Harvard’s Next President: Another ‘White Male Economist Named Larry’

Harvard University’s announcement on Sunday that Lawrence S. Bacow would be its new president has triggered inevitable questions about the university's choice of a leader who in many ways represents the status quo at the Ivy League institution.  At a time when college campuses are a key part of the national conversation about gender, race, and the #MeToo movement, naming Bacow — a former leader of Tufts University — as Harvard’s next president plays into patterns of longstanding leadership inequities, both in American society as a whole and in higher education specifically.