Guest Post: How Universities Die

Guest Post: Institutions are fragile. And precious.

My classmates and I attended college in the late 1960s, a time of disruption at universities. 

The Vietnam War was underway and most of us opposed it. It was the proverbial joy and the curse of "living in interesting times."

I was mostly a bystander during disruptive campus activity. I didn't go on strike and skip classes, and I didn't occupy any buildings. I was paying dearly for those classes; I wanted my money's worth. I didn't think making trouble at college was going to end the Vietnam War any sooner.  Quite the opposite. President Nixon loved criticizing those students he characterized as privileged snobs with their long hair and bad attitudes. I fought that stereotype, so by the standards of the time, I was clean cut.

While I am at my 55th college reunion I am posting a week-long series of guest columns by classmates. Tony Farrell was unusual. He did not protest ROTC on campus. He was a member of ROTC. After college he entered the Navy. He had a long career in marketing for The Gap, The Sharper Image, and The Nature Company. 

Farrell, 1975, getting his Lieutenant boards

Farrell with wife Kathy, daughter Morgen, and their new rescue dog.

Guest Post by Tony Farrell 

Assaults On Harvard, 1969 and Today
“The Most Unbelievable Thing”

My Harvard Class of 1971 has its 55th reunion this June. One panel session is inspired by the article “This Is How Universities Die” by William Kirby, a China expert and historian of the modern research university. Borrowing some of Kirby’s language in a flattering way, here’s the session description: Is This How Universities Die?

Harvard’s principled resistance to assaults on its academic freedom and institutional autonomy has affirmed the university’s world-leadership as nothing else could. Cambridge, 2026, is not (yet) Berlin, 1933, or Beijing, 1950, but Trump's attacks are no less dangerous. Fortunately, America retains an independent judiciary and the rule of law. And it has, in Harvard, a powerful institution with the history, will and resources to resist. But if Harvard fails, we may witness the destruction of the singular realm—higher education—in which the U.S. is foremost. If American universities remain the envy of the world in 2026, the question must be: For how long?

There’s some irony here because in 1969 (spring of our sophomore year) some classmates and other students—protesting the Vietnam War and ROTC on campus—seized University Hall, the main administration building in Harvard Yard. We aging alums are now much older than those harried deans ushered out of their offices. The maligned    President Pusey ordered state troopers to forcibly remove the student occupiers the next day, at dawn; a violent event memorialized as “the bust.”

Then as now, the question is the same: Can universities be destroyed in this way? By protesting students or authoritarian governments?

The week following “the bust,” Harvard’s faculty and administrators debated what had happened and what to do, as recounted in Roger Rosenblatt’s 1997 book “Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969.” At the time, Rosenblatt was a young English instructor. “Several faculty members,” he wrote, “were European Jews who had fled the Nazis and had come to American universities only 20 years earlier. . . .They had a much greater understanding of the fragility of institutions.”
“That day’s most stirring speech,” he continued, “came from Alexander Gershenkron, professor of economics, one of Harvard’s many European refugee professors, and who spoke out of that experience.”

Gershenkron began: “I am not a Pollyanna. I know quite well there are things that are horribly wrong with the United States; but I also know there are many things that are wonderfully right. Amongst those are the great universities, and among them is Harvard. There’s nothing comparable; there’s no counterpart anywhere in the world. To try to destroy, to disrupt, to attack this University is criminal. They attack the University simply because it is in their proximity, just as a criminal steals something just because it is lying there. And in attacking the University, they attack the finest flower of American culture.”

He continued: “‘The Most Unbelievable Thing’ is a fairy tale by Han Christian Andersen which, in the dark days of the Nazi occupation, the Danes used so effectively. There was a king and a princess. The king was interested in the progress of the arts, and announced he would give the princess in marriage to the man who would accomplish the most unbelievable thing. 

“And there was great excitement and tremendous competition in the land. Finally, the great day came when all the prepared works were presented for judgment. There were many marvelous things, but towering high above them was a truly wonderful thing. It was a clock, produced by a handsome young man. It had the most wonderful mechanism, showing calendar, back-and-forth, into the past and into the future; showing the time; and around the clock were sculpted all the great spiritual and intellectual figures in the history of mankind.

“Whenever the clock struck, those figures exercised most graceful movements. Everybody—the people and the judges—said that, Yes, to accomplish a thing like that was most unbelievable. The princess looked at the clock and then the handsome young man, and she liked them both very much. The judges were about to pronounce their formal judgment when a new competitor appeared, a lowbrow fellow. He carried a sledgehammer, walked up to the clock and smashed it. Everybody said, Why, to smash up such a clock, this is surely the most unbelievable thing. And that was how the judges had to adjudge. . . . ”

Gershenkron concluded: “I can only hope this faculty will rise and smash up all the criminal nonsense that’s going around the campuses of the country. This university—like the clock in the story, like all great works of art—is a frail and fragile creation. And unless you do something about it, this wonderful work of art will be destroyed, and the guilt will be yours.”

In 1969, the appeals of Gershenkron and fellow like-minded European professors were voted down by the faculty: No student protesters were criminally charged (a few were expelled), but Harvard was not destroyed.

Today, the assaults on the university by the government are more serious, potentially consequential, perhaps even existential. We will see how “frail and fragile” the university might be.

Fight fiercely, Harvard.

 

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog by email go to Https://petersage.substack.com. Subscribe. The blog is free and always will be.]