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But the celebrity professor’s own record raises a question: Is he the right guy for the job?
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Photo by Ken Richardson
Steven Pinker is one of the most famous—and divisive—academics in America. A cognitive psychologist at Harvard, he’s spent five decades writing about how we think, picking fights with the left, and wading into culture wars that most professors avoid. Bill Gates calls him a favorite writer. His critics call him a cover for racists. He’s been accused of providing intellectual ammunition to the alt-right, and of dismissing inconvenient evidence when it doesn’t fit his theories. He’s also, right now, one of the loudest voices pushing Harvard to change.
My introduction to him, though, was surprisingly gentle.
The past few years, Pinker has turned his attention to what’s happening at Harvard itself—a lack of academic freedom, the monoculture he sees taking over, and the groupthink undermining research and education. What first caught my eye was something he wrote for the Boston Globe in 2024, on how Harvard had been handling student protests over the war in Gaza. Pinker wrote about teaching Sunday school as a young man, leading students through moral dilemmas with no obvious right or wrong answer. Now, he said, he found himself “wishing that my august institution taught its students this skill.”
Which demands a pointed question: If Harvard isn’t teaching students to think through hard problems for themselves, what, exactly, is the mission of the university?
This struck me as bold, since Pinker draws a paycheck from Harvard, but even more to the point, it seemed quite reasonable. And calm. Also, right at the heart of what we need to figure out about higher education.
It gets immediately complicated, however, given that a lot of people, including President Donald Trump, have been asking the same questions in a much harsher way. Trump has had a great deal to say about our elite universities, especially Harvard, and none of it is good. This has put Pinker in a bind between the woke and Trump. Between indoctrination from the left and whatever the Trump administration is. So Pinker has written not just about the monoculture at Harvard, but, lately, about the fallout if the Trump administration is able to drastically cut the school’s federal funding.
Pinker has fashioned himself as a public intellectual—someone who takes on big issues and demands that we do, too. It’s tricky territory. Of course, he could make a left turn and simply shut up. But speaking out, having his say, is what he does and wants to do, and—though he can be shy about admitting it—enjoys doing.
Pinker is taking this moment on not by jumping up and down, but in the same clear-as-a-bell way I first discovered—by getting right to the problem. In “Harvard Derangement Syndrome,” which ran in the New York Times last May, he argued that universities are obsessed with implicit racism and sexism but blind to a bigger problem: “my-side bias,” the tendency to believe whatever our political tribe believes. Universities, he wrote, should expect faculty to “leave their politics at the classroom door.” To that end, he even suggested “a bit of D.E.I. for conservatives.”
But Pinker’s critics—and there are many, especially in academia—argue that he’s guilty of exactly what he decries: my-side bias, ideological blinders, a willingness to engage with far-right figures in ways that give them legitimacy. He says he doesn’t set out to spark controversy—though he seems to welcome it when it comes. But it’s a double-edged sword in a dangerous time: Pinker has leaped into the fray of what ails Harvard—and higher education in general—starting with his own questions about our universities: What are they doing? Who are they for? Where are they going?
But there’s another question, one that goes to the core of what he’s all about, as Pinker tries to change the culture at Harvard: Is he the right guy for the job?
Something large was always at play for Pinker, who grew up in a Jewish community in Montreal. His kindergarten teacher told his mother he was the smartest kid she ever taught. His parents had bought a set of the World Book Encyclopedia—Pinker as a young boy devoured them. He loved science and math. His mother was a big reader, someone who knew everything. He asked her, at 17, “How do you get a job in a think tank?” She suggested he become a psychiatrist, but Pinker wasn’t interested in going to medical school. A college professor, then; this, they could agree on. They’d drive to McGill University together—Pinker lived at home all through college, “in the Canadian style,” he says—as his mother was working on a master’s in education. She brought home books on psycholinguistics that triggered an early interest—it was the era of Noam Chomsky getting famous in the revolution of cognitive science—and in his office in Cambridge, Pinker turns to look up at his books: “In fact, I have some on my shelves. I know exactly which ones they are.” Never mind that it was also the era of unemployed Ph.D.s; Pinker knew what he wanted. It took him all of three years to get a doctorate at Harvard in experimental psychology after graduating from McGill. He moves fast.
