An illuminating history of Harvard College, one of the institutions that made America what it is today, from its precarious colonial origins to its conflicted role as a bastion of elites and a beacon of meritocracy in an age suspicious of both.

When Harvard College was born into the colonial wilderness in 1636, its survival was far from assured. And yet, as Adam Begley chronicles in his fascinating, partly personal, people-driven history of the college, this humble training ground for clergy became the premier place where New England sent its privileged sons to be educated. Soon the nation followed suit, which gave the college a central role not only in perpetuating class divisions but in advancing America’s ideas about education itself.

Begley tells the story of Harvard’s enduring struggle to define what an elite education is—and who that education is for—by focusing on representative Harvard people: We meet Henry Dunster, the early college’s devoted president who clashed with the school’s trustees over religious doctrine, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the superstar African American Studies professor whose deft networking gave him unprecedented power and influence. Fair Harvard offers sharply drawn portraits of the people whose work helped transform the college and the country. Along the way we also meet students who embody opposing Harvard tendencies, including Begley’s own parents—his mother a bright but troubled tenth-generation legacy, his father a brilliant, ambitious refugee from war-torn Europe—as well as a remarkable group of recent undergraduates with surprising opinions about Harvard, privilege, and the limits of what a commitment to meritocracy can achieve.

Written with wit, erudition, and a keen sense of irony, Fair Harvard is at once an engrossing look at a peerless global institution and a reckoning with the ideals that have long guided the college’s ideas about itself—especially as they collide with an angry United States President and a public distrustful of elites and disdainful of meritocracy.