(These are some very quick thoughts—apologies for typos and disconnected arguments).
The recent public relations failures of elite universities—most notably, Harvard—seem deeply paradoxical. Here we have multi-billion-dollar organizations, heavy with pedigree and rife with all types of connections, folding to a handful of online radicals whose only instruments are the volume of their digital voice and the misinformation of their words. In the post-knowledge economy, the carefully crafted lies of the few beat the expertise of the academic establishment. We have seen these elsewhere, across all too many painful examples.
Why are the responses of institutions like Harvard so decidedly weak? Current explanations focus on the kinds of interests that hold influence over higher education. The financialization of the sector means that the boards that control universities are more open to listen to critiques that may hurt the brand. More overtly, the politicization of some of these unelected bodies contributes further to universities’ weak responses.
These two explanations are probably correct but to them I would add a third, larger historical trend: the decoupling of academic elites from established political/economic elites. The processes we see at Harvard today would be unimaginable a few decades ago. The weight of the institution would have been felt immediately and critiques from poorly educated radical activists would have quickly become squashed to become side notes to the morning’s news.
What changed? Arguably, the connections between elite academic organizations (and higher education more broadly) and traditional elites have eroded to the point that no-one really has university’s backs. Harvard could trust that members of elite groups would come out to defend their reputations. Today, that bet is more uncertain. The public attacks on the scholarship of Claudine Gay and Christina Cross, both exceptional academics at Harvard, are clearly racially motivated. The nature and tone of the attacks is, unfortunately, expected. What is less expected is the institutional and para-institutional response: Where are the statements from the institution? Where are the statements from notable alumni? Where are the public and forceful statements from elites in power with interests in higher education? Senators? Governors? CEOs?
In my new book, Science in Turbulent Times (2025? Maybe), I document this process of elite disconnection in the case of Mexico. Above all, Mexico is useful as a reference because it shows the process of elite disconnection in an accelerated way. But the same process can be found here, in the United States. For a few decades, American universities could rely on elite networks to provide some level of symbolic and at times even financial support. From human capital theories to the knowledge economy, an ideological backdrop supported these symbiotic couplings. Of course, this was always an uneasy relation. Universities were both sites of economic reconfiguration and of the production of politics deemed uncomfortable by the elites but, for the most part, there were seen as useful. This connection has now largely disappeared. That this happened in unison to the fragmentation of economic elites in the country (pace Mark Mizruchi) merely puts science in general, and the academy in particular, in a an even more precarious position.
We are, for lack of better words, all alone.