Harvard Alums Run Outsider Campaign to Overhaul Presidential Selection Process, Eliminate DEI

Growing up in South Africa, Julia Pollak, a 2009 Harvard graduate, was warned against attending college in her home country.

Frequent violent protests would force the local university to close for weeks at a time. The school plummeted in international rankings. Appointments to the administration were based on two criteria: “race and connection to the ruling party,” Pollak told National Review.

“That university had forgotten its academic mission,” she said. “Those politics and complete obsession with rapid racial transformation of the faculty as its guiding star. As a result, it allowed merit and the ordinary function of the university to get destroyed.”

Pollak’s mother, who sat on the boards of two South African universities, urged her to find a college abroad that valued intellectual freedom. In 2005, that’s what Harvard was.

“When I got there, there was still tremendous viewpoint diversity among the faculty,” Pollak said. “You could hear Cornel West calling for socialist revolution in one class and Harvey Mansfield calling for a return to classical values in another.”

Now, Pollak is concerned that Harvard is heading down the same path as those hollowed out universities she left behind in her home country.

Since the recent resignation of former Harvard president Claudine Gay, following scandals of campus antisemitism and plagiarism in her past scholarship, prominent alumni have demanded reform.

Harvard University’s chief DEI officer, Sherri Ann Charleston, was also recently accused of plagiarizing 40 times in her academic work, such as her dissertation and a journal article, using other scholars’ writing without proper attribution, according to a Monday complaint obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The “Renew Harvard” four want Harvard to revive the commitment to academic excellence that made it famous the world over.

But to effect change, you need to infiltrate Harvard’s fortified bureaucracy, where diversity, equity, and inclusion still reigns, despite Gay’s departure.

Cue: the “Renew Harvard” slate. Four Harvard graduates dedicated to restoring the university’s commitment to open debate are running for seats on Harvard’s Board of Overseers, the school’s second most powerful governing body, which sits under the Harvard Corporation. The board of overseers acts as a check on the smaller Harvard Corporation and, crucially, has a role in confirming the individual selected to succeed Gay as president of the university. Certain members of the board will likely serve on the presidential search committee, the Harvard Crimson reported.

“The previous selection process was conducted in record time,” Pollak said of Gay’s selection. “It appears, though, the important questions were not asked. This time around, we will be asking all the uncomfortable questions. Is this the most qualified candidate? Is this candidate’s publication record high quality enough?”

Though it has minimal formal powers, the board has major responsibilities and the ability to impact the academic direction of the university.

But unless Pollak, Zoe Bedell, Logan Leslie, and Alec Williams get seated on the board, the status quo is unlikely to change. The graduates must each receive 3,238 alumni nominations by Wednesday to make it onto the ballot for the spring’s election. As of Sunday, they collected 1,500 signatures, according to business mogul Bill Ackman. In recent months, Ackman, an old-school Democrat and Harvard alum, has published his revelations about DEI and promised to put financial weight toward its destruction in academia. He also endorsed the “Renew Harvard” candidates.

The barrier to entry to the 30-person Board of Overseers used to be a lot lower for outsiders like this year’s four petition candidates, Bedell said. Only 600 signatures were once required to get on the ballot if you weren’t selected by the Harvard Alumni Association, at which point all Harvard alumni have the opportunity to vote. But a successful petition process in 2020 ended in five candidates being nominated and three getting elected to the board.

“After that, they changed a bunch of the rules,” Bedell said. “Now you need 3,200+ nominations. They also capped the number of ‘petition candidates’ who can actually serve on the board to six total.”

The Harvard Alumni Association is running their own roster of eight pre-approved candidates who match the tone of the last couple decades.

A candidate from Los Angeles said in an online Q&A in Harvard Magazine that the “key challenges facing Harvard mirror those facing the world: 1. Driving technological innovation; 2. Embracing diversity and fostering community; and 3. Promoting justice – specifically addressing inequity and climate change.”

Another candidate said an “essential focus” of the university should be “maintaining (and even increasing) diversity across the student body (as well as professors and staff) despite the Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action for admissions.”

DEI was also woven throughout the platforms of the eight candidates from 2023 as well, according to the online Q&A in Harvard Magazine from last year.

One candidate, a former president of the Harvard Alumni Association, wrote that a key campus priority for Harvard must be: “Remaining true to our values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and showcasing how including people from a wide range of backgrounds can enable everyone to thrive.”

