Can universities be trusted to reform internally, or is external pressure required?

Step back, and imagine an analogy: your local police department has a bunch of problems with its professionalism, and there is tons of evidence of this.

Now ask yourself this hypothetical question: Is the department more likely to reform internally without external accountability, or with external pressure?

OK. Now why would universities be any different? Human nature is the same. When over-using a parking meter, how often do people call the police to ask for a parking ticket? Did the Catholic Church undergo a true self-reformation? Do corporations keep as meticulous accounting records when they are never audited externally? Lacking external pressure and accountability, how likely is it that a school of nutrition whose faculty is 97% vegetarian will internally reform to allow the views of carnivores and omnivores to be represented in teaching and research, and to ensure they are not discriminated against in admissions and hiring?

Similarly, scholars who benefit from their ideological monoculture in academia have little reason to challenge the system that feeds and rewards them. Among Harvard faculty, there are approximately 5540% more liberals than conservatives. People listen to academics because they are supposed to be competent and good people. Admitting to internal pedagogical, intellectual, and moral problems, and fixing them, would undermine their own authority. That would spoil the party. Why would a university leader voluntarily give up their brittle prestige, moral self-image, and intellectual comfort? There is an inherent conflict of interest for insiders to reform. Change from within is a losing bet with those psychological incentives.

In addition, there is an ironic revulsion among too many academics to being reformed by external parties they deem intellectually and morally inferior. Today’s academics — especially in the social sciences and humanities — are rarely known for their humility. Too often, they are activists first, and have a sanctimonious drive to reform the world in their own image (rather than study and understand the world in a disinterested manner), yet also tend to view the median, patriotic, common-sense conservative American with disdain. You hear it at the end of a joke in class. Thus, the idea of their own house being cleaned up by external less credentialed forces, especially democratically elected officials (sorry, I meant "populists"), is an unacceptable ego threat.

Credentialed academics, being highly linguistic creatures, also mistake discourse and discussion for progress in the non-propositional world; they misrecognize the ways of logic for the social logic of how things work and get done in the world. Conferences, white papers, op-eds, blogs, and eminently articulate statements do not change the world, as much as material incentives and public accountability. The graduate seminar room is not the president’s office. Politics is not the same as philosophy. That is why DEI has been inhibited and thwarted more in the last 12 months than it has in the last 12 years combined.

On top of that, the epistemology behind many internal reform efforts is too relativistic and pluralistic, and therefore powerless to stand up to dominant ideologies like DEI or critical constructivism (wokeism). These secular religions will tend to outcompete moderates, and will only be displaced by stronger frameworks that actually believe in truth and goodness, not neutral hand-wringing. Internal reformers who are militantly agnostic about the university’s teleology, charmingly harmless and inoffensive, allergic to moral judgments, and more focused on being agreeable than truthful, are not likely to succeed in substantive reform.

Nor have they tended to in the past. Failures of academic freedom have persisted for many decades despite years of internal warning. For decades, universities have resisted or attempted creative work-arounds to bans by courts of speech codes and affirmative action. Many of the reforms being demanded from the outside now are things elite universities themselves admit they should have implemented decades ago, but never got around to, and were actively resisted until external pressure and shame arrived. It reminds me of a person with worsening gingivitis waiting decades to get surgery and a humiliating lecture from their dentist, and finally getting dragged in by a spouse.

Universities tend not to be self-correcting ecosystems. Like corporations before the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (mandating financial record reporting), or police departments before federal consent decrees, universities tend to protect and reward their own insiders for maintaining things as they are; and insiders are, ironically, the very people who are supposed to be responsible for change! That is a conflict of interest; it isn’t a reform recipe consistent with human nature.

At this stage of self-destruction, external accountability isn’t ideological intrusion or tyranny, it’s institutional triage.

***

What about Heterodox Academy?

