A chill has come early to Harvard this year. Last week, the university announced that President Trump’s increasingly unhireable, unfrocked campaign manager Corey Lewandowski had been offered a perch as a fellow at its Institute of Politics, traditionally an aerie for politicos in between jobs. (The fellows’ obligations include hosting events and fielding questions from students, faculty members, and opinionated retirees.) This week, Sean Spicer, the White House’s gum-gnashing former press secretary was also added to the I.O.P. roster, leading some onlookers to speculate that the Institute had its eye on the camera lens more than on the seminar table. Theatre and politics turn out to be easy bedfellows, even when private ideologies stand far apart.

If theatre was the goal, though, the I.O.P. got a surprise act yesterday, after it was announced that the document leaker and trans activist Chelsea Manning would also be joining the bill. Michael Morell, a former deputy director of the C.I.A., resigned from a different fellowship in protest, and the current C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo, cancelled an I.O.P. appearance last night. Then, as if to cap off the week’s appointments and disappointments, the Times printed the results of a recent Marshall Project investigation, revealing the Harvard administration’s decision to reverse an admissions recommendation for Michelle Jones, a Ph.D. applicant released from prison. Jones had been convicted of murdering her four-year-old son, in 1992; twenty-five years later, having published, presented at conferences, and won an academic award while serving a twenty-year prison term, she sought admission to a Ph.D. program. Harvard’s history department moved to accept her, but administrators didn’t approve the acceptance. Jones is now a doctoral student at N.Y.U. Just a couple of weeks into its autumn term, Harvard has somehow managed to spread offense and resentment as roundly as a cloud dropping sleet over Boston in late March.

Is Harvard free to make unpopular decisions in the service of its academic mission? Definitely. Does it deserve the public slings and arrows hurled in its direction this week? Actually, it does. As recently as the middle twentieth century, private universities were institutions with little direct social role, built on cloistral research and devoted to patrician cultural inheritance. By the late sixties, however, that mission had begun to change. Research was more often expected to have a public face and a social (perhaps even military) function. College became a more common experience for the middle classes; curricula moved from a unified canon and toward the study of many traditions, taught by specialists. Élitism, still flagrant, referred less to who applied than to who got in. Universities were no longer retreats for research but institutes supposed to serve the public good.

In the magazine, I’ve written often, and from several angles, about the problems and paradoxes that emerge as the old and new models collide. The collision is messy, especially because a newly outward-facing school can hardly shut its gates to public judgment. Many observers perceive some disingenuousness in universities’ claims of academic freedom and the safe exchange of ideas. They are not wrong. An institution that rewards its scholars for writing trade books, gracing Charlie Rose’s table, warming seats on CNN, or broadcasting their wisdom for thousands over the Web—an institution that regularly vacuums up personnel from the executive branch—cannot reasonably claim to operate on principles apart from those of public life.

Whatever right-wing-pundit-heavy reality show Harvard’s I.O.P. may hope to cook up with Lewandowski and Spicer, in other words, is not as foreign to twenty-first-century academe as one might suppose: universities already own a corner of the spectacle biz. The scrutiny that results challenges schools less proud than Harvard. Last night, as debate about the various fellows raged, the University of California, Berkeley, was the site of a talk by the right-wing writer and erstwhile Breitbart News editor Ben Shapiro—an event targeted by hundreds of protesters. But, where Berkeley’s administrative approach seemed basically sound (let the extremist speak, not in academic protection but under the glare of public opinion; let people, from inside and outside the school, challenge him on the campus as they would in a town square), Harvard seems to have tripped over its robes.

Late yesterday, Douglas W. Elmendorf, the dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, which houses the I.O.P., publicly rescinded the Institute’s fellowship offer to Manning. “I still think that having her speak in the Forum and talk with students is consistent with our longstanding approach, which puts great emphasis on the value of hearing from a diverse collection of people,” he wrote in a statement. “But I see more clearly now that many people view a Visiting Fellow title as an honorific, so we should weigh that consideration when offering invitations. In particular, I think we should weigh, for each potential visitor, what members of the Kennedy School community could learn from that person’s visit against the extent to which that person’s conduct fulfills the values of public service to which we aspire.”

The fatuity of this thinking is obvious. Elmendorf nods to pieties about Harvard being in the ideas business but concedes that, even more, Harvard is in the image business. Manning is an unfit guest of the I.O.P., he explains, because the Institute does not want to be seen giving her an honor; the putatively bad “optics” (as the TV people say) outweigh whatever she might say.

This is a deeply embarrassing thing for any university dean to admit accidentally, let alone to put in writing. That it is surely true does not exactly absolve the remarks. What are these tantalizingly unspecified “values of public service” that guide Elmendorf’s decision? Presumably, they have nothing to do with L.G.B.T.Q. activism, for which Manning has recently become an honored and quite mainstream voice. (Shortly after Manning’s release, I spent a period of days interviewing her about her activism and new freedom for a profile in The New Yorker’s stylish sister, Vogue.) Presumably, too, they have little to do with taking responsibility. Manning pleaded guilty to ten charges and served seven years in prison for crimes she continues to acknowledge; her sentence was commuted, with reasoned comment, by the President of the United States. In favoring her image over the gnarlier ground of her ideas, Elmendorf champions one standard of public-service virtue over another—an inherently political choice. He appears to side with those who, in disagreement with the former Commander-in-Chief, don’t believe that Manning has been adequately punished, or that she should enjoy the privileges of free civilian life.

All this echoes, strongly and uncomfortably, Harvard administrators’ decision about Michelle Jones. In the Times piece about the case, John Stauffer, one of two American-studies professors who flagged Jones’s file for administrative review, said, “Frankly, we knew that anyone could just punch her crime into Google, and Fox News would probably say that P.C. liberal Harvard gave 200 grand of funding to a child murderer, who also happened to be a minority. I mean, c’mon.” Again, no doubt an honest quote, admitting Harvard’s concern for public opinion over academic interest. Again, though, embarrassing. One hopes that Stauffer, a distinguished scholar who works on protest movements, race, and abolitionism, cringed to notice that he appears to be likening the shadow of a past crime to the shadow of minority status: no university wants to be caught seeming to weigh the public-opinion ramifications of skin tone in admissions decisions.

More sadly, the Jones decision shirks an opportunity to define what the twenty-first-century university is. Jones is a woman who, by all accounts, emerged from a nightmare past to embrace a productive life of the mind. She served a sentence for her crime. She’s free, and now she wants to use the university to harness what she’s learned. (Jones’s scholarly interest is the history of incarceration.) She appears to have seen Harvard as an agent of access and transformation; she dived into serious scholarship but did not shy from turning her expertise—and her experience—outward, for a public purpose. The university could ask for no better student in whom to reconcile the disparate, conflicting parts of its mission. Yet it passed, apparently only in deference to the basest measures of prime-time opinion. Universities like to think of themselves as beacons of enlightenment. This week, though, Harvard staked out a future in the dark.