This interview in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Evan Goldstein and Len Gutkin is one of the clearest, most sober-eyed assessments yet of what many in higher education are feeling but struggling to name: that we have crossed a threshold. Randall Kennedy—long known for his intellectual independence and willingness to critique excesses within progressive politics—states plainly that he now fears for the freedom of American universities. His warning is especially powerful because it comes not from a reflexive institutional defender, but from someone who has repeatedly challenged DEI overreach, due-process failures, and moral absolutism on campus.
Here is one of my favorite, truly explanatory quotes from this piece:
"Why is it that the right wing is so upset at the universities? Because universities, more than any other place in American society, are actually open to groups who have been historically marginalized."
When Kennedy says the barking has turned into biting, he captures the reality that legal victories, however important, cannot undo the chilling effects of extortionate governance, coerced compliance, and the quiet normalization of fear.
What makes this exchange essential reading is its insistence on perspective. Kennedy refuses false equivalence: the excesses of campus politics, however real, are not morally or politically comparable to a federal government willing to take higher education “by the throat.” At the same time, he does not absolve universities of responsibility for earlier failures to defend academic freedom when it was inconvenient or unpopular to do so.
That combination—clear-eyed self-critique without capitulation—is precisely what has been missing from much public debate. Read alongside the longer arc of culture-war politics in education, this piece underscores a hard truth: institutional autonomy is not preserved by silence, euphemism, or quiet retreat. It is preserved only when faculty and leaders alike are willing to speak plainly, defend one another, and recognize that what is at stake is not a policy preference or a contested acronym, but the very conditions under which knowledge can be pursued at all—and to this, I might add, the viability of democracy itself.
-Angela Valenzuela
Randall Kennedy Is Afraid. He Thinks You Should Be Too.The Harvard law professor on federal extortion, DEI overreach, and why defeating Trump in court won’t be enough.
By Evan Goldstein and Len Gutkin
January 2, 2026
Randall Kennedy doesn’t shy away from an argument. His classes at Harvard Law
School, where he has taught for more than four decades, are intellectually raucous affairs. As a law student, future President Barack Obama enrolled in one of Kennedy’s courses but, according to David Remnick’s biography, later dropped the course, fearing a “semester-long shout fest.”
Kennedy remains feisty, iconoclastic, and unpredictable. He’s a self-described progressive who’s willing to call out his own side. On questions of race, Kennedy has long considered himself an optimist. His optimism can put him at odds with activists who draw a straight line from 1619 to today. Where they see implacable racism, Kennedy tends to see progress, not perfection.
But he is the first to admit his optimism has been tested over the past decade. On the topic of the Trump administration and higher education, he is deeply unnerved. “Until recently, I never would have said that I fear for the freedom of universities in the United States,” he told us. “I fear for the freedom of the universities in the United States now.”
During an interview over Zoom from his office at the law school — where the walls are lined with blown-up covers of his many books, including Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal and Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word — Kennedy was characteristically frank and voluble as we discussed the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education; double standards around diversity, equity, and inclusion; George Floyd and the October 7 attacks; and whether academics are too self-critical. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Evan Goldstein: We last spoke in February, about a month into Donald Trump’s second term. Back then you said: “I have never felt so worried about the state of academia. Fear is palpable. There’s tremendous foreboding.” Are fear and worry still palpable?
Randall Kennedy: I still feel very fearful. Before, there was worry about what might happen. There was concern about the barking. Now there’s been biting. This administration has time and again shown that it cares little to nothing about the law. And it has succeeded. A bunch of institutions have felt compelled to enter into “deals” with the federal government. These universities say over and over again, “These deals do not compromise our autonomy, our independence, our academic freedom.” Of course that’s not true.
Len Gutkin: We published an essay by the University of Texas law professor David Rabban about the various court cases in which universities have sued either states or the Trump administration. Rabban’s wary about making predictions about what will happen if these cases end up in the Supreme Court. But he thinks that some of the justices who were on the winning side of the Students for Fair Admissions decision will nevertheless side with universities when it comes to academic freedom. Are you optimistic about what might happen when and if these cases get decided at the Supreme Court?