I have great respect for Heterodox Academy and its mission, indeed I have been a member of Heterodox Academy since its inception, and its leader, John Tomasi, is someone I know and admire (I was one of his teaching assistants when he was at Brown). I believe Heterodox Academy has contributed important ideas and initiatives to the conversation, and I have even contributed to their blog.

Yet, respectfully, I think Heterodox Academy is incorrect to oppose the Manhattan Statement on Higher Education, while preferring “internal reform” and “insider attention and action”.

Why?

A 10 year analysis of insiders shows they have been ineffective: internal reform efforts, while noble, have as an empirical matter largely failed to produce meaningful structural change over the last decade. Despite increasing awareness of the challenges to free inquiry and institutional neutrality over the past 10 years (the tenure of Heterodox Academy), the prevailing culture has within most elite universities become more, not less, resistant to academic freedom, civil discourse, ideological diversity, open inquiry, and truth seeking. Things would likely have been even worse without the internal reform efforts of Heterodox Academy. But zoom out and see the larger trends over a decade.

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The evidence is overwhelming and hard to deny: things have been worsening, not improving, over the past 10 years since Heterodox Academy was formed:

• in 2024: 83% of US academics agree “that free speech was more limited than ten years ago”. Internal reform hasn’t made free speech increase over time.

• Speech codes and bureaucratic restrictions on expression got worse over the past decade (in 2024: “85% of top colleges have restrictive speech code…the number of schools with the worst polices is increasing”)

• DEI loyalty oaths in hiring and promotion were hardly heard of 20 years ago, and since then became widespread. Internal reform did little to fix this. It got so bad that in 2017, “UC Berkeley search committee rejected 600 of over 800 applicants based solely on their DEI statements”. Harvard dribbled out a ban of DEI statements in one of its schools on its own (Faculty of Arts and Sciences), but as far as I know, untouched until external pressure were the dozens of remaining schools, centers, academic hospitals, and related centers.

• Violations of civil rights law and meritocracy in admissions was never fixed by internal reform for decades, and was only called out by outside accountability from the Supreme Court (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 2023). Students were given hundreds of percentage points in advantages, and penalties, depending on their race.

• Non-meritocratic hiring and promotion of faculty has not improved in the past decade. For example, from 2013-2023, patterns in faculty hiring at Harvard suggest the same kind of unequal standards and DEI quotas that discriminate against Asian American and European Americans that have been exposed in selecting students in admissions also exist in selecting faculty. A 2021 study found over 4 in 10 US and Canadian academics would not hire a Trump supporter. And what higher percent would do that anyway, but not admit it on a survey? Are we at 50%? 60%? 70%? In any case, these endemic, enlightened, and cultured despisers are the same people hiring their replacements. No problem? Ok, what would be your chances if 40% of academics were so tribal to say they wouldn’t hire a Biden supporter?

• The proliferation an 8 billion dollar industry of non-evidence-based diversity trainings that fail to have meaningful effects, and likely even worsen biases.

• Improved viewpoint diversity? How about worsening ideological homogeneity and conformity among faculty instead? Liberal to conservative professor ratios going from over-representation by 65% of liberals in 1969, to 587% by 2022. The views of academics are so out of touch with the median American that a 2021 study found that “only 28% of American and Canadian academics would feel comfortable having lunch with someone who opposes the idea of transwomen accessing women’s shelters.”

(from Jussim, 2024)

• Internal reform hasn’t worked because it depends on an empirically false premise: that more education correlates with more moderation, reasonableness, and tolerance of intellectual variety. But radicalization has a dose-response curve with education: for whatever reason (ideological training, self-selection, social pressure), more education correlates with less moderation, and more radical ideological views (from Kaufman, 2021):

  

  Because academics are—on average—more radical as they get more educated, the highly educated are the least likely to reform themselves internally, compared to, for example, a less educated set of common sense managers running a bunch of barbershops who are given feedback from their customers on its professionalism. Trusting highly credentialed academics to reform themselves to be more moderate ideologically is like trusting highly decorated military leaders (who get more pugilistic as they ascend), to reform internally to become more pacifist. Don’t bet the house on that.

