Colleges typically relish their associations with powerful people. They welcome departing administration officials with fellowships to their institutes, and they tout alumni who are elected to state or national office.
But in a national crisis, some of the country’s most prestigious universities are being forced to confront their connections to lawmakers who endorsed and amplified the conspiracy theories that resulted in a violent attempt to take over the U.S. Capitol last week.
At the University of Pennsylvania, Amy Gutmann, president, and Wendell Pritchett, provost, released a statement the day after the attempted insurrection, saying they “join together with everyone who raises their voices and condemns threatening incitements and assaults on the political freedom of all citizens.”
The statement did not mention Trump, who graduated from the university in 1968. And it came after the editorial board of the student newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, had called on university officials to “forcefully speak out against Trump in order to completely repudiate the president’s actions from any connection to the school.”
If the university could avoid drawing the connection between itself and the president, the student newspaper could not forget it. “Throughout Trump’s presidency,” the editorial said, “students, alumni, and faculty alike constantly called on the University to take ownership of its connection with the commander-in-chief.” It said that every Daily Pennsylvanian story that mentioned Trump also noted that he was an alumnus.
Hadriana Lowenkron, editor in chief of the newspaper, said that since Penn educates many members of marginalized communities, university officials should “distinguish their own values from the statements that President Trump has made and enacted.”
That distinction is “important when you have a president who has consistently made remarks or implemented policy that goes against marginalized groups,” she said.
The Daily Pennsylvanian reported that many Penn students and alumni were disappointed that the university’s statement about the storming of the Capitol wasn’t stronger. Last summer, a group of faculty members urged the university to investigate Trump’s admission to the university, though the provost decided not to. A Penn spokesman told The Chronicle the university was not planning to release any further statements about last week’s events.
Law school alumni and students this week called for Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to be disbarred because of their “efforts to undermine the peaceful transition of power,” The Washington Post reported. On Wednesday, Heather K. Gerken, dean of Yale Law School, where Hawley earned his law degree, said in a statement that she is “deeply saddened whenever any graduate falls short of the high expectations of this profession or this Law School.”
She didn’t name the senator, nor did the school make her available for an interview, but she called this “a sobering moment for our democracy, our profession, and our law school.”
At Harvard University, a regular destination for former members of presidential administrations and where Cruz attended law school, a letter circulated late last year urging administrators to create “accountability guidelines” to govern who from Trump’s administration could be offered positions on campus, the Harvard Crimson reported. Both Sean Spicer, Trump’s former press secretary, and Corey Lewandowski, the president’s former campaign manager, have earned fellowships at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics.
Conservative voices should be well-represented on campus, but political figures who aided an insurrection are another matter, some faculty members say.
Ryan D. Enos, a political-science professor, wrote to Lawrence S. Bacow, Harvard’s president, urging him to create guidelines governing who will be invited to Harvard’s campus.
“We must have minimum standards to which we hold those associated with Harvard,” Enos wrote. “Those standards surely include supporting free elections and not encouraging violence. If we do not insist that those at Harvard do not try to overturn the free and fair votes of other citizens or that they would not encourage the violent overthrow of our own government, then we have no standards at all.”
In an interview, Enos said he was very pleased with Bacow’s response. (That response isn’t public.) He added that Harvard should make public its decision about how it evaluates who will be invited to campus.
If you try to violently overthrow the United States government, you will pay consequences in your post-political life.
“Places like Harvard can’t say, We’re going to wait three months until the dust settles,” he said. Instead, universities must “show that none of this is condoned. If you try to violently overthrow the United States government, you will pay consequences in your post-political life.”
For now, a Harvard spokesman said that Bacow “looks forward to continuing the discussion.” At the Kennedy School, Doug Elmendorf, the dean, has already set a precedent. On Tuesday, he announced that Rep. Elise Stefanik, an alumna, would be removed from an advisory committee at the Institute of Politics because she made baseless claims about voter fraud. (In a statement, Stefanik called the removal a “badge of honor,” adding that the decision “to cower and cave to the woke Left will continue to erode diversity of thought, public discourse, and ultimately the student experience.”)
Colleges have also quickly revoked honorary degrees in response to the riots. Middlebury College has stripped Rudy Giuliani, who also riled up the Trump-supporting masses on January 6, of his honorary degree. Lehigh University last week stripped Trump of the honorary degree it awarded him in 1988. And on Wednesday, Grinnell College announced that U.S. Rep. Tom Cole, who objected to the certification of the presidential-election results, had voluntarily returned his honorary degree after a petition demanding it be revoked drew thousands of signatures.
Places like Harvard will very likely have a much easier time turning away would-be insurrectionists than will public institutions, especially those in red states, said Holden Thorp, former chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and former provost of Washington University in St. Louis.
“Harvard will get away with it because they’re Harvard, and they’ve got plenty of money,” Thorp said. But most other places will have to contend with donors and state officials who are more sympathetic to Trump.
“For the last 30 years or so, universities have been trying to stay out of the fray so they can protect their budgets and fund-raise from all sides politically,” he said. The attempted coup is only the latest event that runs against the core tenets of truth and knowledge that college presidents find they can’t take a firm stand on.
“When you let creationism slide, then you let climate-change denial slide, then you let Covid denial slide,” Thorp said. “It’s pretty hard to say, Now we’re going to call them out about the election.”
