As turmoil over the Israel-Hamas War rocks Ivy League campuses, their leadership is failing to keep students safe, says academic and entrepreneur Regina Herzlinger. It is time for boards to step up and hold them accountable.
Boston, MA (December 2023)—On Saturday, December 9, Liz Magill resigned her position as University of Pennsylvania president—a decision that most likely was forced by pressure applied by the board of the Wharton School.
On December 7, Axios reported that the Wharton board had asked University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill to step down. The reason is the university leadership’s “collective failure to act” regarding the “dangerous and toxic culture…” that has permeated Penn’s campus since the Israel-Hamas War began back in October.
The letter followed Magill’s widely decried December 6 testimony before a congressional hearing committee on antisemitism, where she and other university presidents refused to explicitly rebuke calls for genocide.
Regina Herzlinger, a Harvard Business School professor, says what has happened with the University of Pennsylvania’s board is precisely what needed to happen—and she urges that boards of other universities follow suit.
“In times of chaos, boards need to show the moral clarity and courage that most university leadership apparently can’t or won’t,” says Herzlinger. “Someone needs to protect students, who are only trying to learn. And someone must preserve the integrity of America’s education.”
Lately, says Herzlinger, American higher education has truly lost its way. Indeed, she fears the academic spirit that shaped her own life is dying a slow and painful death.
“The excellence of American higher education in the 1960s and ’70s blessed me with a great career and marriage,” she says. “I not only learned so much but also met my brilliant, wonderful husband, George, my MIT classmate, who also received his doctorate in physics there.
“Our education enabled us to live the American dream: We had wonderful careers and a wonderful family,” she adds. “But if we were students today, we may not have the opportunity to go on to live such lives. All too many of the leaders of institutions of higher education no longer seem to understand that their primary role is to ensure that students can become educated.”
Herzlinger has indeed enjoyed an impressive career. She is an iconoclastic entrepreneur and the first woman to be chaired at Harvard Business School. She started the courses in nonprofits and healthcare at HBS, initiatives that now attract thousands of students. What is more, she and her husband created firms that built the medical devices he invented that have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of wounded people all over the world.
And yet, she says, because they are Jews, if they were students in 2023, they would be prohibited from learning in peace…or perhaps at all.
“I was born in Israel,” she reflects. “My parents escaped there from Germany to avoid the Holocaust. As an Israeli student today, I might be harassed by my fellow students at the Harvard Business School, as occurred during a pro-Palestinian ‘die-in’ protest on October 18. My husband, George, and his classmates might be stopped from learning advanced MIT math by a person in the class who unrolled a Hamas flag and led a chant of ‘Free Palestine!’”
Herzlinger notes that such incidents affect all students, as well as those attempting to teach them. For example, in the MIT incident, the young instructor asked permission from the intruder to his class to finish explaining his equation but was so rattled he made a mistake. And as Harvard Hillel reports, on November 29, Harvard economics classes were disrupted by protestors who used bullhorns to shout their slogans. This statement added, “Students were terrified by this protest and the violence it endorsed.”
The presidents of MIT and Harvard, along with those of other universities, have been criticized for failing to take bold and immediate action against activities like this that have occurred since the start of the Israel-Hamas War. For example, when a mob blocked Jewish students from attending class at MIT in early November, the MIT president declared that although they may have violated the school’s free speech guidelines, she declined to act promptly due to concerns that academic suspension could result in visa issues for the protestors.
These kinds of statements set off discussions on how to balance the core principle of free speech with the need to stop the activities that limit the educational process. Many feel that it is hard to know where to draw the line.
“I am a proponent of free speech, even when the content is hateful,” says Herzlinger. “However, when leaders raise free-speech rights above ensuring the academic freedom of students who are simply trying to learn, they lose sight of why academia exists to begin with.”
It is the primary responsibility of universities to protect academic freedom for all students, she adds. When mobs bully, terrorize, or threaten their ability to learn, institutions of learning have a moral responsibility to stop them swiftly and decisively.
“We clearly cannot count on most of the leaders of these institutions to do so,” says Herzlinger. “But the accomplished, brilliant people who were elected by their peers to sit on the governing boards of our institutions of higher learning can. University board members must see their role as a serious responsibility. It is no longer a social status sinecure.”
Board members were caught off guard when these protests erupted. But enough time has passed that we can all clearly see the problem is not going away. It is time for boards to start making the tough decisions needed to keep students safe so they can learn.
“If we are witnessing the death of higher education—with record plunges in public confidence—boards who assure that students are free to learn can provide the remedy,” Herzlinger notes. “They may even lead to the rebirth of higher education as a bastion of learning, free thinking, and intellectual growth, rather than an unchecked war zone.”
About the Author:
Regina E. Herzlinger, the Nancy R. McPherson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, has been named the “godmother of consumer-driven healthcare” because of her groundbreaking scholarly articles and books on empowering consumers. Her latest book, Innovating in Healthcare: Creating Breakthrough Services, Products, and Business Models, coming in 2024, has won the AUPHA 2020-2021 Bugbee-Falk Book Award. She wrote Senator McCain’s presidential healthcare platform, has advised the U.S. Congress and President’s office on healthcare policy, founded the HBS Health Care Initiative, taught the first course on charities and healthcare at HBS, and won the first HBS Student Association Faculty Award for her outstanding teaching in accounting.
With her husband, she founded two successful medtech innovation firms for the devices he invented, such as a rapid blood infuser that has saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who would otherwise bleed to death. The Herzlingers have personally donated a number of these devices to war zones.
Thank you,
Glenda, Charlie and David Cates
