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Harvard, and quite frankly elite American colleges, have been engrossed in a leadership crisis ever since a group of Harvard students signed a letter denouncing Israel for the Hamas attacks on October 7. A few months after that, then President of Harvard Claudine Gay was summoned by Congress to testify before the work and education committee, alongside Presidents of UPenn and MIT. She gave a lawyerly answer when asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik whether calls for genocide against Jews went against their institutions code of conduct on bullying and harassment, to which she disastrously answered that it was context dependent. Shortly after, the President of UPenn Liz Macgill resigned, and for Harvard President Claudine Gay she could have weathered the storm if she had not been accused of plagiarism, to which she would issue corrections but it was too much for the board of trustees and overseers to bear. Gay would be one among four Harvard black women to be accused of plagiarism, in what activist Bill Ackman says is a definite pattern that racial diversity is diluting standards in this once revered institution.

Needless to say, calls against black women professors, all of whom study race, is an indictment on diversity programs across Harvard and the United States in general. The question then to ask is whether diversity and meritocracy can go hand in hand, and did Harvard lower standards in appointing Gay as the first black woman President? The Harvard Chief Diversity Officer, herself a subject of plagiarism accusations, said she wants to work herself out of a job, that is she wants minority voices at Harvard to be so mainstreamed as there will be no question as to their place at Harvard. But that’s something that has gotten a lot of pushback from donors and alumni, as Harvard has been a white male club honing institution since its founding. The supreme court would rule that race conscious admissions were illegal, in which race shouldn’t be a factor of admission. The percentage of black students was approaching 20 percent, though the way Harvard has gone around the issue is that it has designated first generation and low income students as a priority. Also, instead of the one large supplemental essay, Harvard asked it’s applicants to answer short essay prompts, in which they were free to mention race and how it has affected them growing up. Harvard will release the racial composition of the class of 2028 in summer, and so keen watchers of higher education will be looking at the racial makeup of the class to see whether the supreme court ruling had any impact on that.

Then something that’s come up of late is viewpoint diversity. That is wokeness and leftist agenda had gotten so ingrained at Harvard that it was now a center of liberal indoctrination and that’s why right wing politicians want to see an end to this. Already, interim President Alan Garber has appointed a conservative, John F Manning as interim provost, the university’s former law school dean. So, it’s likely a moderate conservative could be Harvard’s next President to appease donors, politicians and alumni. Mitt Romney has been suggested to take up that role, given he’s an alumnus of both the Harvard Law School as well as the Harvard Business School but he’s said No Thanks. A moderate conservative, and endorsed by among others Pennsylvania senator Fetterman, Romney could be Harvard’s answer to calls to diversify not just racially, but also ideologically. When Joe Biden won the Presidency in 2020, a group of students signed a letter that former Trump administration officials should be banned from campus either as speakers, lecturers or seminar moderators showing just left wing of an institution Harvard has become, and it’s why viewpoint diversity is something that is top on the agenda of Harvard’s leadership dialogues.