• More frequent public punishment or “cancellation” of scholars for their speech. Would you believe that from 2000-2022, this increased by over 3000%? According to FIRE’s Scholars Under Fire database, “attempts to punish college and university scholars for their speech skyrocketed over the past two decades, from only four in 2000 to 145 in 2022”. For some case studies, see Tyler Vanderwele's quite shocking description of his treatment at the Harvard School of Public Health, for example, or the experience of Martin Kuldorf losing his tenure at Harvard Medical School for breaking COVID taboos.

(from Kaufman, 2021)

• Internal reform has also failed because the most common ideology among the current ruling elites in the university, left wing progressivism, has at its core an especially censorious belief structure that is highly allergic to free inquiry. Would you trust a bunch of vegetarians running a nutrition school to internally reform to allow meat to be sold in their department cafeteria? No; because it is inherently against their belief system. Then why would you trust insiders to improve academic freedom when their professed beliefs are in tension with that reform? If one sincerely believes, per critical constructivism, that logic and reason are primarily power plays or tools of oppression, then using logic and reason won’t convince one to believe in logic and reason and apply it fairly in an academic community. The suppression of free speech is a problem in most extreme ideologies, yet numerous studies have shown an asymmetry in norms for academic freedom by political ideology, with left wing advocates as more censorious.

(from Kaufman, 2021)

• Improved civil discourse? Why the widespread encampments in 2024 that violate time, space, and manner rules in an academic community?

• Improved civil discourse? How about worsening Antisemitism? Purified monocultures allow radical ideologies to flourish, such as critical social justice inspired left-wing antisemitism (read Marx’s antisemitic essay “On the Jewish Question” for one source of the current plague of hatred). According to Hillel International, “Antisemitic incidents on campus reached their highest-ever level during the 2024-2025 school year”

• Open inquiry? Not with ever-inflating grades that undermine intellectual honesty. This trend likely has arisen from students being more fragile to negative academic feedback due to the larger corruption of the culture of intellectual discourse, and also as a fig-leaf trend that serves to mask group differences in performance that reliably follow from illegal and racially discriminatory admissions policies. Deans can’t hide the double standards in admissions anymore (though they are still trying i.e., by banning test scores), so they try to cover up its downstream consequences.

• As open inquiry has been throttled, a culture of grievance confirmation has overcome a culture of hypothesis testing. The rise of a dogmatic and anti-intellectual culture in the social sciences and humanities, has produced departments where oppression and bias are primarily permitted as causal explanations for social phenomena. Such a culture explains how politically correct but intellectually vacuous or absurd papers can be easily published, but intellectually rigorous but politically incorrect statements (e.g., about sex differences) in an academic community can get one cancelled.

  • Even in the hard sciences, the epistemic culture was over the past 3 decades saturated by a creeping radical ideology of critical constructivism. Before the 2024 crackdown on DEI, the National Science Foundation (NSF) over 30 years had become increasingly dominated by ideological conformity towards DEI ideology. Obscure ideological rhetoric, without countervailing accountability, slowly became mainstream funding criteria. By 2020, over 50% of NSF-funded grants contained one or more of these left-wing ideological keywords. (Rasmussen, 2021):