In his office, Pinker, on sabbatical, is informal, wearing a sweater and jeans, and the cowboy boots he’s known for that give him another inch. His famously spectacular curly hair has been trimmed down a bit, though it’s still spectacular. He’s smaller than I anticipated, and I realize that he’s generally so good-looking in photographs that I was expecting a commanding presence, but that’s not Pinker’s style. He’s eager, almost, to please—and a little edgy. He shifts often in his chair as we talk for three and a half hours—as if he can’t quite get comfortable; Pinker, 71, sprained a tendon in his hip two years ago, which ended his running, but he’s still an avid bicyclist. In his book How the Mind Works, he wrote: “Well into my procreating years I am, so far, voluntarily childless…ignoring the solemn imperative to spread my genes. By Darwinian standards I am a horrible mistake.… But I am happy to be that way, and if my genes don’t like it, they can go jump in the lake.” His third wife, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, is a philosopher and novelist. He’s a professed liberal Democrat, though Pinker often gets accused of being a closet conservative. He takes on, with gusto, whatever I ask.
It quickly becomes obvious that the world comes alive for Pinker when it can be studied, understood, and explained. For a long time, he was mystified about why his father, who’d grown up dirt poor in Montreal after his parents emigrated from Poland in the 1920s, didn’t use his law degree, instead supporting his family by selling clothing in small Quebec towns; Pinker’s father himself never explained why. But then Pinker discovered the research of Thomas Sowell, a conservative economist and social theorist, on how ethnic groups often cultivate particular expertise over time and take it wherever they end up; for Pinker’s father, the Jewish cultural capital of commerce and finance—or, specifically, the garment industry—developed over centuries became the sure thing in order to move on from a childhood so destitute that a neighbor had to knit him mittens to survive a Montreal winter, since his parents couldn’t afford to buy them.
Sowell’s research, Pinker says, “actually helped me understand my own upbringing.” His research pushed against “the dominant mode of explanation that says the only differences among ethnic groups is how they’re treated from the outside, in terms of racism and prejudice. He argued that the traits within a culture matter as well.” With that, Pinker’s father wasn’t a victim of his circumstances, but part of a cultural tradition.
Pinker took his method of understanding, of needing to know and how he needed to know, into cognitive science. The Guardian once wrote of him, “No matter the topic of conversation, he will reach for a wider theory or study to explain it: the universality of facial expressions, the roots of physical attractiveness, the moral awe people feel for Noam Chomsky, why zebras have stripes.”
Pinker found more than a profession—he discovered a method. And the power of his books is in their insistence on going wherever the facts lead. After writing about language for academics, Pinker crossed over to a general audience with The Language Instinct in 1994, which made the case for the biological basis of language and hit big. In The Blank Slate, published in 2002, Pinker argued against a prevailing orthodoxy that we’re born without any innate characteristics, shaped entirely by environment and culture. Instead, he made the case that genetics plays a significant role in how our minds work and who we become. The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) detailed the long-term historical decline in violence, and Enlightenment Now (2018) made the case for reason and science creating a world of well-being and possibility foreign to earlier epochs. Those last two got Pinker a lot of heat for putting a sunny spin on the way things are now, especially among left-leaning thinkers who have called him a cheerleader for Western capitalism, blind to the inequalities it produces. And The Blank Slate has gotten Pinker criticized over the idea that biology is destiny, which leads into dangerous territory: racial differences, eugenics, the question of who gets to define human nature and why.
Biology as destiny is not what Pinker seems to be up to in The Blank Slate. In a nutshell, he argues that there are genetic differences between people, and that acknowledging this is not inherently a bad or dangerous thing; rather, it’s something to be understood. When he made this argument nearly 25 years ago, it was highly controversial. It still is.