Kennedy: In terms of civil liberties and academic freedom, even when you prevail in court, you have lost. You’re prevailing after what — two years, three years? A lot’s been lost already. We need to be more realistic about what a court victory means. Going to court is not costless. It’s not as if you say, I want to vindicate my institution’s rights, so I’m going to hop on the subway and go to the courthouse. That’s not the way it works. The amount of money that is being spent by institutions to vindicate their rights — I don’t know how much it is, but I can guarantee you it’s a lot. Do I think that these institutions will succeed? Yeah, I think they’ll succeed. But there’s always next year, right?
Gutkin: I hear you that this is far from a costless process, and what’s been lost in the meantime is extraordinary. But the most optimistic way to look at it, if you’re taking the long view on academic freedom, is to hope for a Supreme Court decision that strongly affirms the kinds of academic freedom established in Sweezy v. New Hampshire. That would presumably buy the notion of academic freedom a lot longer than just the next year, right? Wouldn’t it sort of reconstitutionalize it for a long time?
Kennedy: That would be a great thing. But it’s not as if the court decides something and that’s it. That’s not typically the way it works. Court opinions are important, but they are part of an array of different things. There is no court opinion that can prevent the Trump administration, or any administration, from initiating some extortionate or repressive act that will take time to halt through judicial process.
If this goes up to appellate courts and the Supreme Court, I hope that the lower courts that have thus far ruled in favor of the institutions are upheld. I expect that they will be. But there’s a lot more to the story than that.
Goldstein: You mentioned the universities that have settled with the Trump administration. Harvard has chosen to contest the administration in court and also to negotiate. No deal has yet been struck, although The New York Times has on several occasions suggested one is imminent. Let me get your take on a critique we hear consistently: While Harvard is publicly fighting the Trump administration, it is quietly complying. Critics point to the replacement of leadership at the university’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. They point to the departure of the director of the Center for Health and Human Rights at the school of public health. They point to the unwinding of the religion and public-life program at the divinity school. Are you concerned?
Kennedy: I’m concerned. I remember in the spring when Alan Garber [Harvard’s president] announced that the university was not going to comply with the Trump administration’s ultimatum — I was very happy. I remember shouting. Very soon thereafter, we get an email announcing indirectly — you had to read the thing twice to figure out what the story was — that we’re not going to say “DEI” anymore.
I had my own problems with various aspects of the DEI regime, and I voiced them. But I did not like dropping this term without explanation, as if it can no longer be spoken. Is it the case that Harvard and other universities, even as they are fighting to protect their institutional autonomy, are nonetheless being chilled? Are they nonetheless being pushed around? Yes.
Things are complicated. There is a substantial faction within Harvard that is cheering the various actions that the university has taken that are somewhat in alignment with the demands of the Trump administration. Some of these things would have been done, probably, in the absence of Trumpian extortion. There are many people who think that some of what was going on in the university was not good, and they wanted to push back against it. After deliberation, the higher-ups in the university have agreed. Not all of that was a consequence of Trumpian pressure. Was some of it a consequence of Trumpian pressure? Yeah.
Gutkin: One of the aspects of the DEI regime that you’ve criticized — you referred to it very amusingly, the last time we talked, as the hobbyhorse that everybody’s seen you ride — is mandatory DEI statements for hiring and promotion. These have since seemed to go the way of the dodo. They’ve been internally unpopular for a long time. But organizations like the American Association of University Professors issued formal declarations that they are compatible with academic freedom. Then the Trump administration comes along and mounts this campaign of extortion, and really fast just about everybody starts saying: DEI statements for hiring and promotion are a bad idea. Internal dissent was given a prod by the Trump administration. Boom! DEI statements are out.
This puts liberal critics of things like diversity statements in a bind. They’ve gotten what they want via a route that involved political pressure they oppose. How should internal critics of university illiberalism, of which you’ve been a vocal one, negotiate this weird situation?
Kennedy: Be straightforward. Simply say: “Listen, I disagree with this policy for these reasons, and I hope that I will be persuasive. But I do not want the university to be taken over by the federal government.” It seems to me that you can say both of those things straightforwardly and unapologetically. We can have our disagreements, but we can also agree that, above all, we are allies with respect to university autonomy, university independence, and limited government.
Goldstein: You’ve indeed been outspoken and unapologetic. Not for nothing your essay collection is titled Say It Loud! But we recently published an interview with your colleague Jill Lepore. She spoke about how various aspects of the last 10 years of life on campus have been disillusioning. And she expressed regret at not speaking out more. Do you recognize Lepore’s experience in yourself or your colleagues?
