On Oct. 8, 2023, I was on the steps of Harvard’s Widener Library, taking part in a vigil for the victims of Hamas’s terror attack. I’m an Israeli American tenured professor, and I felt it was my duty to stand up for Jewish and Israeli students. I helped organize an open letter denouncing antisemitism. I am a member of Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias. I have written numerous blog posts and opinion articles on this matter.
Inside my classroom, I have not discussed these issues at all. I am a professor of computer science, and students take my courses to learn the fundamental capabilities and limitations of computing devices. Students in my class have been on both sides of the campus divide. Two of them asked for more leniency in academic assignments because of their involvement in campus activism, one with a Jewish organization, the other with a Muslim one. I refused them both.
Why does this matter? An assignment about Boolean circuits is clearly less important than combating campus antisemitism, let alone the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. But the value I want to encourage is professionalism. When we erode the boundaries between the academic and the political, we ultimately harm both.
As recently as a decade ago, the majority of Republicans had “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence” in higher education, according to a Gallup poll. This share was down to 20 percent last year. Trust in higher education also declined among Democrats. This is a tragedy, because we need fact- and science-based policymaking for topics including public health and climate change, artificial intelligence and economics.
Nothing justifies the unwarranted attacks by the Trump administration on universities as a whole, and on my own institution in particular. I am proud of Harvard’s leadership for resisting the impossible demands made of it. I also believe these attacks are enabled by the lack of popular support for universities. We academics should look at how we contributed to this erosion of trust by allowing the blurring of the lines between scholarship and activism.
In recent years, the mantra of bringing your “whole self” to work has replaced the old notion that you should leave it all at the door. This movement has had some positive outcomes. Ensuring everyone feels included and has access to mentors and role models can be crucial to attracting and retaining talent.
Some have taken it too far, letting the personal and political overtake the professional, which has led to pressure on businesses to take positions in matters outside their domain. Makers of business software weighed in on elections. Google employees staged a sit-in over Gaza. Right-wing activists launched a boycott of Bud Light after it was featured in a transgender influencer’s promotional social media post. The result is that people who disagree with one another find it hard to work at the same company or buy the same products, increasing the problem of polarization.
If there is one thing the extreme left and right agree on, it is that everything is political. Inside universities, we see more of the left-wing variety. At Harvard Law School on Oct. 10, 2023, a teaching fellow told students, “I have tried to normalize the practice of bringing your whole identities and ideologies to the law school and classroom,” and then invited them to join a solidarity vigil with Palestine. I could not disagree more — and would say the same about inviting students to a vigil for Israelis. We should not normalize bringing one’s ideology to the classroom! (The law class’s professor later told students he had not authorized the email.)
On the extreme right, the same idea has taken hold in government, where the very notion of a nonpartisan public servant is threatened, and those deemed insufficiently loyal have been fired. Both versions, on the left and the right, are toxic.
You might think I can avoid politics in the classroom only because I am a computer scientist. This is not the case. Faculty members who are determined enough can inject politics into any topic, and after all, computer science has brought huge and dramatic changes to society. The interaction of computer science and policy sometimes arises in my classes, and I make sure to present multiple perspectives. When I teach cryptography, a topic at the heart of the tension between privacy and security, I share with my students both writings by former National Security Agency officials as well as the “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.”
In fact, I believe that the lessons students learn from computer science (and science in general) can make them better citizens. Trying and failing to solve hard problems teaches students that there is such a thing as an objective truth, and our first attempts to find it are often wrong.
Computer science is an inherently collaborative enterprise. Throughout the course of my career I’ve worked with Iranians and Israelis, Russians and Ukrainians, believers and atheists, gay and straight folk, Republicans and Democrats. Working in the field, you learn the benefit of collaborating with people of varying backgrounds, and how to put aside disagreements to focus on the task at hand.
I believe university education in both humanities and the sciences can make students better citizens through developing habits of mind. When ideology seeps into education, it has the opposite effect. I would rather my fellow citizens understand why it is wrong to kidnap babies and grandmothers than to be fluent in the subtleties of postcolonialism.
All academics are experts on narrow topics. Even when they intersect with the real world, our expertise in the facts does not give us authority over politics. Scientific research shows that vaccines work and climate change is real, but it cannot dictate whether vaccines should be mandated or fossil fuels restricted. Those are decisions for the public, with the scientific evidence being one factor. When academics claim authority over policy, the result is not an increased effect on policy but decreased trust in academia.
The vast majority of faculty members do not attempt to pursue a political agenda. They are busy doing the work of education and research that has made American universities the envy of the world and the engine of our prosperity. Unfortunately, a few faculty members can have a disproportionate influence on how universities are perceived, and provide ammunition to those who want to see them destroyed.
No campus activist has hurt the research and educational mission as much as the recent government actions have. But these actions make it more urgent for us academics to step up the long overdue work of restoring trust in universities.
Boaz Barak is a professor of computer science at Harvard University.
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