In The Blank Slate, Pinker had three central beefs with academic orthodoxy. First: that human nature does not exist. Second: that our minds and bodies exist apart from each other. Third: that we are born innately good. Instead, he had come to believe many traits are universally human; that our minds are an information processing system plugged in to the hardware of our brains (“I think that intellectuals are just kind of squirrelly about that,” Pinker says. “They’re squeamish about the idea that the mind is just the activity of the brain.”); and that, while we are quite capable of doing good, it is not the underlying state of humanity. Pinker takes the basic position of philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who wrote that the condition of man is a war “of every man against every man.” In other words: The natural state of human beings is guided by self-interest and engaged in an ongoing struggle for power and resources.
Pinker says the book was not meant to stoke controversy, but explore what already existed. “I thought that the moral emotions had crept into the science, distorting the way scientists could do and report their research,” Pinker says. “And so the major goal of the book was to drive a wedge between them, so that if, for example, you thought that there were differences between men and women, that did not imply that you were against equal rights for women or condoning prejudice and harassment of women.”
Pinker’s frustration comes through in The Blank Slate—a sense that we’ve gotten human nature wrong. I read a passage to him from the book:
“The blank slate has also served as a sacred scripture for political and ethical beliefs. According to the doctrine, any differences we see among races, ethnic groups, sexes, and individuals come not from differences in their innate constitution, but from differences in their experiences. Change the experiences—by reforming parenting, education, the media, and social rewards—and you can change the person.”
I say to Pinker: “You’re close to take-no-prisoners territory there, don’t you think?”
“It’s provocative,” he says, and thinks for a moment. “I am after, just relentlessly after, clarity. I just want the idea to be as identifiable, visible, clear, understandable as possible.”
In the preface of The Blank Slate, Pinker quotes Anton Chekhov: “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.” I ask him whether that underpins what, when all is said and done, he believes he’s really about.
“I probably should have used that as an epigraph,” he says, pleased that we land on something so direct and simple. “If there’s a kind of moral passion behind my work, that would capture it.”
And now, Pinker says, The Blank Slate feels newly relevant:
“The idea that political and moral equality require sameness, which is one of the fallacies that I tried to expose, has come back with a vengeance in wokeness,” he says. And that winds him up a bit: “The idea that there is no such thing as biological sex, that sex is an arbitrary label assigned at birth, like a first name, or the bad biology that would say sex is a continuum—these are meant as ways to safeguard, but weren’t something I conceived of when writing The Blank Slate. If they were, I would have put them in there.”
“I am after, just relentlessly after, clarity,” says Pinker, shown here in his Cambridge home. / Photo by Ken Richardson
But why take this sort of thing on, given the risk?
The Blank Slate was much praised for opening up the nature-nurture debate—it was shortlisted for the Pulitzer, but it also garnered some now-wait-a-minute reviews that sometimes attacked Pinker for oversimplifying things. Louis Menand, author of The Metaphysical Club, a Pulitzer-winning intellectual and cultural history of late-19th- and early-20th-century America, reviewed the book skeptically in the New Yorker. Pinker’s villains, Menand wrote, were “social scientists, progressive educators, radical feminists, academic Marxists, liberal columnists, avant-garde arts types, government planners, and postmodernist relativists.” His heroes were cognitive scientists and ordinary folks. “I wish I could say that Pinker’s view of the world of ideas is more nuanced than this,” Menand wrote.
It isn’t just Pinker’s conclusions that have drawn fire—it’s his method. “By far the nastiest and most aggressive academic responses I have seen come from humanities professors when there are ideas from the sciences that they see as encroaching on their territories,” Pinker told the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2019. “That’s when you get rage and withering condescension.” It’s not hard to find.
