Former Harvard president Derek Bok’s timely book “Attacking the Elites” (Yale University Press, 2024) admits the Ivy League has failings. This includes the confession that there are very few conservative professors at colleges today and that right-leaning professors and students are sometimes bullied or silenced.

Bok, who was president of Harvard from 1971 to 1991, also laments elite colleges’ failure to instill in students a sense of civic duty, compassion, curiosity, and a rounded world view.

Decisive Movements

To his credit, Bok was a proponent of and at the forefront of some decisive movements at American universities, including affirmative action and student protests against the Vietnam war in the 1960s.

Bok also continues to advocate for Ivy League colleges to offer more scholarships for low-income students, especially, as he points out, Harvard is enriched with a $50 billion endowment and raises an additional $1 billion each year.

Bok also goes against the grain of other Ivy League leaders in his belief that college endowments can be more effective on corporate change through shareholder resolutions rather than bending to student demands by divesting investment holdings.

Since “Attacking the Elites” was published in January, four months after Hamas terrorists killed 1,200 innocent civilians in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, it is surprising that the book makes no mention of antisemitism or the anti-Israel hate speech that has subverted colleges across America since.

Defending college student protests in general terms, and ostensibly the pro-Palestinian demonstrations as well, Bok says most of them are “well intentioned” as he emphasizes the importance of tolerance and free speech.

Ironically, Bok praises non-existent differentiation of thought at universities, saying that “the quality of conversations about politics, economics or society in general is bound to benefit if the participants hold different beliefs.”

Bok believes that when opposing protesters do clash, college administrators can simply diffuse the situation through logic. The answer to “bigoted or abusive speech [that is] severe, pervasive and objectively offensive,” Bok writes, is to reassure targeted students of university support and to “explain to the perpetrators why their behavior is hurtful.”

As proven by the fervent, at times violent, anti-Israel demonstrations of the past nine months — and the tepid Congressional testimony by the Harvard and University of Pennsylvania presidents on this antisemitism that resulted in their firings — talk is cheap.

By clearing out the pro-Palestinian encampments, Columbia University finally capitulated in favor of its Jewish students and alumni to show by example that hateful speech against Jews and Israel should not be tolerated.

A Professor for 50 Years

Harvey Mansfield, a 92-year-old who was a Harvard professor of government for 50 years, retiring only last year, gives a conservative’s insight into what’s wrong with higher education. To sum Mansfield’s thinking up: American colleges are overrun by far-left, progressive elites who believe their world view is the only world view that matters.

One of Mansfield’s staunchest beliefs is in the U.S. Constitution, telling The Wall Street Journal in an interview last month, the Constitution is one of the last remaining bulwarks against the nihilism currently besetting America.

Mansfield relates the difficulties he faced as one of the few conservative professors at Harvard, where he championed “manliness,” and opposed grade inflation, affirmative action and feminism. One of Mansfield’s most notable holdouts was fighting against a Harvard major in women’s studies.

The nonagenarian says he doesn’t oppose liberals, per se, but progressive extremists. Mansfield says a progressive has a “loathing for his country. It goes beyond embarrassment to real dislike of America, and in a way, therefore, of themselves, because, after all, they’re Americans.”

By contrast, the professor says, a liberal believes America is imperfect — but remediable and “even worthy of pride.”

So, do either the former Harvard president or professor see a way for American colleges to right the ship and get back to providing a truly dynamic education?

‘Dismayed Liberals’

Bok defends the status quo of Ivy League elites because, he reasons, they are the most intelligent educators and students in the nation. They have produced welcome innovations through their important research, not to mention five U.S. presidents, Bok says.

Mansfield, on the other hand, believes the way out of the current ideological mess will come only from “dismayed liberals.”

That is when, hopefully, the inversion of authority will end, Mansfield says. College administrators will stop being subservient to student opinion; end grade inflation; demand actual, intellectual debate; a college degree will once again mean something; and young people entering the workforce will, once more, be good for democracy.