• Students are increasingly taught what to think, not how to think. Syllabi no longer serve as neutral frameworks for inquiry, but are themselves often ideologically curated documents. As faculty have radicalized and purged most colleagues who think differently beyond a narrow range of radical left to liberal, it is no surprise their syllabi are increasingly shaped by predictable ideological filters in courses dealing with moral and social issues, and rarely pair favored texts with genuine opposing arguments. These are not pockets of decay; entire departments, and even fields of inquiry have been corrupted and have dropped the baton of truth seeking, and are running in the wrong direction believing they are close to the finish line (e.g., the American Sociology Association's theme for its annual meeting in 2024 was “Intersectional Solidarities”, “emphasizes sociology as a form of liberatory praxis: an effort to not only understand structural inequities, but to intervene in socio-political struggles”; Even quantitative fields like experimental psychology are captured, as they teach and research endlessly about left wing friendly phenomena that are either non-existent, tiny in magnitude, or don’t predict real world behavior (implicit bias, stereotype threat, etc.), and hardly teach or hire experts in politically incorrect topics of importance, like intelligence, even though IQ is a contender for being the single most replicated and important trait for predicting life outcomes (If you were 18 and learning about the human mind, wouldn’t you want to know about that?). I could cite hundreds of other examples across most humanities and social science departments.). When one ideology is vastly overrepresented (by hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of percentage points!) in so many departments, why is it such a surprise that syllabi reflect the biases of their creator? This would be true also if the ideologies were reversed or switched up (i.e. Saudi Arabia’s major university probably doesn’t have a fair representation of the history of Zionism, and North Korea’s top economics department probably doesn’t teach much about the history of capitalism and the role of market forces in creating wealth and reducing poverty).

Academics on the left are less likely to refrain from representing their own views in their teaching (and research), so it is no surprise that syllabi reflect these different levels of constraint, given the quite selective nature of what is considered taboo vs. celebrated to discuss as a course topic or as an explanation in assigned readings, while teaching in America (Kaufman, 2021):

• Among students, from 2016 to 2024: “the perception that free speech rights are "secure" has dropped by 30 percentage points,” down to only 43%. and “Two in 3 students say self-censorship limits educationally valuable conversations on campus, and 2 in 3 report self-censoring on some topics during classroom discussions”

  % of students who feel the following freedoms are very secure or secure today (the Knight Foundation):

  

  At Harvard in 2025, around only 1/3 of students feel comfortable expressing their opinions about controversial topics (and only 17% of conservatives). Conservative graduate students are much more likely to say their political views are not a fit for academia.

• Faculty increasingly feel they cannot speak freely (2024, nationally: only 27% of faculty “think academic freedom is secure on their campuses” and “35% of faculty say they recently toned down their writing for fear of controversy, compared to 9% of faculty who said the same during the McCarthy era”). At Harvard in 2024, more than half of Harvard professors are too afraid to discuss controversial subjects with students.

  Similarly, a 2021 national study found: “In the social sciences and humanities, over 9 in 10 Trump-supporting academics and 8 in 10 Brexit-supporting academics say they would not feel comfortable expressing their views to a colleague. More than half of North American and British conservative academics admit self-censoring in research and teaching.”

• Without external pressure, the future will get even worse because youngsters are even more radical and less supportive of free speech than current insiders who are in charge. What about the “I believe the children are our future” objection? Perhaps you are thinking: “OK, fine, things have become worse not better over the past decade…but future generations can take over the project of internal reform and self-regulation, and turn universities into places of true open inquiry, even when offensive.” Quite the opposite. The culture of free inquiry gets worse the younger one’s age, on average. The current soon-to-be-retired generation of Baby Boomer (over 60 years old) academic freedom leaders are the generation most supportive of free speech. (And even this generation is quite tepid towards reform. Because they have spent decades—often half-centuries or more—in elite academia where their reputations rest, they often display divided minds, and in some cases, full blown Faculty Club Stockholm Syndrome). The Millennial generation (born 1981-1996) is much less principled, with 40% saying limiting offensive speech is permissible. And Generation Z is the most likely to say they would end their relationship with a family member if that person expressed a political view they find inappropriate. Without external accountability, the future of self-reform is about a bright and promising as a campus quad encampment without flashlights or Uber Eats.

  

Younger people are less supportive of academic freedom: they are more likely to support campaigns to cancel an academic, and political correct ideology, i.e. the idea that we must change the way people talk to protect people’s feelings, rather than saying that people are too easily offended (Kaufman, 2021).