Another candidate said, “Throughout my career and participation on numerous boards, promoting DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and cultivating leadership have been driving principles and commitments. I have witnessed the adverse impacts that result from racism in healthcare and academia, and am committed to advancing the mission of fostering access to the transformative power of higher education for the benefit of all.”

As it stands, even if all four of the “Renew Harvard” contenders are the four highest vote getters in the race, only the top two will be seated. The other spots go to the alumni association candidates, who, while professionally accomplished, are likely to keep the school mired in DEI.

“There’s an institutional pressure there,” Bedell said. “That’s where most of the candidates have come from. We’re in the situation that we’re in today so that suggests that it’s not a process yielding people who have concerns about where things stand today.”

Typical board elections are uneventful but not particularly transparent, with low turnout and most of the process happening behind closed doors, Leslie said. But he believes his team could have significant influence if they’re elected in spite of the procedural roadblocks.

“Under the old regime, we’d all be on the ballot already,” he said.

If Harvard wants to restore its reputation, it has to get out of politics, the four “Renew Harvard” candidates argue. The group is advocating for the University of Chicago standard, or a policy of neutrality on political matters paired with a firm dedication to free speech for students and faculty.

Harvard’s response to October 7 and its aftermath was predictable, as parroting the progressive line has been its routine for many years. But this time, it backfired, Leslie said.

While donors rarely threatened to withdraw in the past, October 7 was a “tremendous wake-up call.” Harvard reacted the way it normally did in these types of fraught situations, “but this time it came under an immense kind of scrutiny.”

“It doubled down on their errors and hopefully it reset the tolerance I think people have for the institution to act the way it has been acting,” Leslie said.

Suddenly, Harvard’s folly was exposed for the world.

“If Harvard had upheld a standard where it does not take positions on social issues, then it would not have taken all sorts of positions on race and racism over the last decade or more, but it did,” he said. “Therefore, there was an expectation that Harvard would take a position on issues of the day. When the 34 student groups issued their statement, . . . [a] ridiculous, highly offensive statement, Harvard just melted away.”

“Instead of reassuring the world that it stands against antisemitism, stands against terrorism, stands against genocide, stands against all these things, it didn’t,” he continued “It shirked away. You saw the former president kind of melt in front of the scrutiny, in front of Congress, then trying to retreat into a neutral, contextual stand, which is deeply inconsistent with how Harvard has treated every other issue.”

The coddling of progressive students in recent years made Gay’s testimony and the university’s tolerance for antisemitism all the more galling, Pollak explained.

“I think it’s made some egregious decisions, like removing Dean Ron Sullivan from his deanship because he joined Harvey Weinstein’s legal defense team because a lot of students said it made them feel unsafe,” Pollak said. “And yet, they’re not protecting students on campus from speech that should actually make you feel unsafe,” she said, presumably referencing the anti-Jewish hatred sweeping the Ivy League in recent months.

“It’s an unequal enforcement of the rules and there’s sort of a tragedy in the political climate of fear and conformity.”

Overall, the four petition candidates are urging accountability and a higher standard of leadership at Harvard. The head sets the tone and the agenda, Pollak said. Pollak recalls Gay’s statements about the Supreme Court decision that struck down affirmative action in college admissions. Her email to the student body called the day “a tragedy” for the community, assuming everybody on campus was mourning.

“That kind of posturing is completely inappropriate,” Pollak said. “The head of the university must assume that there are multiple different views among students, among faculty, and must create space for their views to be heard and seen as legitimate. You can’t delegitimize half the country. It definitely starts at the top.”

Pollak hopes the rigorous intellectual life she remembers at Harvard can be restored. Coming from the political Left, she had never been exposed to conservative ideas until she came to the school in the early 2000s.

“Being able to study with Niall Ferguson and Harvey Mansfield and Ruth Wisse, these great conservative intellectuals with whom I argued and fought,” she said. “It was delightful and delicious and a fabulous education.”

Most of those legends have retired and have not been replaced, she added. Over 80 percent of Harvard faculty describe themselves as “liberal,” according to a July 2022 Crimson survey. The lack of conservative faculty is not accidental, Pollak said, because the people who are choosing professors are not seeking true diversity in their hires.

“The departments perpetuate themselves and their own ideas,” she said. The commencement speaker rosters are embarrassing. They always look like a Democratic Party convention.”