Steven Levitsky is a political scientist and professor of Latin American studies and government at Harvard University. He is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller “How Democracies Die,” which he co-authored with Daniel Ziblatt. Levitsky’s work focuses on democracy, authoritarianism, and the challenges faced by democratic institutions. His perspectives are informed by extensive research on Latin American politics and global democratic trends. Levitsky sat down with The HPR to delve into the recent pro-Palestinian student protests at Harvard, critique the administration’s handling of the situation, and examine the broader implications for free speech and campus politics.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: As a government professor at the College and a free speech advocate for the recent pro-Palestinian student protests, can you explain, in your own words, the events that have unfolded at the College this academic year, and the perspective you have been trying to bring into this conversation?
Steven Levitsky: We are, in the College, facing two challenges this year. One is the longer-term challenge of dealing with a much more diverse student body than ever before. This is obviously a gradual evolution over the course of decades. But, you know, even in the 25 years I’ve been at Harvard, we are a much more diverse place than we were when I arrived in the year 2000. And that is a challenge. It’s uncharted territory. And I think from the bottom up and from the top down, we’ve experimented with different strategies in dealing with that. One of them, I think, is proven to be somewhat misguided, and that is this sort of movement in the direction of encouraging students to feel safe or protecting students from speech they don’t like. That was an understandable response to diversity. I don’t think it’s worked very well.
But, broadly speaking, we’re facing a challenge of a much more diverse population. Just to give you one example, when I was a college student, there were virtually no Arab-American and Muslim-American students on college campuses, and their voices, politically, were largely unheard. I was an undergraduate at Stanford in the 1980s, and the only voices that you would hear at Stanford in the 1980s criticizing Israel were left-wing Jews. It’s a very, very different world. So that’s one thing: There’s the longer-term challenge of dealing with a much more diverse student population.
The second challenge is we have a war starting in October, and really impassioned members of at least two camps, just to oversimplify, both present on campus — people who feel fear, and pain, and loss, and who feel very, very strongly for entirely legitimate reasons, on two sides of a war. That hasn’t happened in any of our lifetimes. Many people compare the current wave of student protests to the Vietnam protests; perhaps this is the largest scale protest nationwide since Vietnam, but in Vietnam, it was one-sided in terms of college students. There was not a strong pro-war camp. There were not many South Vietnamese represented or, for example, when I was an anti-apartheid activist in the 1980s, there were no White South Africans, very few White South Africans, who would be made very uncomfortable by anti-apartheid protests. And not everybody agreed with anti-apartheid protests, not everyone agreed with calling for divestment, but there was no real other camp — so this is entirely new. It’s a real challenge for students or professors and the administration. I think that’s the overall framework that we have to understand this, at least as members of the Harvard community.
And yeah, my position has been that we need to err on the side of tolerating speech and protest; that even though that’s hard, in a time of protest, we have to deal with a certain amount of messiness, and even hurt feelings. But again, this is new for all of us. So it’s understandable that we’ve taken missteps. It’s understandable that we’re unsure what to do. And I think there’s ultimately been a healthy debate on campus about steps forward. Hopefully, we’ll apply some of the lessons next year.
HPR: There have been a series of punishments and arrests that have been going on on campuses around the country. But as you know, on our own campus, 37 students were recently placed on academic probation suspension and faced other disciplinary actions due to their involvement in the 20-day encampment on Harvard Yard. You mentioned in a Crimson op-ed that the handling of these protests was unprecedented compared to other events of the latter half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. You describe this as a “Palestinian exception.” Why do you believe this is happening? What would you speculate has motivated those in leadership positions to handle these protests differently?
SL: That’s a great question. And I should lead off, I guess, two things. First of all, I’m really glad I’m not an administrator. And I have to recognize as critical as I have been in times of Harvard administrators, they’re in a really tough position. And I’m really glad I’m not them. Second of all, just to reinforce something you just said, anything I say is utter speculation. I don’t know why the response to these protests has been different. All I can do is speculate.
I think that this primarily has to do with external pressure on various fronts, three of them to be specific: congressional pressure, lawsuits, and donor pressure. And I think probably the lawsuits in the congressional pressure are most important. So we’re under a couple of congressional investigations, as you know, there is a threat looming over us of either a pretty large, a pretty substantial endowment tax or, and or efforts to eliminate or cut back federal funding at Harvard. So there are people in elected office who are wagging fingers at us and have the power, potentially, to really hurt us. That’s one source of pressure.
Another is lawsuits against Harvard for allegedly not protecting Jewish students. I can say personally, I’m not a lawyer. I’m way out of my league here. Those lawsuits look awfully frivolous to me. Harvard is trying to get them dismissed, but it’s doing so on the grounds that it is in fact, combating antisemitism. So Harvard needs to convince Congress, and it needs to convince the courts, and it needs to convince some angry donors that it is taking steps to, and put this in quotes, combat “antisemitism” Harvard acknowledged, Claudine Gay acknowledged early on. And I think this was a mistake, frankly, that Harvard has an antisemitism problem, which I’m not convinced is true. I mean, antisemitism exists everywhere. And it exists at Harvard. And it’s always a problem. I just don’t think it is a particular problem at Harvard. In fact, I think levels of antisemitism at Harvard, relative to other parts of American society, are almost certainly quite low. But recognizing publicly telling the world we have an antisemitism problem means we have to take steps to combat it. Right, we have to deliver on steps to combat and now we’re under pressure, again, from Congress, in courtrooms, and from donors to deliver evidence that we’re combating antisemitism. That’s hard to do. It’s hard to combat antisemitism. Nobody, nobody knows how to eradicate, or eliminate, or successfully combat antisemitism, just like we don’t know how to combat or eliminate racism. It’s a hard thing to do.
