By Stanley Kurtz
Wednesday, May 28, 2025
This past Sunday’s New York Times opinion section
featured a long op-ed by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker in defense of
his university. A frequent internal critic of Harvard, Pinker acknowledged real
problems at the school. Yet he also went after those supposedly afflicted by
what he calls Harvard Derangement Syndrome, a disorder that causes critics to
lose all perspective, seeing only evil where a mixture of good and bad exists.
Pinker’s piece is heartfelt, thoughtful — and off target.
Harvard has rightly lost legitimacy in the eyes of a goodly portion of the
American public. The school has betrayed its very motto and purpose — the
search for truth, veritas. Harvard has become an effectively partisan
institution, undeserving of public support.
This does not mean that important scientific research and
valuable, apolitical instruction in introductory languages and basic sciences
does not also take place at Harvard, as Pinker says. Nor does it prevent the
occasional plucky conservative student from running the gauntlet of opposition
and emerging the better for it. The existence of these goods may pose practical
challenges to a complete cutoff of federal support. Yet none of that gainsays
the fact that Harvard has sacrificed its legitimate claim on the public purse.
The New York Times has no proper call on public
financial support, although it is in many ways an excellent paper filled with
deeply reported stories, often on apolitical topics, and although its coverage
of controversial political and cultural issues is informative even when biased.
We wouldn’t expect the public to support a private news outlet that is
effectively the voice of the Democratic Party. (NPR is the controversial
exception that proves the rule.) Nor should the public be expected to support
universities that have become de facto instruments of political and cultural
partisanship.
Partisanship has taken over the academy to the point
where it is next to impossible to receive beneficial training in science or
languages without also being subjected to one-sided politicking in nontechnical
subjects. Families rightly worry that the price of a scientific or mathematical
education for their children is a four-year campaign to alienate their
offspring from their parents’ values. Rather than being a saving grace, as
Pinker would have it, nonpartisan courses like engineering or science are the
bait that draws students into ideological manipulation.
Yes, it worked for decades. Half the country tolerated
the academy’s egregious bias for the sake of science, medicine, languages,
business, and, above all, the doors opened by a prestigious degree. Those days
are over. After decades of frog boiling, the water finally got too hot too
fast. Safe spaces and microaggressions seemed almost entertainingly funny at
first. But when the woke tide burst the academy’s bounds and spilled into human
relations offices, elementary school classrooms, and girls’ sports, a line was
crossed. Anyone, anywhere — even your children — could get canceled. It was
instantly understood that the country had become the campus. What was once a
joke was now a very real threat.
Pinker is a cofounder of Harvard’s Council on Academic
Freedom. That’s great. The council comes to the defense of professors who are
canceled for being politically incorrect, and Pinker cites numerous such
cancellations at Harvard. He also acknowledges that the significance of these
cases goes beyond the individuals involved. After all, every public
cancellation acts as a standing threat to everyone who’s witnessed it. Yet for
all that, says Pinker, things are not so bad at Harvard, pointing to himself as
proof. He’s taught many politically incorrect concepts over the years and has
never once been canceled. In general, Pinker says, heterodox opinions are
frequently voiced at Harvard, without kicking up a fuss. Conservatives, in
other words, are exaggerating Harvard’s problems.
Actually, Pinker is underplaying the problems. The real
difficulty is that conservative academics don’t get appointed to begin with.
That is the most important source of Harvard’s illegitimacy. The founding American statement on academic freedom is the 1915
Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure promulgated
by the then newly founded American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
The latter part of that declaration highlights the responsibilities that
accompany academic freedom. This is the material that the contemporary
professoriate has forgotten, betrayed, and even, at points, repudiated.
The 1915 declaration warns of trouble “if this profession
should prove itself unwilling . . . to prevent the freedom which it claims in
the name of science from being used as a shelter . . . for uncritical and
intemperate partisanship.” Should the academy not police itself for
partisanship, says the fledgling AAUP, “it is certain that the task will be
performed by others—by others who lack essential qualifications for performing
it,” and whose actions will be “deeply injurious to the internal order and the public
standing of universities.” This is obviously a warning against government
intervention, yet it also clearly cites irresponsible partisanship on the part
of professors as the likely cause of such intervention.
