Noah Feldman Versus Martin Luther King Jr.

Harvard working group warns of “outside forces”

A Harvard working group today issued a “Report on Institutional Voice in the University,” which the Harvard Corporation endorsed and Harvard’s interim president, interim provost, and deans announced they accepted.

The report, by a working group of which Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman was a co-chair, starts with the statement that “the purpose of the university is to pursue truth” and goes from there. “To succeed, the university cultivates an environment in which its members can research, teach, and learn. This is its core function.”

It basically says Harvard should quit its habit of issuing statements on current events. “The university and its leaders should not…issue official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the university’s core function.”

It all seems reasonably sound, constructive, even, to me. So far, so good. Congratulations. Except for this: “the university has a responsibility to speak out to protect and promote its core function. Its leaders must communicate the value of the university’s central activities. They must defend the university’s autonomy and academic freedom when threatened – if, for example, outside forces seek to determine what students the university can admit, what subjects it can teach, or which research it supports.”

Can you think of an example of when “outside forces” seek to determine what students a university can admit?

That struck me as a reference back to the case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, with six justices in the majority, that Harvard College’s admissions were unconstitutionally discriminating by race. Harvard is still resisting that ruling instead of showing any remorse.

But American history has seen other recent examples of “outside forces” determining what students a university admits—as, for example, on October 1, 1962, when President Kennedy sent in the army to reinforce the U.S. marshals and border patrol agents on the scene, and James Meredith registered as a student at the University of Mississippi. Or on June 11, 1963, when U.S. marshals, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, and the federalized Alabama National Guard accompanied two other black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, who enrolled for summer session at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, despite the resistance of Alabama Governor George Wallace.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s April 19, 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” begins with an extended denunciation of “the view which argues against ‘outsiders coming in.’" 

Wrote King: “I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”

Harvard of 2024 defends “autonomy” against “outsiders” with George Wallace-like ferocity, which makes sense, given the anti-Jewish bigotry that afflicts the place (Feldman told the New York Times in December 2023 that “he had ‘never once’ experienced antisemitism on Harvard’s campus, even during the years when as an observant Jew, he regularly wore a kippa.”)

It’s not just Feldman. Harvard’s former president, Drew Faust, made a similar argument this month in her Phi Beta Kappa address: “We should not be permitting, and certainly not celebrating a governor or a legislature or a member of Congress who is designing courses or degree requirements, hiring faculty, or proudly claiming responsibility for firing university presidents. …The value of university autonomy has been foundational to university excellence.”  

Who are the outsiders? Harvard alumni, including Reps. Elise Stefanik and Kathy Manning and Kevin Kiley, who are members of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce? Harvard students and alumni who, aided in some cases by Harvard alumni lawyers, are suing for discrimination? Harvard alumni and donors who have paused giving to protest the antisemitism and the ideological conformity? How does Harvard expect “autonomy” when it’s getting $600 million or $700 million a year in federal funding? How does Harvard expect “autonomy” when it seeks authorization for $2 billion in tax-exempt financing via the state of Massachusetts (of which it was able to raise only $734,995,000.)

You don’t hear Harvard complaining about the Title IX mandates for women’s athletics and sexual harassment prevention as an infringement on autonomy. You don’t hear Harvard complaining about the integration of universities in Alabama and Mississippi as infringements on autonomy.

No, the only complaining about autonomy and outsiders have to do with the current problems of stifling left-wing conformity and pervasive and severe Jew-hate, which would have continued and worsened totally unchecked had it not been for “outsiders,” that is, concerned alumni and members of government, getting involved. By the Noah Feldman standard, some communist Harvard grad student from Gaza chanting “there is only one solution, intifada revolution” is an “insider,” while the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights or Bill Ackman is an outsider.

If the Harvard working group on institutional voice had included some alumni or members of government, rather than only faculty, perhaps Harvard might have been saved the embarrassment. Anyway, on the questions of “outside forces” versus the “inescapable network of mutuality,” I’d take Martin Luther King Jr. over Noah Feldman, Drew Faust, and Harvard’s interim administrators in a twinkling. It’s not even a close call.

Recent work: I had two pieces in today’s Wall Street Journal: an editorial feature, “I’m a Crime Victim—ProPublica Has My Tax Returns,” and a letter to the editor, “Immigration, Groupthink and Unintended Consequences,” about the 100th anniversary of Calvin Coolidge’s 1924 immigration act. A couple of readers wrote to appreciate the unusual feat of having both a letter and an opinion piece appear on the same day. 

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