I have spent the better part of a month pondering what to make of the House Education and Workforce Committee’s December 5 public flogging of the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT. Much of the criticism heaped on the presidents’ heads after the hearings condemned them for being “evasive” when they should have been forceful, and for retreating into “context” and “lawyerly responses” when a “one-word answer” was in order. But, context actually matters – just ask Donald Trump’s lawyer, John Sauer, who couldn’t give a one-word answer when questioned by a federal appeals judge if a president would be immune from prosecution after ordering the assassination of a political rival. And context matters, as well, in terms of how we think about a reasoned response to the congressional thrashing to which the university leaders were subjected. Here, then, is a bit of my context.

I am Jewish. When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, I did what many Jews did at that moment: feeling alone and vulnerable, I drew closer to my (literal and universal) Jewish family. Surprisingly, to me at least, I connected rapidly with the trauma that is a part of our history, the fear that is a part of our DNA, and a loneliness that I hadn’t thought about before. As the war expanded into Gaza, I also understood, as a Jew, our responsibility to never forget the humanity of all people, particularly given our own history of enslavement and oppression. This same ethical orientation has placed me on the political left where I have been for my entire adult life.

I am also an academic, not just in the professional sense of having spent most of my career teaching college students, but by observing, investigating, and critiquing higher ed during many of those years. In that examination, I have encountered much over the past few decades that has led me to worry that academia is losing its way. Beth Benedix, and I analyzed a number of the factors responsible for what we consider to be a crisis in liberal education in The Post Pandemic Liberal Arts College: A Manifesto for Reinvention.

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