Harvard Might Create a Conservative Center. Is It Real or Just Window Dressing?

By Andrew Gillen

Monday, August 11, 2025

 

The news that Harvard University is considering establishing a new conservative center is being met with near-universal skepticism. Progressives see the center as a surrender in the face of relentless attacks from the Trump administration on higher education in general and Harvard in particular. Conservatives worry that the proposed new center will be an exercise in giving the appearance of reform without really reforming.

 

Conservatives are probably right to be skeptical. Like much of higher education, Harvard is politically skewed. Surveys indicate that 77 percent of Harvard professors self-identify as “liberal” (with 32 percent saying they are “very liberal”) while just 3 percent say they are “conservative” (with just 0.4 percent saying they’re “very conservative”). A university that saw no problem with this until its federal funding was threatened is probably not serious about recognizing the problem; or, even if it does grasp it, it’s probably not well-equipped to fix it.

 

Further, the university’s recent efforts to combat antisemitism warrant skepticism. Those who thought antisemitism was a problem that needed fixing kept resigning from committees in frustration. As former Harvard President Larry Summers noted on X, one of the leaders of the effort “publicly minimized Harvard’s anti-Semitism problem, rejected the definition used by the US government in recent years of anti-Semitism as too broad, invoked the need for the concept of settler colonialism in analyzing Israel, referred to Israel as an apartheid state and more.”

 

“Could one imagine Harvard appointing as head of anti-racism task force someone who had minimized the racism problem or who had argued against federal anti-racism efforts?” Summers added.

 

So, yes, skepticism is warranted, but that doesn’t mean that such a center is not needed or cannot succeed. Fortunately, there’s a way to tell whether any new center is set up to bring new voices to campus or is just being used to give the appearance of reform while allowing the political monoculture to remain entrenched. A method known as “ICE HE” looks for the following five indicators:

 

Independence: Is the new center independent of the rest of the university? Just as the chemistry department has little influence over the philosophy department, neither should existing departments have much influence over the new center.

 

Competition for students: Can the new center teach classes in areas where the status quo is skewed? If the new center thinks that English courses have been hijacked by activists pushing Marxism or that biology classes are teaching identity dogma instead of science, can it offer competing courses to students? Or is the center instead used to quarantine all conservative thought on campus?

 

Equitable funding: Is the new center funded the same way as the rest of the university? If the new center must raise its own funding, essentially paying the university to exist, while the rest of the university doesn’t, then there’s a problem.

 

Hiring freedom: Who controls faculty hiring? Suppose you set up a new center to study social problems but let the existing sociology department control hiring. In that case, you’ll end up with a clone of the sociology department. A new center therefore needs the freedom to hire faculty without requiring the approval of the existing faculty. After all, the decisions of existing faculty are how we got into this mess in the first place.

 

Even playing field: Is the college trying to sabotage the new center? If the new center’s offices are located in the basement of a remote off-campus building, or their classes are only available on Saturday mornings, or the admissions office rejects students who are likely to be interested in the new center, then the university is clearly trying to sabotage the center.

 

It should be noted that a new center doesn’t need to achieve every aspect of ICE HE. Indeed, I don’t know of a single center anywhere in the country that does meet all five conditions. But the more conditions that are met, the greater the chance of success. But if you see a new center that fails to meet any of the conditions, or only meets one or two conditions, it’s not a real attempt at reform.