Lawrence S. Bacow announced Wednesday that he will step down as president of Harvard in June 2023 after a five-year term, a period during which he led the university through the coronavirus pandemic as well as an attack against its admissions policies, which are likely to face a Supreme Court test this year.
A lifelong scholar, Bacow, 70, first came to Harvard as a graduate student in 1972, eventually earning three Harvard degrees. Prior to assuming his current position, he served as a professor and chancellor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later as president of Tufts University.
Although his five-year term as Harvard president is short compared to that of his predecessor, Drew Gilpin Faust, who served 12 years, Dr. Bacow said in a statement that it was time to go.
“There’s never a good time to quit a job like this, but now it feels right to me,” he wrote in a message to the Harvard community. “We have worked together to sustain Harvard through change and storm, and collectively we have made Harvard better and stronger in countless ways.”
Harvard’s announcement of Dr. Bacow’s departure follows similar recent announcements made by several high-profile university presidents.
Recent issues on US college campuses
- Registration crisis: New data shows that 662,000 fewer students enrolled in undergraduate programs in the spring of 2022 compared to the previous year, a drop of 4.7%.
- President of Harvard: Lawrence S. Bacow, who led the university through the pandemic as well as an attack on its admissions policies, announced he would step down in 2023.
- Affirmative action: As the Supreme Court prepares to rule on the legality of two race-conscious admissions programs, a lawyer who helped draft Texas’ abortion ban has offered a new avenue for critics of the affirmative action.
- Freedom of speech: A legal scholar who wrote that President Biden would appoint a ‘lesser black woman’ to the Supreme Court has been cleared for a new position in Georgetown after an investigation. He decided to quit anyway.
Among them, Lee Bollinger, who served as president of Columbia University for 21 years, said he would step down at the end of the 2022-2023 academic year; Dr Wayne AI Frederick, a surgeon who has worked at Howard University since 2013, said he would leave in 2024; and Andrew Hamilton, president of New York University, said he would step down next year in his eighth year on the job.
Dr. Bacow, who grew up in Pontiac, Michigan, the son of immigrants who escaped Nazi persecution, said he plans to spend more time with his children and grandchildren. A Harvard spokesperson said Dr. Bacow was not giving interviews on Wednesday.
Dr. Bacow and his wife, Adele F. Bacow, an urban planning consultant, announced in March 2020 that they had contracted Covid-19. At the time, Dr. Bacow told The Harvard Gazette that he was likely to be infected due to a previously diagnosed autoimmune disease, which he did not identify.
In an April article, Harvard magazine reported that Dr. Bacow experienced “a recent mild case following a trip to London”.
Something of a dark horse candidate for president when his selection was announced in 2018, Dr. Bacow was a Fellow of the Harvard Corporation, Leader Hauser in Residence at the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and on the selection committee a successor to Dr. Faust.
The committee had considered 700 applicants before choosing one of its own members, Dr. Bacow himself.
Dr. Bacow has been recognized for lobbying Congress for more lenient visa policies for international students during the pandemic, for announcing a university-wide climate change initiative, and for investigating the university’s ties to slavery, recently announcing an endowed slavery legacy fund that will allow scholars and students to continue to shine a light on Harvard’s ties to slavery.
The university has committed $100 million to the effort, with some of the money going to find descendants of slaves at Harvard and also to create exchange programs between Harvard students and faculty members. with those of historically black colleges and universities.
Dr. Bacow’s tenure at Harvard was not without controversy.
Last year, Cornel West, considered one of the nation’s most prominent black philosophers and progressive activists, announced he had resigned from Harvard Divinity School over a land dispute. At the time, Dr. West attacked Harvard, calling it a “declining and declining” institution. Dr. Bacow, who had declined to comment on the details of the case, citing the confidentiality of the process, nevertheless defended the management by the university.
In another high-profile controversy, three female graduate students filed a lawsuit against Harvard this year, accusing the university of ignoring allegations that John Comaroff, a professor of African and African-American studies and anthropology, allegedly sexually harassed students.
At the time the case was filed, Dr Comaroff, who denied the allegations, had been placed on leave after the university discovered he had engaged in inappropriate verbal conduct. He was found not responsible for unwanted sexual touching.
Harvard’s biggest challenge, however, may have involved a lawsuit brought by Students for Fair Admissions, which accuses the university’s racially-conscious admissions system of discriminating against regard to Asian American applicants.
The Supreme Court is expected to hear the case this fall. Dr. Bacow said challenging Harvard’s admissions process “jeopardizes 40 years of legal precedent granting colleges and universities the freedom and flexibility to create diverse campus communities.”