Ivory Tower

Sex, lies and mortarboards: the gripping inside story of the culture war within Harvard University.

In 2024, Claudine Gay – the President of Harvard – resigned after a disastrous Congressional questioning over antisemitism on campus. Donald Trump was gleeful, lambasting the university as a hotbed of ‘woke’ politics. Gay’s defenders were appalled, casting her as the victim of a reactionary witch-hunt. What neither side acknowledged was that Gay’s ousting was only the most recent moment in a decades long turf war on Harvard Quad: one that pitted Marxist sociologists against libertarian economists, Democratic activists against Republican presidents, and Wall Street philanthropists against student activists.

Here, James Stewart – New York Times reporter and Pulitzer-winning author of Den of Thieves – offers the definitive inside story of the academic battles raging at America’s most famous college. The story of Harvard’s culture war, he shows, is also the story of America’s.