CNN —Black History Month, which gets underway this week, is a chance to give Americans the timely reminder that you can’t teach our history honestly without understanding Black struggle and triumph. There are few aspects of America’s past that haven’t been impacted by conscientious Black people and their resistance to systemic racism and illiberal democracy. The situation at Harvard has been made more dire by the university’s failure to push back sufficiently against broader political attacks. Another vocal critic of Penslar is the former Harvard president Lawrence Summers, who was also an outspoken opponent of Gay’s. As an academic institution, we should be leading the resistance to these assaults on higher education, not bowing to them.

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