Opinion Today: Steven Pinker on “Harvard Derangement Syndrome”

Why the school — and its fight with Trump — matters.
Opinion Today
May 23, 2025
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By Patrick Healy

Deputy Opinion Editor

As a higher education reporter at The Boston Globe in the 2000s, I quickly learned that one university commanded outsize interest from our readers: Harvard. Some admired it as an American success story. Some were fascinated by breakthrough research there. Others were enraptured or enraged by campus controversies or elites revealed as imperfect. Harvard was both a point of pride and a big target.

After Hamas's attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing campus protests across the United States, Harvard became an even bigger target. It came under public and congressional scrutiny for how it thought about free speech (or didn't), how it dealt with antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of hate (or didn't), how it championed academic freedom (or didn't) and how it nurtured viewpoint diversity among students and faculty members (or didn't). In a matter of months, as problems piled up, Harvard's president was ousted and the university faced a cascade of pressures — and they only intensified under the Trump administration, which has moved to cut off federal funds to Harvard and announced on Thursday a halt to the university's enrollment of international students.

In a new guest essay for Times Opinion, the longtime Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker takes a deep look at the last 20 months and what Harvard should do to address its problems and challenges, including with Trump. Pinker never pulls his punches, including against Harvard. Yet in his review of the events and evidence at hand, he concludes that many people on the right and some others in America have lapsed into a kind of "Harvard Derangement Syndrome."

I'm mindful, from my higher education reporting days, that the vast majority of students do not attend Ivy League schools like Harvard — and yet those schools receive disproportionate attention. But there's a good reason in this case: Values and principles like speech, freedom, diversity and the role of institutions are fundamental to American society, and Harvard is engulfed in a reckoning over those very issues. Pinker's essay powerfully captures the stakes for Harvard, and America, in what's happening right now between the university and the Trump administration.

Read the guest essay:

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