The 1915 declaration goes on to warn faculty against
indoctrinating students, emphasizing the importance of exposing students to
both sides of the argument on “controverted issues.” The declaration continues,
“It is manifestly desirable that such teachers have minds untrammeled by party
loyalties, unexcited by party enthusiasms, and unbiased by personal political
ambitions; and that universities should remain uninvolved in party
antagonisms.” That doesn’t sound like Harvard to me. The problem is not merely a
lack of partisan restraint on the part of Harvard’s faculty, but the sheer
absence of professors most able to convey the conservative side of the argument
on “controverted issues.”
How did Harvard’s faculty become so one-sided? An
important part of the answer is that hard leftists on the faculty simply don’t
believe in classical liberal notions such as impartiality, or the distinction
between knowledge and politics. In other words, faculty leftists don’t accept
the founding premises of academic freedom. These sorts of professors make no
effort either to hire without regard to politics, or to seek out the finest
representatives of contending points of view. On the contrary, faculty on the
left have generally worked to reproduce themselves politically. As a result,
very few conservatives remain on the faculty. Hard-left professors will cry
“academic freedom” when their intellectual monopoly is put at risk by outside
forces. Yet the truth is, they care nothing for academic freedom in its true
and fuller meaning. They simply deploy the phrase as a cudgel to protect their
political cartel.
Pinker’s relatively small Council on Academic Freedom is
far better than that. They mean it when they speak of academic freedom. Yet it
remains difficult for these professors to confront the reality that the left’s
faculty monopoly has destroyed the very basis of academic freedom at Harvard.
Pinker’s group is better at protecting those who already have appointments than
at dismantling the ideological filter that’s corrupted the appointment system
itself.
Jonathan Turley chides the Harvard faculty members now loudly complaining
about the Trump administration’s actions for having been “entirely silent for
years as departments purged their ranks of conservatives to create one of the
most perfectly sealed-off echo chambers in all of higher education.” When I
taught as a lecturer at Harvard in the mid- to late 1990s, I got to see some of
that purging at work. From what I saw of the nearly nonexistent number of
conservatives on the tenure track, the fix against them was in from the start.
When Harvard’s Department of Government voted on tenure for one of them, the
university betrayed its own rules and regulations to deny the
candidate’s promotion.
Pinker denies that Harvard is a leftist indoctrination
camp — that’s Harvard Derangement Syndrome at work, he says. Well, I taught in
Harvard’s Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, a selective and popular
interdisciplinary major in social and political theory and the social sciences.
One of my jobs was to co-teach the large great books course required of all
majors, so I had plenty of opportunity to see other faculty at work. Virtually
the entire departmental faculty co-taught that course. The year I entered,
leftists on the faculty had reworked the reading list, bringing in authors such
as Jurgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, and a large assortment of radical
feminists. The choice between neo-Marxism and postmodernism became something
close to the dominant theme of the course. The faculty — a mixture of junior
faculty on the tenure track, lecturers, and grad students — were very far to
the left. Many held President Clinton in contempt (from the left). At least a
plurality, and probably a majority, were socialists of one sort or other.
Similarly, at least a plurality, and likely a majority, were effectively
proselytizing for their leftist political views in class.
Indoctrination camp? Not very far off the mark. Sure, the
students were wonderful. And I liked many of my faculty colleagues. There was
real learning going on and evidence of genuine thoughtfulness — although most
of it remained cabined within the approved ideological boundaries. In other
words, it was entirely contrary to the spirit and the letter of the 1915 AAUP
declaration on academic freedom.
Is this the sort of thing the public ought to be called
on to subsidize? Almost everything we now call “woke” I encountered during my
years at Social Studies — without proper balance or challenge. We were teaching
America’s future leaders. Our program’s graduates helped give the new ideology
its dominant position in the culture — without adequate vetting or challenge.
