What Jill Lepore Knows About Harvard (Eboo Patel, Dec 05, 2025, Persuasion)
Lepore, a renowned historian, Harvard professor, and New Yorker staff writer, made this statement to David Leonhardt of The New York Times about how the intellectual culture at Harvard changed around 2014:
Students started showing up, determined that their job in a classroom was to humiliate one another and possibly catch a professor in saying something that was a violation of what they believed to be a way you can speak … This entire campus became incredibly prosecutorial.
She continued:
[I]t just surprises me to no end when people are like: Well, there was really never a problem on campuses. I don’t know what college campus they’re talking about … I just think it’s silly to deny that that existed, that it didn’t harm a lot of people, that it wasn’t wildly out of control on many occasions.
And in a subsequent conversation with Evan Goldstein of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Lepore went even further. She said that the culture at Harvard got so “miserable” that she felt like she could not do intellectual work anymore. She could not teach the way she wanted to teach, because students refused to read viewpoints that they disagreed with. She could not publish essays she wanted to publish because colleagues warned her that, for example, her writing comparing the #MeToo movement to various moral panics would “destroy [her] life.”