The headline of the March 22 article regarding the attack on assistant professor Christina J. Cross was misleading. This was not just part of an ongoing assault on DEI initiatives — this was a racially motivated attempt to defame Dr. Cross and diminish the scholarship of a member of the Harvard faculty.

It is time to stop the weaponization of the footnote.

The intent of the code of academic conduct is to prevent theft of ideas. It has been easy to turn this code of conduct into a cudgel because its standards are contextual and evolving. But we should be clear that we, like the general public, don’t care about arcane details — we care about integrity.

We care about integrity because we don’t view scholarship as an academic exercise but as a powerful way to understand and improve the world in which we live. This ambition implies challenge of the status quo. There will always be a range of opinions that emerge in scholarly dialogue; challenging ideas can face strong headwinds. However, we should make clear that we will fight attempts to silence or intimidate our scholars. We will protect academic freedom, including the freedom to study race, ethnicity, and social inequality, as Dr. Cross has done.

Finally, we should be clear that we evaluate scholarship in part by its impact on the world in which we live. The attack on Dr. Cross is a testament — albeit perverted and frightening — to her importance and the power of her work to change the world. We recognize and honor the power of that work as well as the work of Dr. Claudine Gay, Dr. Sherri A. Charleston, and Dr. Shirley R. Greene, whose scholarship and integrity have been similarly assaulted.

—Sarah Fortune, John LaPorte Given Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases; Kari C. Nadeau, John Rock Professor of Climate and Population Studies; John Quackenbush, Henry Pickering Walcott Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics

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