Never in our program did the other side get a proper hearing. That, itself, is
a kind of proselytism.
Let’s return for a moment to that founding 1915 AAUP
declaration on academic freedom. Something else about it is both important and
forgotten. The declaration makes the point that both public and private
institutions are obligated to uphold academic freedom, except in cases where
they explicitly acknowledge a preexisting institutional religious or
ideological commitment.
According to the AAUP declaration, in other words,
private institutions are in no way exempted from the requirement of
nonpartisanship. Here is the reason. Any right to push a particular ideological
perspective, says the declaration, “is waived by the appeal to the general
public for contributions and for moral support in the maintenance, not of a
propaganda, but of a non-partisan institution of learning.” That is, once a
private university appeals to the general public for financial contributions,
the public’s diversity of political perspective obligates that university to
maintain a position of nonpartisanship. How much more so does this apply in our
era, when private universities not only solicit private contributions but take
billions of dollars in public money?
Pinker cites some questionable statistics to claim that
Harvard’s courses are less biased than generally supposed. The problem with his
stats is that they mix apolitical courses like engineering and computer science
with more politicized courses in the humanities and the social sciences. Not
every course can be politicized. The point is, most of what can be politicized
has been politicized — and in only one direction. Pinker concedes that about a
third of Harvard’s general education courses have “a discernible leftward
tilt.” That is a lot, and it doesn’t even count the tilt not openly
acknowledged in the course description. Maybe a big part of the reason why tech
types are so lefty nowadays is that the courses they take to supplement their
apolitical technical training all lean one way.
At another point, Pinker lauds Harvard for having
centralized its enforcement of disruptive protests, thus preventing what he
calls “faculty nullification” of student discipline. This contains a telling
concession. Faculty cannot be trusted to discipline disruptive leftist
protesters because the faculty themselves are illiberal leftists with low
regard for the rules of civil discourse. Are we to trust a faculty that cannot
be relied upon to discipline shout-downs or antisemitic harassment with
appointing new professors based strictly on expertise, not politics? The
question answers itself.
If Pinker’s relatively small Academic Freedom Council
alone were in charge of selecting new faculty, I might believe that a change
could come from strictly internal forces. Yet trusting the much larger
left-dominated faculty that has purged conservatives and consolidated its
monopoly for decades is folly. Pinker can float his suggestions for achieving
intellectual diversity. The faculty will ignore them.
True, the government may well make a mess of things if it
intervenes to control faculty appointments. Yet asking the public to stay its
hand on the grounds of an academic freedom whose principles of nonpartisanship
were long ago abandoned by Harvard’s faculty is a nonstarter. I’ve already
proposed a possible compromise solution to Harvard’s battle with Trump. I think
it’s the best way of bringing in new faculty that can be found under the
current imperfect circumstances.
Harvey Mansfield, Harvard’s longtime standout
conservative professor, recently told an
interviewer that Harvard “totally lacks . . . viewpoint diversity” and has
effectively forged “an informal alliance with the Democratic Party.” I find
that a more accurate assessment than Pinker’s. And again, Mansfield’s portrayal
of Harvard’s reality stands in complete opposition to the original conception
of academic freedom. If Mansfield is right, then Pinker’s well-intentioned
group notwithstanding, there is no true academic freedom at Harvard, and there
hasn’t been for some time, only a polite fiction.
The idea that the left’s iron grip over Harvard’s faculty
will be surrendered in the absence of outside pressure is a pipe dream. Federal
intervention is a bad idea that is nonetheless necessitated by the
determination of Harvard’s faculty to flout the principles of liberal education
and academic freedom alike.
It was all predicted in 1915 and has come to pass
precisely because Harvard’s faculty — with honorable exceptions like Pinker —
has actively rejected the foundation upon which its academic freedom rests.
Harvard has tarnished its good name, and the public must act accordingly.
Whether every jot and tittle of the administration’s actions on Harvard is well
advised is another question. Be that as it may, the hammer must come down on
Harvard. I’m glad the Trump administration is wielding it.
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