When 70 university presidents gathered for a summit at the end of January, the topic on everyone’s mind was the crisis at Harvard.
The hosts of the summit treated the university, battered by accusations of coddling antisemitism, as a business-school case study on leadership in higher education, complete with a slide presentation on its plummeting reputation.
The killer slide: “Boeing & Tesla Have Similar Levels of Negative Buzz as Harvard.”
In other words, Harvard, a centuries-old symbol of academic excellence, was generating as much negative attention as an airplane manufacturer that had a door panel drop from the sky and a car company with a mercurial chief executive and multiple recalls.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at Yale’s School of Management, organized the summit. “Despite near 400 years of history, the value of brand equity is nowhere near as permanent as Harvard trustees think it is,” he said in an interview. “There used to be a term in the industry of something being the Cadillac of the industry. Well, Cadillac itself is, you know, sadly not the Cadillac of the industry anymore.”
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There is already evidence of reputational damage: a 17 percent drop in the number of students applying to Harvard for early admission decisions this year. Other Ivy League schools saw increases.