Samuel Moyn, a professor of law and history at Yale, reviewed Enlightenment Now for the New Republic, arguing that Pinker’s conclusions were too narrow. “Behind this self-styled posture as a man of evidence and science,” Moyn tells me, “I think he’s a man of faith who won’t confront the evidence that doesn’t go his way. I think there’s so much that he’s sweeping under the carpet that it’s hard not to wonder what could lead him to extrapolate from a few data points to a big theory that’s so simple-minded.”
And Daniel Smail, a Harvard history professor, wrote a withering takedown of The Better Angels of Our Nature for an academic journal, dismissing Pinker’s optimism about civilization as naive. His verdict: “Better Angels is not a work of history. It is best understood as a work of moral and historical theology.”
Pinker, as is his way, calmly rejects the Moyn and Smail appraisals, though he admits this sort of thing makes him angry, and small wonder why: The accusations that Pinker is “a man of faith” or that he was writing “historical theology” strike at the most basic underpinning of his approach: Chasing the facts as he finds them, on the way to making his case for the way things really are. The charge, essentially, is that Pinker is guilty of his own my-side bias. “Those reactions of both Moyn and Smail, I think, are outrageously false,” Pinker says.
Pinker has his defenders in academia, too. David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas, calls Better Angels “extremely accurate. People have criticized that work, and I think unfairly, because it just violates all of our intuitions.” And even Moyn gives Pinker credit for “advancing the public conversation” in writing “accessibly” for a broad audience.
In other words, the debate over Pinker’s work has never really been settled—it’s ongoing, and it’s personal.
This isn’t for the faint-hearted, being a lightning rod, especially given the past decade’s atmosphere. In late 2017, for instance, during a panel discussion at Harvard about free speech, Pinker said, “Political correctness has done an enormous amount of harm in the sliver of the population that might be—I wouldn’t want to say ‘persuadable,’ but certainly whose affiliation might be up for grabs. The often highly literate, highly intelligent people who gravitate to the alt-right: Internet savvy, media savvy, who often are radicalized in that way.” Pinker was actually arguing that by shutting down debate, the left was pushing smart, contrarian people toward the alt-right—not because the alt-right was correct, but because it was the only place willing to engage certain questions.
Still, the right had a field day. Neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer ran a headline that read, in part: “Harvard Jew Professor Admits the Alt-Right Is Right About Everything.” The left hammered Pinker for giving ammunition to extremists, regardless of his intent.
And this is the pattern: Bad actors and dark thinkers have appropriated Pinker’s research and writing for their own ends—and Pinker has done little to stop them.
Charles Murray, coauthor of The Bell Curve in 1994, which linked IQ differences among races to genetics, has since cited The Blank Slate to support his views. Last year, Pinker appeared on the Aporia Podcast, an outlet that supports a revival of race science. In 2024, the Guardian reported that one of Aporia’s cofounders, Matthew Frost, once said that he’d been recruiting mainstream writers to give the podcast “legitimacy via association.” Pinker gave them an hour. After the Guardian chastised him for appearing on Aporia, Pinker told the newspaper he only agreed to be interviewed after the outlet “attacked” his views on human progress. He also said he believes it is vital to persuade audiences one disagrees with, which is why he appears in media with diverse political orientations.
Pinker likes to say he manages his “controversy portfolio carefully.” But that means the trouble he might get into—not the trouble he creates for others by lending his credibility to people like Murray, with whom he engages rather than dismisses. Late last year, he and Murray had a back-and-forth in the Wall Street Journal about Murray’s views on “terminal lucidity” proving the existence of the soul; Pinker, ever skeptical of faith, chastised Murray for reaching beyond the data. But the debate itself was the point: Whether Pinker won the argument didn’t really matter—Murray got the platform, a serious intellectual exchange with a Harvard cognitive scientist.
Nicolas Guilhot, a professor of intellectual history at the European University Institute, has long tracked Pinker’s thinking and writing (including a tough review of Enlightenment Now in 2018 for a diplomacy and foreign policy journal). I asked him whether Pinker bears any responsibility for how his work gets used.
