Are You Ready For … the Harvard School of Conservatism?

I might be. You might be. The Trump administration is not, as we’ll see, and questions will arise whether Harvard itself is ready and willing to engage in honest viewpoint diversity. 

Finding itself in increasingly desperate straits, Harvard has searched frantically for a face-saving exit from its battle with Donald Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon. Harvard president Alan Garber has even begun considering a concession to conservatives on campus — the few that actually exist there any longer — by establishing a center for “conservative scholarship.” The Wall Street Journal reports that the proposal bases itself on Stanford’s Hoover Institute:

The idea has circulated at the university for several years but gained steam after pro-Palestinian protests began disrupting campus in late 2023. Harvard has discussed the effort with potential donors, people familiar with the matter said. The cost of creating such a center could run somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion, a person familiar with Harvard’s thinking estimated.

A spokesman for Harvard said an initiative under discussion “will ensure exposure to the broadest ranges of perspectives on issues, and will not be partisan, but rather will model the use of evidence-based, rigorous logic and a willingness to engage with opposing views.” He added that the school has been accelerating efforts to set up the initiative, which would “promote and support viewpoint diversity.” …

Harvard President Alan Garber helped promote an “intellectual vitality” program to reinvigorate debate on campus and ensure students engage in discussions free of self-censorship.

Ahem. Universities are themselves supposed to be “intellectual vitality programs.” That’s literally their historical reason for existence. If Harvard needs an adjunct program to accomplish that task, that speaks volumes about Harvard. It means that Garber has essentially given up on true viewpoint diversity, likely because his entrenched and tenured faculty everywhere else on campus simply will not stand for it. That’s because only three percent of that faculty identify as politically conservative, according to a survey two years ago by the Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper. 

The costs here are instructive, too. Why would it take a billion dollars to organize a conservative-oriented think tank? It’s not as if Harvard doesn’t have an infrastructure in place for such facilities. They wouldn’t be hiring Aaron Rodgers or Shohei Otani as scholars or administrators. How much does letterhead and some office space cost, anyway? 

Tell Garber to give me $250 million and some office space on campus, and I’d put together a Hayek Institute (or a Friedman Institute, or best yet a Sowell Institute) that would actually work. For one thing, at least I’d have some passing familiarity with conservative principles, which Harvard lacks. (I hear you snickering in the comments!) What does Garber know about conservative thought, let alone about who and what to feature within it? 

This bloated cost projection is nothing more than an attempt to wheedle Trump and McMahon into releasing the federal funds that they have frozen in the Harvard contretemps. Gee, if we had a billion dollars, we’d build a conservative institute! Well, they have a declared value of $53 billion in their endowment, and I’ve yet to see this proposal funded, let alone any ground-breaking ceremonies at the Harvard Institute for the Anthropological Study of Conservatives. 

According to the WSJ, the White House isn’t buying it — figuratively or literally:

The Trump administration would view the creation of a new institute as window-dressing and wouldn’t see it as a meaningful part of their negotiations, said a person familiar with the administration’s views.

Nor should they. Even if this proposal were on the level, and it seems pretty difficult to credit Garber for good faith, it doesn’t address the core problems at Harvard. They have an entrenched faculty and administrator class that is at least 97% hostile to any viewpoint diversity in classrooms and on campuses. Their pedagogy is less about education and “intellectual vitality” than it is about ideological indoctrination and radicalization. Both faculty and the student body conduct intimidation campaigns against Jewish students and faculty, and they refuse to comply with the educational provisions in the Civil Rights Act and the requirements of the foreign-student visa program. 

Even a well-meaning conservative think tank on campus would do nothing to force the reforms needed at Harvard. At best, it’s a non-sequituir, and one suspects it’s intended to serve as a beard for the radical progressives.