Kennedy: Academics tend to be very tough on themselves and very tough on their institutions. We get really disappointed when our colleagues or our institutions don’t live up to our highest aspirations. That’s a good tendency. Being self-critical is a good thing. But one has to be careful. Good tendencies can be taken too far. By all means be critical. But beware of losing perspective.
There are people in the university who are so mad at various aspects of DEI, like the DEI statements; they’re so mad at the overreaching, the coerciveness, the political correctness, the tendentiousness. They’re so angry that some of them are willing to, in effect, be apologists for the Trump administration’s encroachments.
Now, Jill Lepore is definitely no apologist for the Trump administration! She is a strong citizen of the university who is attentive to malign, repressive influences from wherever they issue. My point is simply that we must be careful to distinguish between bad influences. Thin-skinned, overly defensive, ridiculously formulaic cancellations by students is one thing. Encroachments by departments of the executive branch of the federal government are another thing, a worse thing, altogether.
I think that there are a substantial number of academics who regret failing to be more vocal earlier in opposition against “woke” encroachments on due process and freedom of thought and expression. I harbor such regrets. That is part of learning.
But I definitely do not believe that the colleges had it coming, that the colleges are responsible for the Trump administration’s repressive actions. I wrote various things in the aftermath of the George Floyd moment that were critical of my camp, the progressive camp. But let’s maintain perspective. The coerciveness, the overreach that we were complaining about is nothing compared to what is going on now with the federal government taking higher education by the throat and extorting “deals” from it.
Again, we should be prepared put it all out there. I read your interview with Anthony Appiah where he talked about the infamous N word. In the last several years, there are at least 10 instances in which people have been demoted, people have been fired, bad things have happened to people for things like talking about a movie featuring James Baldwin, when James Baldwin said himself, “I am not your nigger.” People complain about it, and the teacher is all of a sudden in trouble. That’s absolutely ridiculous, and our institutions acted way too slowly in response to those sorts of episodes. One can say that, and one can also say strongly and loudly: Turn the page. What’s going on now is abominable, and all hands should be on deck.
Until recently, I never would have said that I fear for the freedom of universities in the United States. I fear for the freedom of the universities in the United States now.
Gutkin: The N-word dispute reminds me: When I edited an essay you wrote in 2021 about these incidents, I remember a post on X by a faculty member, a white woman, who wrote that she was very angry that we had published your essay in the way that we had, with the unredacted slur. “As a white woman from the south,” she said, “every time I read that word it’s like a punch in the gut, and it’s shameful that The Chronicle would run this.” I’m paraphrasing. In retrospect, this seems like a symptomatic incident of those times: Concerns about harmful language were so prevalent and so plastic that, in this case, a white person could claim to be harmed by a Black person’s essay about racial slurs. Has the academic atmosphere changed?
Kennedy: I would say to this person: “Listen, it’s a good thing that you see this word and it has a strong impact on you. That shows that you are aware of its history. It shows that you are attentive to racism in American life. Now, if you are telling me that because of this intense emotional response you have that I shouldn’t use that word — that’s where we have a problem. Does this mean that we erase the word from Martin Luther King Jr.'s ‘Letter From a Birmingham Jail’? Does this mean that we cannot ever play Richard Pryor’s great comedy album That Nigger’s Crazy? What do we do? Very concretely, what do we do?”
I have not personally encountered any difficulties on this front. There are various reasons for that. I’m pretty straightforward. I’m teaching people who are within months of being guardians of other people’s property and liberty. Also, I’m old and I’m a Black man. I’m sure there are students who might otherwise rile up at me who say: Don’t mess with that old Black man. Leave him alone.
Goldstein: I want to go back to the post-October 7 moment. A common critique then — and to an extent now — is that there’s a double standard afoot. Look at how Harvard responded to George Floyd’s murder and compare it to how Harvard responded to the October 7 Hamas attacks in Israel. It’s clear that these incidents are being handled differently. Does that critique have credibility?
Kennedy: It has some credibility. If the people on the receiving end were Black students, as opposed to Jewish students, would the temperature be different? Would the effect be different? Would people’s sentiments be different? There was something to that. But that’s not the end of the story. What does one do with double standards? What does one do with hypocrisy? How do you react?
