My first job out of college was in a small newspaper bureau in a parish—that’s Louisiana-speak for county—just east of New Orleans’s Ninth Ward. Our office, a squat former bank branch, sat on the main thoroughfare, Judge Perez Drive, named for an early twentieth-century local political kingpin. Leander Perez had been a district attorney, a judge, a mastermind of mob justice and stolen elections, and such a notorious and unrepentant segregationist that local leaders eventually decided it wasn’t the best idea to honor him with a major roadway. In 1999, after some deliberation, they announced that they were renaming the street to…Judge Perez Drive, after Melvyn Perez, a local jurist, no relation.
I’ve thought often about Judge Perez Drive recently, in light of similar acts of administrative sleight of hand. The U.S. Army’s Fort Bragg and Fort Lee, once named for Confederate generals, now honor, respectively, a World War II veteran and a Buffalo soldier. And Harvard announced this summer that it is renaming John Winthrop House to merely Winthrop House, to acknowledge that the two John Winthrops associated with the House had both owned slaves (see “News in Brief,” page 18).
The principled resistance cheered at Commencement stands off against the prospect of layoffs, shuttered labs, and diminished ambitions.
Following a formal request to “dename” the House—through a new process the University established in 2021—an advisory committee conducted historical inquiries and real-time surveys, and found both “positive associations” and “complications” with the Winthrop name. In the end, the group declared that an invisible renaming (because what student has ever called it “John Winthrop House”?) was a fair way to reckon with an institution that spans many historical eras and standards of conduct. If you keep the name and expose the story, the argument goes, you invite people to grapple with those complexities. As an added bonus, you can try to please everyone.
Many stories in this issue of Harvard Magazine deal in complexities: challenged narratives, shattered assumptions, situations in which it is hard to discern who has won and who has lost. Lydialyle Gibson’s portrait of political philosopher Brandon Terry, whose new book challenges the “romantic narrative” of the civil rights movement, offers a new argument for hope amid political setbacks (page 26). Max J. Krupnick’s deeply reported story about doxxing at Harvard shares the surprisingly long history of name-and-shame efforts in America and gets under the hood of the current debates over the boundaries of antisemitism, harassment, and free speech (page 36).
Nina Pasquini’s cover story about the political divide within Gen Z—and the new brand of conservatism on the rise among Harvard students—offers proof that campus politics are not as simplistic as the outside world might imagine (page 20). (It is also a reminder that, whatever faculty politics they might encounter, Harvard students are quite capable of thinking for themselves.)
Harvard, of course, now faces one of the most complex challenges in its history, a product of competing truths that University leaders have voiced themselves: a troublingly lopsided campus culture, a dangerous rise in antisemitism, a feverishly aggressive government, and an assault on the First Amendment and international students (see page 32). The University’s defiant stance in April, after the Trump administration made its first draconian demands, has led to a string of creative government moves to exert financial pressure, as U.S. President Donald Trump had forewarned—including some newer tactics that could make future court challenges more difficult. The principled resistance that the community cheered at Commencement stands off against the prospect—and reality—of layoffs, shuttered labs, and diminished ambitions.
That predicament has left University leaders in a frantic state this summer, occupying backrooms and courtrooms, making both impassioned statements and controversial reforms. As we closed out this issue, other universities, one by one, were announcing settlements with the federal government, and many were wondering whether Harvard would be next (see “The Price of Resistance,” page 13). On this, too, the Harvard community has been divided. Some have called for a negotiated solution that codifies reforms and enacts some punishment for a campus culture gone awry; some have urged the University to stand its ground in the face of threats to independence, free speech, and academic freedom. Some want Harvard to undo its recent changes; some want those changes to go further. The debate continues in coffeeshops and on commuter rail trains, in email newsletters and editorial pages, and among competing Harvard graduates in Congress.
By the time this magazine hits mailboxes, Harvard’s immediate battle with the government may have been resolved—or it may be ongoing, weaving through the courts, in a slow burn of mutual intransigence. Whatever happens, there will be no clever outs, no painless solutions, no easy roads, no way to please everyone. But there will be plenty of time to wrestle with the complications.
—Joanna Weiss, Editor