“Of course he can’t prevent people from running with his ideas,” Guilhot told me in an email. “But he is at the very least cavalier about what he knows are the possible—and probable—implications of the views he peddles. This is all the more problematic because there are no progressive policies to point to that would latch on to his view of human nature, while there is a plethora of right-wing and reactionary agendas that are based on it. None of this is an accident, and Pinker is very much a participant of the recent restoration of a deterministic idea of ‘nature’ that has seamlessly connected neoliberal projects (of which he is definitely a representative) to reactionary ones.”
I put this to Pinker directly: You insist on following evidence wherever it leads. Do you take any responsibility for who has followed your work—and where they’ve taken it?
“If I have been misleading or unclear in a way that would egg on deplorable actors, I would take responsibility for that,” Pinker says. “But if I express things perfectly clearly—there’s a huge world out there. I can’t take responsibility for how some random person out on Twitter interprets a paper or an interview if there’s no content in the interview that would actually egg on or encourage them. And I can’t boycott every forum whose members hold some opinion that some third party finds repugnant.”
Then, of course, there is Jeffrey Epstein.
Epstein collected heavyweight intellectuals, and in terms of funding and gifts seemed to have a particular affinity for Harvard. Pinker attended a few gatherings where he was present, but claims he never liked Epstein.
In 2008, Pinker’s friend and Harvard colleague Alan Dershowitz defended Epstein, who had been charged with soliciting prostitution from a minor. Dershowitz had consulted Pinker for help interpreting the wording of a statute concerning the use of the mail to solicit minors to engage in prostitution or sexual activity. For that crime, Epstein pleaded guilty and served 13 months in prison.
Pinker says he doesn’t blame Dershowitz for defending Epstein, nor does he believe he did anything wrong by helping interpret the law. “I believe in the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of legal representation of the accused,” Pinker says. “If I had known then what I know now about the extent of Epstein’s crimes, and that it would be used in his defense, I might have second thoughts.”
But Pinker got an early clue about just who Epstein was, and it didn’t stop him from showing up.
In the Epstein document trove released by the U.S. Department of Justice, more than 430 results mention Pinker—often emails about events Epstein buddies John Brockman, Pinker’s literary agent, and theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss wanted Pinker to attend (many emails are included several times). The only one from Pinker himself—to an Epstein assistant in March 2012, four years after the conviction—said he’d be “delighted to meet with him” when Epstein visited Harvard. “I probably shouldn’t have said yes,” Pinker says now, “but I was being polite—he was a donor to Harvard.” (Pinker says they didn’t ultimately meet up.)
In 2014, as part of a project he was working on, Krauss invited Pinker to help organize a conference at Arizona State University on the origins of violence after the publication of Better Angels. At the end of the event, Krauss asked Pinker to allow Epstein to come say hello, Pinker says. Someone snapped a picture, which now lives online.
“I would not have agreed to do anything that was associated with Epstein or branded with him,” Pinker says. “If I was perhaps more assertive, maybe less polite and Canadian, when Krauss said, ‘Will you let Epstein come over to your table and sit down with you?’ I could have said no. Probably I should have said no. I didn’t say no.” He also didn’t say no to organizing a conference largely funded by Epstein.
Pinker dismisses criticism of his connections as guilt by association—whether it’s Murray or Epstein, he insists that proximity isn’t endorsement. But the pattern is visible: years of polite yeses, a willingness to lend his credibility to people and platforms that most academics would avoid. At some point, the accumulation starts to speak for itself.
Which brings us back to Harvard—and whether Pinker is the right person to lead the university out of its current trouble.
Pinker, part of the Council on Academic Freedom that has been shaping policies at Harvard, has both critics and defenders in the world of academia. / Photo by Ken Richardson
The most important piece that Pinker has written about Harvard—and, really, higher education in general—was “Harvard Derangement Syndrome” last year for the New York Times, as the Trump administration’s threats on funding and problems within the university coalesced. It was a cry for sanity and a path forward. He prefaced it with: “I’m hardly an apologist for my employer when I say that the invective now being aimed at Harvard has become unhinged.”