When Claudine Gay [former president of Harvard] responded in Congress and said, basically, it all depends on the context [whether “genocidal” protest statements were permitted on campus], lots of people jumped all over her, including champions of academic freedom and champions of free speech, even though, as a legal matter, what she said was absolutely correct. Their thing was she’s being hypocritical. Double standard, double standard, double standard.
Another way of responding would have been to say: She has done things in the past that did not show a sufficient regard for due process, civil liberties, openness. I’m against that. But what she said yesterday was right. She’s evolving in a good way. I hope that she will level up. There were people who agreed with the position that she took but wanted to stone her anyway for being wrong a week ago or two weeks ago or a year ago.
Goldstein: I want to ask about Gay and her resignation. So much happened so fast that I feel like the page got turned quickly, maybe too quickly. To what extent do you see a connection between the successful campaign to oust her, pushed in part by the conservative activist Christopher Rufo, and the view of some that Harvard looked weak and unwilling to defend its own. Did that make the university a more inviting target?
Kennedy: A couple things. The attack on the three presidents — MIT, Penn, Harvard — was terrible. The reverberations are still very much with us.
There’s been a misperception, a misportrayal, of what went on. If you read the newspapers, you would have the impression that Gay said nothing about her personal disgust with antisemitism. In reality, she talked about how appalling she found antisemitism and bigotry of any sort over and over again. She went out of her way to say that. But they kept coming back. And we ought to remember, it wasn’t just Republicans who were attacking. There were a good many Democrats too. And a wide range of academics. Opinion within the academy should have been stronger in defense of her position. There should have been more voices championing academic life. A defense of the academy needs to be more a part of this conversation.
[Princeton president] Chris Eisgruber is doing that. When he says, Hey, this talk of universities being under a pall of orthodoxy — well, yeah, it’s not like they’re Edens. On the other hand, the argument about orthodoxy has been overdone. Academics should be critical, but a lot of what we’ve done is good, and we should be willing to defend our institutions. He’s right. We need to rally around one another and rally around our institutions, especially in light of the menace they currently face.
Goldstein: Let me ask a question about hyperbole. During the high-water mark of the protests after George Floyd’s murder, you warned racial-justice activists against making exaggerated and misleading claims about the prevalence of racism. You wrote an essay in our pages taking issue with the idea, then getting traction, that Princeton was at its core racist. Similarly, you have been a voice of caution against characterizations of Harvard and other universities as being havens of rampant antisemitism. How do you make sense of the tendency, as you see it, to overstate harms?
Kennedy: They are definitely related. Not only are they related logically, but they are related for me personally and emotionally. I did take strong exception to activists claiming that Princeton is steeped in institutional racism. No, it’s not. Neither is Harvard steeped in institutional antisemitism. Are you going to tell me that the Harvard University that was overseen by Larry Bacow was a den of antisemitism? Are you going to tell me that the Harvard University that has Penny Pritzker as the senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation is antisemitic? Are these people so out of it that they don’t see that the institution that they are leading is a den of antisemitism? Claudine Gay’s successor, Alan Garber, also Jewish. He chose John Manning as the university’s provost. John Manning’s Jewish. His predecessor as dean of Harvard Law School was Martha Minow. Wonderful person, also Jewish. The current dean of the law school is John Goldberg. Also Jewish. You can go through Harvard University and its various schools and find Jewish teachers, students, and administrators — thoroughly distinguished and flourishing.
I am not saying that there are no incidents, even terrible incidents, of antisemitism at Harvard. But that is a far cry from the claim that Harvard is grossly negligent in its attitude towards antisemitism or anti-Black racism.
I fault Harvard for not challenging that narrative more strongly. My speculation is that the higher-ups at Harvard felt that they had to give some degree of lip service to that narrative so people wouldn’t say they are tone-deaf. They felt pressured to accept that narrative, at least to some extent. But that narrative is at best erroneous and at worst false. Why is it that the right wing is so upset at the universities? Because universities, more than any other place in American society, are actually open to groups who have been historically marginalized.
Goldstein: Let me drill down on the antisemitism allegations and try to make it more concrete. I was struck by a profile of Garber published in The Atlantic over the summer. In that piece he makes clear that he’s very concerned about reports that Israeli students are being shunned, calling such behavior “a particularly corrosive form of discrimination.” Garber also said he’s been worried for years that hostility toward Israel was becoming entrenched on campus. The author of the profile, Franklin Foer, summarizes Garber’s perspective like this: “Zionists were treated as pariahs unworthy of inclusion in the Harvard community.” Is that Garber paying lip service?
