The resignation of Harvard University’s president, Lawrence Bacow, after five years at the helm of America’s oldest university signals further tumult after a period marked by dealing with the pandemic, a series of conflicts with both students and faculty, and a looming constitutional challenge.     

The son of immigrants who escaped Nazi persecution, Mr.  Bacow earned three degrees from Harvard. He was previously the chancellor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the president of Tufts University, a job he took “expecting it to be my last,” he told the Tufts Daily in 2006. 

Twelve years later, he became the 29th president of Harvard. His half-decade tenure failed to match that of his predecessor, Drew Gilpin Faust, who served for 12 years. “There is never a good time to leave a job like this, but now seems right to me,” Mr. Bacow wrote in a message to the Harvard community explaining his departure.

President Bacow’s move comes amid a reshaping of Harvard’s leadership. The Senior Fellow of the Harvard Corporation, one of the school’s governing bodies, William Lee, is set to depart at the end of June and one of the university’s most powerful administrators, Executive Vice President Katherine Lapp, is stepping down this summer. 

Mr. Bacow led the university through a radical transition to remote learning in March 2020, when Harvard became one of the first colleges to send students home due to the Covid-19 pandemic. A full return to campus occured only a year and a half later. Two classes graduated via Zoom. 

Harvard was no stranger to conflict with faculty during Mr. Bacow’s years as president. In 2019, an economics professor, Roland Fryer, was suspended and disciplined following accusations of sending sexually inappropriate text messages to staff, a response some saw as motivated by ideological discomfort with Mr. Fryer’s work. 

In July 2021, philosopher Cornel West, whose relationship with Harvard over the years has been marked by turmoil, resigned after he failed to receive tenure. In a letter posted on Twitter, Professor West accused the university of “spiritual rot.”

Mr. Bacow defended the importance of free speech and diverse thought on campus in a February 2021 address to faculty. “Anyone who speaks on our campus must answer questions and is expected to engage in the kind of civil dialogue we hope to see in the wider world,” he said.

Yet in that same address, Mr. Bacow supported the Harvard Kennedy School’s removal of Representative Elise Stefanik from the Institute of Politics’s senior advisory committee in January 2021 after she endorsed claims of voter fraud in the election of President Biden. 

Mr. Bacow, who once asserted “the heckler’s veto has no place at Harvard,” was seen as capitulating on precisely that point when he came under fire for Mrs. Stefanik’s role on campus.     

In justifying his retreat, Mr. Bacow explained that Mrs. Stefanik’s political position “made the Congresswoman’s position as an adviser to an organization dedicated to promoting undergraduate engagement with that same electoral process untenable.” 

Mr. Bacow also witnessed legal challenges to the university. In February 2022, three graduate students in anthropology filed a lawsuit against Harvard claiming the university neglected years of sexual harrassment and retaliation by a tenured professor, John Comaroff, who has denied the allegations. He is currently sanctioned.  

Most consequentially, a legal challenge brought by the nonprofit Students for Fair Admissions alleged Harvard discriminated against Asian-American applicants. The Supreme Court will hear the case this fall. It has the potential to alter the process for selecting students at Harvard, and schools across the country. 

Mr. Bacow’s administration released a watershed report in April detailing the history of slavery at Harvard. The university subsequently pledged $100 million to the cause in order to “address the persistent corrosive effects of those historical practices on individuals, on Harvard, and on our society.”

The search for Mr. Bacow took seven months and involved reviews of more than 700 candidates. The process for picking Harvard’s next leader is likely to be no less arduous, given the scale of the challenges that lie ahead.