If Heterodox Academy cares about data, it should conclude that internal reform over the past 10 years has on the whole failed. It should be a trusted mediator between universities and the government—making negotiations more principled and successful—rather than siding with insiders who have already failed for decades to bring progress, have conflicts of interest, and have minuscule incentive to self-regulate.

That’s why I chose to sign the Manhattan Institute statement. It is a necessary escalation amidst the university’s self injurious behavior and suicidality. Self-regulation has been minimal. Internal reform, despite good intentions, has failed spectacularly. Universities can’t accept federal funding and ignore their most basic obligation: to follow federal laws, submit to government regulation and oversight, and serve the common good of the democratic nation they exist in, and that makes their existence possible. What that means in practice is up to debate by lawyers. But there is no question that making a radical political ideology (of any kind) the effective telos of the university fails this test as flagrantly as a freshman taking an exam the morning after rush week.

To borrow a clinical metaphor: when does a family member or physician intervene when a person has become self-destructive, despite repeated protests that they are self-regulating? It is a tough ethical question. Yet in the case of the universities, given the last 10 years of evidence and its self-destructive trajectory, the right thing to do is not so foggy: the patient has overdosed on its DEI opiates. It is unconscious, turning too blue, and now requires veritas-narcan and institutional CPR to be revived from its stupor. Public trust in our universities has declined over the past 10 years.

When a situation has escalated to the point of self-destructiveness, continued trust in another round of self-control and internal reform is not only blind to past evidence, but can even be willfully negligent and actively harmful, or at the very least is plausibly careless.

That doesn’t mean one will necessarily have an ethical and competent doctor; but it does mean one has to admit the need for help from the outside, and give up the illusion of the sufficiency of internal accountability. Governments should follow administrative law and procedural norms (and courts may find that the Trump administration has not), yet, that doesn't obviate the central point that outside accountability is what has and will in the future -- as an empirical matter -- result in change, whereas internal reform has been relatively unproductive given the very large scope of the problem and the time frame it has been present. Once conscious again, much more than even 40 days of rehab are needed to prevent a recurrence.

What if university leaders interpret needed reforms imposed from the outside as illegitimate? If faculty and administrators can’t accept essential reforms without labelling them capitulation, we see further examples of why external intervention is needed. The content of a policy is what matters, not its source. Any university leader who cannot distinguish between reforms that uphold core academic values and those that undermine them — just because of their origin — has abdicated moral clarity and leadership.

In summary: without external accountability and public pressure, there is little hope of restoring the non-sectarian university to its foundational and classical mission: the pursuit of truth as a sacred enterprise, pursued through reasoned argument (especially when offensive), ideological openness, and truly free inquiry regardless of one’s immutable characteristics or identity, using rigorous scholarly methods, come what may. These are not partisan values; they are the the prerequisites for a functioning university. Self-aware and mature leaders would see the crisis for what it is, accept the need for external accountability, engage in negotiation, and find common ground reforms from any source, loved or despised, that makes progress more likely.

Omar Sultan Haque has spent 23 years at Harvard University. He is furious about what has happened within the school.

While the media have framed the recent fight between Harvard and President Donald Trump in partisan terms, Haque believes that the problem goes much deeper than political score-settling. As he rose through the ranks—from graduate student to postdoctoral fellow to medical researcher to faculty member at Harvard Medical School—Haque watched the university gradually abandon the pursuit of truth and replace it with left-wing racialism.

Rather than stay silent, Haque has spoken out. Last year, he wrote an essay about his experience and has continued to criticize the university throughout the recent campus turmoil. As Haque sees it, Harvard cannot be reformed from within. It’s an unconscious patient and requires CPR to survive.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

***

City Journal: Give us a sense of the ideological landscape and your experience at Harvard.

