A Letter To My Harvard Classmates Andrew I. Fillat
The following is a letter, edited for relevance to a broader audience, sent to Section D, Harvard Business School (HBS), Class of 1972. The first year at HBS is spent entirely with one’s section. Its purpose was to explain my resignation as section secretary after the Harvard Board affirmed support of Claudine Gay as its president, and antisemitic intimidation remains unpunished.
To my section mates:
On the Dec.4 congressional hearing the university president, its meaning, and its fallout: There is no question it was political theater. But that does not invalidate its usefulness. The state of higher education is now front-and-center and that is very much needed. Too many colleges have devolved into political, social, and ideological activism at the expense of education and training its graduates to exalt open-mindedness, critical and analytical thinking, acceptance of history and classics and the extraction of lessons from them, and a search for truth. HBS, through its case method, is the exemplar of benefits of this approach. But that seemingly ends at the river’s edge. (The HBS is across the Charles River from the university.) Universities are graduating students with grossly insufficient skills to do productive work; ask anyone you know who is in management at a company how it is to deal with undergraduates that have been hired in the last decade. This does not bode well at all for U.S. competitiveness on the world stage.
On free speech: I believe that the requirement for free expression at universities emanates not from the First Amendment but from the core mission of any secular educational institution. Freedom exists to create an environment described above that is focused on education. Yet Harvard and other universities already undermine themselves with support for “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and speech codes that serve only to shut down exposure to ideas students reflexively do not like. Worse, speech or mob protests that are clearly intimidating, harassing, or threatening are diametrically opposed to open discourse and inquiry, not to mention how they deprive the targeted students free and safe access to the education they are paying for. Leaders of these efforts must be held to account, but to date no punishment has been meted out.
On punishment: I happen to know that President Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recommended discipline and was rebuffed by the faculty committee with sole authority to punish student behavior. As to Harvard and Penn, it is not known what disciplinary procedures exist or what has been recommended. But the case of Roland Fryer, a black professor at Harvard who was arguably unjustly defenestrated by a faculty committee led by Gay is instructive. The details of this have become public, and it shows that Gay can be extremely forceful when pursuing her convictions.
On DEI: The extensive diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy built at great expense and so avidly supported by Gay during her career exposed its corrupt ideology when it immediately abandoned the Jewish minority in the face of antisemitic demonstrations. Where was the commitment to diversity and inclusion? (I will leave a discussion of Marxism, relabeled as “equity,” for another time.) Jews were offered no safe spaces or protection. Genocidal chants like “Death to all Jews” and “From the River to the Sea” apparently did not violate DEI speech codes and the macroaggressions against Jewish students escaped the scrutiny that petty microaggressions receive when they pertain to other minority groups. The hypocrisy of the DEI movement has now been laid bare and it implies that Jews will be cast adrift and stigmatized once again as Harvard did for so many years of its history. That is personally offensive and a sad regression for an elite institution.
In my opinion, the protests at these schools and others demonstrates that the original intent of DEI has been lost and has led to tribalizing the student body and judging and labeling various groups (e.g., as oppressors or oppressed, as colonizers, etc.) This does not lead to a cohesive campus community, but rather to competing sides and endless grievances. At this point, any viable solution probably requires dismantling all DEI programs except for those engaged in recruiting qualified applicants of diverse backgrounds.
Change is urgently needed, and it should start at the top if the facts warrant it, regardless of appearances. Circling the wagons by the boards is not an adequate response.
Andrew I. Fillat spent his career in technology venture capital and information technology companies. He is also the co-inventor of relational databases. He has two degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard.
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