So you can create task forces. And, you know, the two task forces we have right now are very serious in there. They’re run by serious people. But there’s only so much that a task force can do, and in general these days mentioning the task force leads to people rolling their eyes. That’s not a deliverable. So what do you do? How does the Anti-Defamation League, which is giving universities letter grades in combating antisemitism, how does the ADL measure success? As far as I can tell, and I’m not on the inside of the ADL, banning protesting student groups helps get you a better grade, and punishing student protests gets you a better grade. I think, if I had to guess — and again, this is speculation — that we need to deliver, that we needed to show the outside world that we were punishing student protesters as deliverable evidence that we’re combating antisemitism.
HPR: On the theme of punishment, in response to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences reinstating the 13 Seniors who were prevented from graduating, and the possibility of the Harvard Corporation rejecting this decision, you mentioned that they, the Corporation, risk “a faculty rebellion against the entire governance structure.” Could you clarify what you mean by that? Additionally, what would your involvement be in this faculty rebellion, now that the corporation has indeed rejected that decision?
SL: I think, first and foremost, it will accelerate the push for the creation of a faculty senate, which I support although I’m not one of the organizers in that effort. The pretty glaring lack of faculty consultation all year, the fact that every day since October 7th it has been abundantly clear that our university leaders are far more attuned to external opinion than to the opinion of faculty members, that has generated quite a bit of faculty support for a faculty senate — support that might not have existed a couple of years ago. Enthusiastic active support, people willing to go to meetings. I think that the events of last week probably almost certainly reinforced that view. And the view is held strongly by a good-sized plurality of faculty members and I think at least weakly by a majority of the faculty members.
There has also been quite a bit of criticism, both from the left and the right, of the Corporation and its behavior, which has raised questions about the whole structure of how we are governed. And we’ve been governed in this way for a very long time. And the fact that it’s criticized by both left and right suggests to me that there may never be a consensus for an actual reform of the governance structure. But I think the Corporation has lost legitimacy among the faculty. And there will be efforts, I don’t know how successful — I’m much more confident in the movement behind the faculty senate than the sort of higher level governance reform. But there’s going to be outspoken opposition to the Corporation and calls for change. You know, the Corporation, during normal times, is generally not very involved in the governance of Harvard when we have a president who’s not interim. The Corporation’s job is to choose the president and remove the President if necessary. And when we have a president with a stable tenure, the corporation can sort of hang back and generally, I have to say, isn’t very involved in governing Harvard in the day-to-day. And that’s the way it should be.
What angered me about this decision, and what angered many of my colleagues, is here’s a case in which the Corporation, as my colleague, Ryan D. Enos, put it very colorfully, “These 12 guys flew into their private jets and decided who should or should not be graduating.” At heart, rules regarding student conduct, regarding the conferral of degrees, this is stuff that ought to be decided here at Harvard by active members of the Harvard community — by the faculty. And the fact that the Corporation decided not who the president should be, which is their job, but who should graduate and who shouldn’t? That pissed off a lot of people.
HPR: How would you capture the opinion of some of your colleagues who support the disciplinary action against these protesters? What is the reasoning that they are giving for supporting what you have deemed as unprecedented actions?
SL: There are multiple views against mine, or, for example, in favor of stiffer punishment. I can think of at least three and they’re, you know, they’re legitimate positions. One view that may be the most pronounced is that these protests really are qualitatively different, that they really have been threatening to students, they’ve been told not to use slogans that make a number of our students feel unsafe or threatened. They’ve continued to do so. They yelled at administrators, and then scared the bejesus out of some of our administrators. And that stuff really does merit punishment. These are not just kids who are camping out on the lawn, but rather, students adopting fairly radical and threatening positions at times, you know, harassing individuals, members of the Harvard community, and so they should be punished. That’s one view.
Another view is a more conservative view, which you hear in response to every protest. I mean, there are always voices, even when I was an anti-apartheid activist in the 80s. There are always people who say, “These kids are disruptive, they’re breaking the rules.” And if they break the rules, they need to be disciplined. And if you don’t discipline them, it’s just going to encourage future protests. So that’s the sort of standard conservative response to protest which again is a legitimate minoritarian view on this campus, but it’s always existed in the face of every protest.
The third view, which is in some ways the most sophisticated, which is held by more of my close colleagues, people who are Democrats, a lot of “Big D” Democrats are very concerned that student protests are undermining basically the Democratic Party electoral coalition. That the conflict of the last year and mobilization against the Biden administration’s policies toward Israel are really threatening the Democratic Party coalition and could bring a terrible, terrible outcome if it contributes to Trump’s victory in 2024. Almost everybody in this fight is or was broadly a supporter of the Democratic Party a year ago. And these colleagues view this conflict as ripping apart the Democratic coalition, and they want to see it resolved. And they basically want the radical Biden critics to go away. And they don’t think people like me should be encouraging, or protecting, or speaking out in defense of those students.
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