I'm Christopher Leiden, this is open source. The humbling of Harvard is the puzzle in this

podcast, oldest and far the richest among American universities. Harvard is the apex in some sense of American intellectualism.

Harvard will be a long time figuring out just how it lost a very big game that it didn't seem to know it was playing.

High stakes, free-for-all know it was playing. High stakes free for all turned out to be with poisonous

words like plagiarism and anti-Semitism threaded through the media coverage and then in airborne ad banners and other blunt instruments.

Suddenly, the president of Harvard, a black woman as chance would have it,

resigned her job under pressure as if to confirm that

something serious had indeed happened. But what in the world was this Harvard fight

about and was this beginning or the end of a great battle?

Randall Kennedy of the Harvard Law School and Diana Ek from the Divinity School

are both pillars of Harvard conversations

around race, religion, justice for as long as I can remember. We'll get to

measuring the damage here, Randy and Diana, but first each one of you please recall the moment when you sensed

Uh-oh we're off the track. There's trouble ahead

Randy I thought that there was tremendous trouble ahead when I heard in the halls that

President Gay's job was in jeopardy.

And that was after the congressional hearing,

and after she had made apologies and was trying to write herself, but the drum beat of condemnation continued and the word went out you better write the

powers that be because they're meeting in fact it was a Sunday and you know write try to get friends to

write we need to get faculty members to indicate that they do not think that she ought to be replaced.

And so I remember that Sunday all day long

participating in writing letters and reading letters and editing letters and

...