Pinker pointed out that he had written “The Trouble With Harvard” for the New Republic back in 2014, which called for an admissions policy based on merit and took on the idea that professors should be engaged in their students’ self-discovery: “Perhaps I am emblematic of everything that’s wrong with elite American education, but I have no idea how to get students to build a self or become a soul.” In 2023, he wrote a five-point plan for the Globe on how Harvard could save itself, and “How I Wish Harvard Taught Students to Talk About Israel,” the piece that first caught my eye, along with others on problems at the school.
In “Harvard Derangement Syndrome,” Pinker made the case for proportionality. Yes, Harvard has serious problems—he’d been saying so for years. The appropriate treatment, Pinker argued, was to diagnose which parts need which remedies—not to “cut its carotid and watch it bleed out,” as he believed Trump and his allies were attempting to do. The school’s core mission was at risk, Pinker argued: If there’s fear of asking certain questions, then research is crippled, just as it would be by the government slashing funds to conduct it. And that funding is not a privilege for Harvard, but necessary to help us advance our understanding in any number of big ways.
Pinker ended his piece with a sort of call to arms, quoting physicist David Deutsch: “Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge.” To cripple the institutions that acquire and transmit knowledge, Pinker wrote, “is a tragic blunder and a crime against future generations.”
But writing op-eds is one thing. Could Pinker actually change anything?
In 2023, Pinker and five copresidents, along with dozens of other Harvard faculty, formed the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, made up now of some 200 members, which regularly challenges university policies and pushes for change. For Pinker and others on the Council, evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven essentially getting driven out of Harvard as a lecturer was a turning point—she had said in an interview in 2021 that the biological definitions of male and female are essential to science, then was summarily accused of transphobia, the fallout of which continued into 2023. “That’s kind of what DEI officers are empowered to do,” Pinker says: “The fact is, there is very little racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia on modern university campuses, especially in a Northeastern elite university like Harvard. So there’s actually nothing to root out—they’re going to have to be increasingly ingenious and energetic in interpreting things as transphobic so that they’ve got something to do.” Hooven had been Pinker’s teaching assistant as a graduate student, and he ended up bringing her back as an associate in his lab at Harvard.
A week before Christmas in 2023, two members of the Harvard Corporation, Paul Finnegan and Tracy Palandjian, asked members of the Council to join them for a private dinner at Bar Enza in Cambridge. It was a shocking invite: The Corporation runs Harvard, and they’re notoriously secretive. “It’s almost like the Politburo-watchers in the era of the Soviet Union,” Pinker says. “But this was at the moment of the university’s deepest crisis.” Then-president Claudine Gay was getting hammered for her handling of demonstrations over the October 7 Hamas attacks on Jews in Israel; she had testified before Congress two weeks earlier, and in early January, she would resign. “In a rare moment of openness, the Corporation was actually soliciting some faculty opinions,” Pinker says. Like a principal calling the mouthiest students down to the office to ask: How do I run this place?
The meeting was cordial, but Pinker and three other Council members were direct: “Large sectors of the country hold Harvard in contempt,” Pinker says he told Finnegan and Palandjian. “This is the Corporation’s problem.”
The meeting warranted an article in the New York Times a couple of days later, which didn’t please the Corporation; Pinker says the Council didn’t reach out to the paper. But he didn’t mind the exposure, writing to his Council colleagues (and sharing the emails with me): “They’re a legitimate target of reporting by the national media—the days when they could run Harvard like a private blue-blood Bostonian club are gone.” And this: “The public has a legitimate interest in knowing what led to this mess, and the Corporation is part of the story. To be honest, they screwed up in picking Claudine, they probably screwed up in keeping her, they screwed up in their plagiarism investigation [of her], including threatening the New York Post with a defamation lawsuit, and they screwed up in their public pronouncements.”
