Harvard’s Ouster of Renowned Leader in Public Health, Mary Bassett - an Act of Cowardice? : Shared by Tom McDermott
Author: Gregg Gonsalves
Publication: The Nation
Date: January 8, 2026
Summary:
Dr. Mary Bassett, a renowned public health leader, was abruptly removed in mid-December 2025 from her position as director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health by Dean Andrea Baccarelli.
Bassett's distinguished career spans decades, including work with the Black Panthers on sickle cell screening, HIV prevention in Zimbabwe, leadership roles at the Rockefeller Foundation, and service as health commissioner for both New York City and New York State.
Her removal followed criticism in a campus antisemitism report that singled out FXB's focus on Palestinians. Over 2,000 colleagues have signed a petition demanding her reinstatement.
The author of the article argues that Bassett was fired solely for her advocacy regarding Gaza, where Israeli military operations have killed 70,000 people and created a severe public health crisis. The article contends that charges of antisemitism are being weaponized by figures like Elise Stefanik and Christopher Rufo to control higher education.
The author characterizes Harvard's leadership as either collaborators who agree with Israeli government policies or cowards capitulating to political pressure from the White House and far right. This action is described as part of a broader Trump administration campaign to reshape higher education for an authoritarian era.
The terminations of both Bassett and former Harvard President Claudine Gay, both Black women, are noted. Dean Baccarelli announced that FXB would shift focus to children's health, raising concerns about the future of programs on climate change, racial justice, migrants and refugees, and Roma health rights.
Quotes:
"We'll come out of this. Let me tell you something. If none of us are here, if none of us are here to see it, tell your children who the cowards were." - Ta-Nehisi Coates
"Jews and the fight against antisemitism are being cynically used to advance an authoritarian, anti-democratic agenda. Make no mistake: this will not end well, especially for Jewish Americans." - Joe Berman, former Anti-Defamation League litigator
"These institutions, rich, prestigious, cower rather than confront. They compromise their principles instead of defending justice." - Ta-Nehisi Coates
"It is bad medicine to carve out discussions of gross human rights violations, like the carnage in Gaza, of race, sexuality, and gender, and the entire panoply of social determinants of health out of our work to satisfy this regressive politics. Because in the end, it is not viruses and rogue cells alone that kill us—it is what we inflict on each other that makes us sick, leaves us dead." - Gregg Gonsalves
What have we done wrong ? How can we protect education and our children?
ReplyDeleteTo frame this episode as either dissent crushed by authoritarianism or capitulation to a lobby is too shallow. Harvard’s problem is not that it suddenly lost its nerve. It is that, like many elite institutions, it has spent the past decade substituting moral signalling for governance, activism for stewardship, and rhetoric for institutional clarity. When politics eventually arrived at the door, the house was already structurally unsound.
DeleteUniversities cannot credibly claim to be neutral arenas of inquiry while simultaneously allowing centres, programmes and leaders to align themselves visibly with contested political causes, however sincerely held. Once that line is crossed, accusations of bias, capture or exclusion are inevitable. Institutions that have failed to articulate limits, standards and due process in advance often respond clumsily under pressure.
The deeper responsibility lies with the mainstream political and cultural leadership that has governed the West over the past decades. By outsourcing difficult questions to slogans, tolerating the erosion of institutional boundaries, and mistaking virtue displays for competence, they have made universities and much else fragile. The result is a cycle of overreach followed by overcorrection, in which everyone claims victimhood and no one accepts responsibility. We did not arrive here by conspiracy. We arrived here by misrule.