Lawrence Bacow to step down as Harvard president

Harvard University announced that Lawrence Bacow will step down as president next summer, ending a relatively brief tenure amid a string of Covid-era departures across the top ranks of US higher education.

Professor Bacow, a career academic with three Harvard degrees, gave no specific reason for his planned departure after only five years – less than half the average presidential term in the Ivy League university’s 386-year history.

But in a brief note to the campus community, Professor Bacow – Harvard’s oldest incoming president when he took office in 2018 at age 66 – noted the struggles of Covid. The disease infected him twice, and created moments when he used Harvard’s unique power and prestige to set important examples for the rest of academia.

“There is never a good time to leave a job like this one, but now seems right to me,” Professor Bacow said.

Professor Bacow is a former president of Tufts University and chancellor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His announcement gives Harvard a full year to find a successor, in a process that last time considered some 700 nominations.

Highlights of his presidency include defending the university’s affirmative action admissions policy – a fight that Harvard won at trial on the legal merits yet may lose on appeal in the partisan arena of the US Supreme Court, and which either way overlooks the entrenched preferences of its legacy-heavy practices.

Professor Bacow also led much of US higher education in closing his physical campus in the early days of the Covid pandemic, and in fighting a Trump administration threat to send international students home once their classes went online.

Some of his other signature achievements might rank as more controversial. He oversaw a major university report detailing Harvard’s extensive historical ties to slavery, but his university still faced accusations of using too little of its reputational capital and $50 billion-plus (£40 billion) endowment to aggressively battle inequities inside its operations and across wider society.

Similarly, with climate change, Professor Bacow agreed to rid that world-leading endowment of fossil fuel investments, but only after years of protests and with concerns still lingering over the university’s ultimate level of environmental commitment.

Harvard under Professor Bacow also has struggled with issues of racial and gender equity, with highlights that include a refusal to grant tenure to black progressive activist Cornel West and a reportedly anaemic response to multiple sexual harassment allegations that were denied by faculty member John Comaroff.

The heads of Harvard’s governing board offered a review heavily in Professor Bacow’s favour, listing accomplishments that include his leadership during Covid and his encouragement of “mutually respectful discussion” at a moment of “widespread division and disharmony in society at large”. They also made reference in their note to the campus community of Harvard moving ahead under Professor Bacow with its long-awaited plans to more than double its physical footprint with a major expansion into the neighbouring Allston section of Boston.

“Larry is an adroit sailor, and having his steady hand on the tiller in these turbulent times has served Harvard exceptionally well,” said the officials, William Lee, the senior fellow of the university’s governing Harvard Corporation, and Penny Pritzker, his successor next month.

The long list of other US institutions that are in presidential transitions or have just completed one includes MIT, Tufts, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, New York University, Amherst College, Rice University, the University of Florida, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Northwestern University and George Washington University.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com