“Universities were refuges for radicals, but they were not themselves radical.” The church/state metaphor is not idle. Universities have long made room for political activists, including political radicals of all stripes, but “there used to be a kind of separation of church and state,” Harper writes. We call on you to use your position to free Palestine.” Khurana is surely an accomplished scholar and an able administrator, but this is a tall order. During a recent protest at Harvard, a student addressed a dean, Rakesh Khurana (“not just a dean, but a friend,” according to his faculty page), this way: “Dean Rakesh, we call on you to use your privilege. “In recent years,” as Tyler Austin Harper put it in a recent Atlantic piece, “college presidents, deans, and HR professionals have cribbed the language of edgy politics, openly framing their institutions and initiatives as aspirationally ‘anti-racist’ and ‘decolonial’ enterprises.” The adoption of an activist political idiom by administrators can have weird results, including confusion among students about the kind and degree of power administrators possess. When it comes to administrative statements, too, activist and therapeutic goals have become oddly blended. Blake Smith has elucidated aspects of this phenomenon in our pages: “After rhetoric about the gravity of whatever has happened,” messages from administrators “typically encourage potentially traumatized readers to seek relief through relevant campus resources.” Students are figured as at once political activists, paying customers, and subjects of therapeutic concern. Today, “institutions have sought to reconstruct this role in response to what students and parents paying enormous sums for their education have seemed to want.” In the last two decades, Bellafante says, the amount of money administrations have spent on student services has more than tripled. ![]() That hunger for institutional affirmation, Bellafante observes, reflects a reversal of the demands of an earlier generation of students, who chafed at the presumption that colleges should act in loco parentis. At New York University, for instance, both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli protesters shared “the belief that the university was inadequately supporting them.” ![]() The New York Times’s Ginia Bellafante analyzes the dynamic adroitly, with respect to competing activist demands for administrative recognition regarding the war in Gaza. public positions is seen as part of institutional leadership.” The reliability with which administrators issue such statements has apparently produced, among students, an appetite for more of them. “For many on campus,” Fischer writes, “articulating. In the last decade or so, as our Karin Fischer discussed last week, presidents and other upper administrators have been expected to weigh in on the most contentious political topics of the day: the Black Lives Matter movement, the war in Ukraine, the overturning of Roe v.
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