, has exposed deep fault lines within academia and American society at large. The Harvard presidency is arguably the most powerful and influential position in academia, not least because it comes with huge sway over the university’s vast $57 billion endowment. Beginning with the controversial tenure of Lawrence Summers as president of Harvard, James Stewart goes behind the scenes with power brokers and students alike to reveal how Summers’s abrupt departure set the stage for a progressive backlash when Drew Faust was hired as his replacement, and for the highly symbolic choice of Claudine Gay as the university’s first Black president. After Hamas attacked Israel, Republican Congresswoman and Harvard graduate Elise Stefanik led a Congressional inquiry into antisemitism on campus. As the controversy intensified, Gay was accused of plagiarism and forced to resign. But these events were only the preamble to the multiple lawsuits the second Trump administration would file against Harvard in the years to come, forcing Harvard into the impossible position of trying to defend academic freedom at the risk of crucial funding.
A propulsive, character-driven narrative, replete with bold-faced names, combining deep investigative reporting and breaking news, this will be the definitive account of an institution on the brink. Using Harvard as the prism, Stewart confronts some of the most entrenched and sensitive fault lines of our polarized age, as the countervailing forces of meritocracy, elitism, identity politics, and tradition bear down on higher education from all sides. At stake is not only the future of Harvard, America’s preeminent university, but the very idea of education itself, and the unending struggle for the soul of the nation.
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