Kennedy: I sort of remember that interview. Garber was asked whether he had personally felt harassed for his Jewishness. I think he said yes, which was very striking. It’s also very striking that there are a number of well-known professors at Harvard who have gone out of their way to say that they have never felt harassed on account of their Jewishness. Steven Pinker is one. Cass Sunstein is another. Noah Feldman is another. These are not shrinking violets. Again, I’m not saying there’s not antisemitism at Harvard. The issue, however, is whether the university is institutionally soft on antisemitism. Do I believe that? No, I do not.
Gutkin: There’s a Harvard Crimson article about pro-Palestinian student protesters drawing an image of Garber as a devil. Some people construed that as antisemitic. I don’t think that was the correct construal. But this super-vigilant response, scanning the environment for potential signals of antisemitism, is in some ways quite continuous, as Evan pointed out, with the earlier moment with anti-Black racism. Microaggressions became a kind of fashion. All of that, I think, paved the way.
And that’s where I think Eisgruber’s defense of the university falls short. I reviewed his book for The Chronicle, as did your Harvard colleague, Louis Menand, for The New Yorker. Both of us said something quite similar, which was that Eisgruber is repressing a lot of the aberrant things that actually happened around racism during the 2015 to 2023 period. By the same token, something aberrant has happened around antisemitism under pressure from the Trump administration, which has compelled administrators like Garber to purport to see it in places that it probably doesn’t really exist. But if we can’t come clean about the aberrancy of the earlier period, it becomes very hard for universities to defend themselves now, because so much of the logic used by the Trump administration is counting on this kind of identitarian response.
Kennedy: I’m a Princetonian. I like and admire Eisgruber. But here we come back to double standards and hypocrisy. So, for instance, Woodrow Wilson and the push to remove his name from campus. I think that people were trying to do the right thing. How do I feel about it now? It would have been better if we had left Woodrow Wilson alone. We had a group of students act as if they had just learned for the first time that Woodrow Wilson was racist, as if this was some secret that they had unlocked.
This is what’s really bad: The grown-ups allowed that. I was a member of the Class of 1977 at Princeton. One of my favorite professors was Arthur Link, who was Woodrow Wilson’s biographer. We knew all about Wilson’s racism. Valerie Smith, currently the president of Swarthmore, was a professor at Princeton during the period we’re talking about. What was the name of her chair? She was the Woodrow Wilson chair of literature. Cornel West was at Princeton. He knows a little bit about American history. What about Toni Morrison? You could go down the list. Did you ever hear any of them say they couldn’t possibly survive as self-respecting Black people at Princeton University so long as Princeton University had Woodrow Wilson’s name in various places? No! These students said what they said, and the grown-ups basically went along with them, deferred to them. We ought not have. And we should learn from that.
I must say, because I want to tell you the truth, that there were things that happened at my institution about which to this day I am ashamed that I did not take a stronger position. One thing that happened was that the dean of the law school at that time, Martha Minow, was given an award at Brandeis. And some of the students at Harvard Law School who were at the forefront of the movement went out to Brandeis and picketed and criticized Martha Minow for not being assertive enough and strong enough with respect to the struggle for racial justice. I didn’t like what was done. I spoke with students, sort of one on one, but to this day I am very sorry that I didn’t write an open letter and publicly express my disappointment and disagreement with what those students did.
As academics, we want the best for our students. We want to embrace our students. But we have to be more willing to say: No, on this I disagree. If they get mad at us, too bad. I mention that because it’s not like I’ve been so great. There are a lot of people, myself included, who have not been strong enough in articulating what was on their minds and willing to take the heat. And with respect to taking the heat, I’m not going to the Gulag. I don’t have to worry about that, and neither do any other professors at these places. So go on. Speak your mind.
A version of this article appeared in the January 16, 2026, issue.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Correction (Jan. 6, 2026, 9:24 a.m.): An earlier version of this interview incorrectly identified the date of Claudine Gay's resignation from Harvard. The text has been updated.
Correction (Jan. 6, 2026, 9:24 a.m.): An earlier version also incorrectly stated that Princeton eliminated DEI statements in hiring and promotion during the second Trump administration. In fact, Princeton did so during the Biden administration. The reference has been deleted.
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