It was clearly go time, with Pinker leading the charge. His involvement and directness have given other faculty the courage to take public stands. Eric Maskin, the Nobel-winning economist and a copresident of the Council, puts it this way: “Steve has been effective within the Harvard community in emboldening people who were inclined in that direction not to shut up.” An interesting admission: that a Nobel laureate would think twice about the risk before speaking out.
The Council had only the one direct meeting with the Corporation. But they were just getting started. Pinker and former Harvard Medical School dean Jeffrey Flier kept writing occasional opinion pieces and worked back channels, especially through private conversations with Alan Garber, the president who replaced Gay; he proved much more open to their initiatives. The Council pushed for applicants to faculty jobs in arts and sciences to no longer be required to write diversity statements, “which pretty clearly,” Pinker says, “eliminated anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar.” The Council also pushed for institutional neutrality on issues that don’t directly affect the university, given how Harvard got into trouble, in particular, for Gay’s waffling rhetoric on demonstrations over the war in Gaza.
Both initiatives were adopted by Harvard.
Within Garber’s first few months as interim president after Gay resigned, he formed a working group on open inquiry and constructive dialogue at Harvard. It’s impossible to say how much the Council’s pressure—the op-eds, the behind-the-scenes meetings with Garber—got the ball rolling, but the working group’s report that October was clear in concluding that the lack of open inquiry is a crisis for higher education.
For Harvard to officially admit that, Flier says, is a big deal, and he is enthused: “Every time I write an article or an op-ed, I wonder ‘Will someone try to cancel me or destroy me now?’” Flier says. “That is less common today because there’s more awareness of this and there’s more opposition to it, and the people who used to do it are more afraid of doing it now. That is a huge change. And unless you lived through it, you wouldn’t see the change.”
Pinker is more cautiously optimistic. “I see green shoots,” he says. In his “Harvard Derangement Syndrome” piece, Pinker wrote, “Young people are shaped by peers more than most people realize.… In many cases, students’ politics are no more attributable to indoctrination by professors than are their green hair and pierced septums.” What can you do about that? Yet at least both the Corporation and Garber are speaking the Council’s language now, in public statements on academic freedom when Garber’s tenure was extended beyond 2027. “I think he was always on board,” Pinker says, “but he would not have prioritized it if not for our pressure.”
The Council will keep looking into graduate student education on academic freedom, Pinker says (given that many undergrads spend more time being taught by grad students than professors), and intellectual diversity of the faculty (affirmative action for conservatives, as Pinker half-jokingly puts it). They also plan to study—per Pinker’s obsession with data—how universities actually work. “Universities are surprisingly ignorant of how universities work,” he says. Pinker insists he’s gotten no pushback at Harvard for any of his public criticisms, or his push now for change.
But the greatest threat to Harvard, Pinker says, is from the outside: “that the Trump administration will attempt to cripple it using every means at its disposal. That with a compliant Supreme Court, it may not even matter if Harvard has the law on its side, which I think it does.”
It’s tough to predict where that will end, or how open to different points of view the university will really become. But something does feel different. The university is on notice. Pinker and the Council will keep pushing—as if taking a page from the wokeness playbook in keeping everybody on high alert. We’re watching.
Pinker is convinced he’s pursuing the truth as he finds it. His method has made him a star. It’s also left a trail of complications.
As always, Pinker is convinced he’s pursuing the truth as he finds it. His method has made him a star. It’s also left a trail of complications—the associations, the bad actors who cite his work, the questions about what doors he’s opened and for whom.
Whether that makes him the right person to lead Harvard out of its current troubles is a question the university will have to answer for itself. Pinker, for his part, shows no signs of slowing down. He carries on as if he is certain his work and beliefs deserve whatever airing he decides to give them.
It brings to mind the line Pinker quotes in The Blank Slate, from Chekhov: “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”
The question now is whether Pinker applies that same scrutiny to himself and the way he operates. Harvard may be waiting on the answer.
This article was first published in the print edition of the April 2026 issue, with the headline,“Man of Reason.”
