From the Harvard Crimson: Former Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana criticized the December 2023 congressional testimony of three university presidents on campus antisemitism — including then-Harvard President Claudine Gay — saying none of them could explain what a university is for. The remarks, delivered in a lecture at Cornell University last week, are Khurana’s most direct public comments on the backlash that ended Gay’s presidency and set off two years of federal scrutiny of Harvard.
Khurana delivered the Milton R. Konvitz Memorial Lectureship in American Ideals on Thursday, an annual Cornell lecture named for the civil liberties scholar who taught there for four decades. His talk — “From Institutional Mission to Administrative Means: The Bureaucratization of Universities” — argued that universities have grown too heavy with administrators and lost institutional legitimacy. Khurana earned his bachelor’s degree at Cornell...
He named one only as a school in Connecticut — an apparent nod to Yale University that drew laughs. Between 2003 and 2021, its human resources department jumped from 11 staff to 192, and its development staff spiked from 71 to 333, while the faculty went from 610 to 675...
Khurana said rising inequality had also reshaped how universities raise money, pushing them toward a small number of very large gifts... That arrangement held, Khurana said, only as long as donors asked for nothing in return — and it has not survived the collapse in public trust. Donors now style themselves as “impact philanthropists” who want a say in how their money is spent...
Full story at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/9/21/khurana-criticizes-gay-testimony/.
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