More than other universities, Harvard is expected to issue moral edicts all the time, but until now these pronouncements were cost-free. In February 2022, Harvard denounced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because, sure, why not. In September 2021, Harvard announced its divestment of fossil-fuel investments, which sounded slightly self-sacrificing, but the truth was fossil fuels were no longer a particularly profitable investment. Forty-nine years have passed since I matriculated, and during all that time I never once heard anybody refer to any kind of “finest hour.” Until now. Did Harvard have one before it stood up to Trump?
Yes, it turns out, more than 200 years ago. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I scribbled down six instances of moral challenge since Harvard’s founding in 1636. Then I started phoning and emailing historians and various others who were Harvard experts to ask how Harvard met these moments. Here are my findings.
Salem witch trials. Harvard’s involvement here was minimal, but not helpful. In 1689, Cotton Mather published a book titled Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions that helped create hysteria by alleging instances of “Bewitched or Possessed persons in New-England.” The Salem accusations surfaced three years later. Mather was a Harvard graduate, but more significantly, he was the adult son of Harvard President Increase Mather (after whom Harvard’s present-day Mather House is named).
Father and son urged “exquisite caution” in Salem, according to an October 2019 article in the Harvard Crimson by Juliet Isselbacher. But they also urged “speedy and vigorous prosecution.” More laudably, Increase wrote: “It is better that a Guilty Person should be ABSOLVED, than that he should without sufficient ground of Conviction be condemned.” But that was in a tract that (according to Isselbacher) wasn’t published until after 20 Salem witches had been hanged. Whoops.
Slavery and the Civil War. Three years and two Harvard presidents ago, a university committee issued a report on Harvard’s legacy of slavery. For 147 years after its founding in 1636, Harvard administrators, faculty, and staff enslaved more than 70 people. The university and its donors also maintained “extensive financial ties to slavery,” principally in the Caribbean. In 1850, Harvard Medical School admitted three free Black students, but after objections from alumni and students, the school’s dean, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (father of the jurist) cravenly expelled them.