Omar Sultan Haque: Unlike many others at Harvard, I have no dramatic cancellation, or intellectual persecution, or struggle session to report. I stopped teaching at Harvard last year primarily because of its anti-truth-seeking culture, radical left-wing bias, racial and gender discrimination, and prevailing anti-intellectualism, which made continued participation a poor use of time. There are exceptions, but on the whole Harvard has strayed from its foundational mission of unbiased truth-seeking and has become ideologically driven, too often resembling a secular church or a partisan think tank. The university’s culture and practices prioritize ideological conformity over open inquiry and debate, suppressing dissenting viewpoints and compromising academic freedom. This shift undermines the core values of a secular university and poses a threat to the integrity of academia and broader society.

CJ: How have DEI initiatives affected day-to-day life at Harvard?

Haque: The university may have changed the official name of its DEI office to use more nebulous euphemisms, but DEI and “Diet DEI” (a diluted form) have the same effects in practices, norms, and the larger culture of orthodoxy and taboo. Diet DEI is just more dishonest. The university has made some progress by eliminating racially segregated graduations and required DEI loyalty oaths in one of its many schools—mandatory diversity statements when applying for a job—but the larger culture of DEI is the problem. Some tropes remain popular on campus that are legacies of left-wing racism, such as the idea that a person’s racial identity is central to one’s academic study; that people should be sorted into “oppressor” and “oppressed” groups by their immutable characteristics; that racism is specific to one race rather than a universal, sinful propensity in human nature; and that lowering academic or behavioral standards for certain racial groups is not happening (when advocates are confronted with evidence that it is happening, they argue that the practice is justified). These beliefs infect teaching, research, grading standards, hiring, promotions, campus debate, what is considered an acceptable topic for invited lectures, what projects get funded, and so on.

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CJ: In your observation, has Harvard continued to engage in discriminatory admissions and hiring?

Haque: Yes, of course! There is endless evidence at Harvard, in student admissions and faculty and staff hiring, that people are, in effect, sorted via a left-wing segregation filter: competing primarily against others of the same race and sometimes gender. One colleague at Harvard Law School who served for years on the admissions committee flat-out admitted this to me recently. That is why Harvard tries to cover its tracks and hide admissions data and post-admissions performance metrics that predictably result from separate and unequal admissions standards. The eye-popping data on biases against Asians and whites in admissions have already been exposed [in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard]. A corporation with identical racist practices would have been sued out of existence decades ago; why the exception for a wealthy university? The data on faculty and staff hiring and promotions reveal even more obvious evidence of discrimination. Just examine whether people in the same positions are similarly accomplished. No need to call Sherlock Holmes.

With SFFA, I thought the discrimination would end. But after the ruling, I saw Harvard’s first essay prompt for applicants to the university: “Harvard has long recognized the importance of enrolling a diverse student body. How will the life experiences that shape who you are today enable you to contribute to Harvard?”

So, Harvard has this sneaky, but technically legal, escape hatch from the Supreme Court ruling. Admissions officers can ask about “life experience” (wink, wink), and use that to sort applicants by race and assess them accordingly. They don’t ask about patriotism or spirituality, only diversity. The university’s recalcitrance and denial, its commitment to DEI, and its rationalization of racial discrimination has been truly shocking.

CJ: What is your sense of the political makeup of Harvard’s students, faculty, and administrators?

Haque: Per surveys, Harvard has become much more ideologically homogeneous than conservative and religious schools like Hillsdale. As a result, Harvard is too narrow-minded in scholarship, myopic, intolerant, and anti-intellectual. It favors progressive viewpoints to the detriment of open inquiry, especially on social, moral, and political topics in teaching and research. Courses, exams, research, trainings, grants, and campus life too often become predictable exercises in mouthing univariate explanations and dogmatic platitudes. Harvard’s institutional culture increasingly functions as a combined finishing school and seminary, not for a traditional religion, but for the progressive Left and the Democratic Party. It’s a totally corrupted institution.

CJ: What is your sense of how Harvard’s administration is responding to its ongoing fight with the Trump administration? Do you believe that Harvard deserves federal funding?

Haque: I think the Trump administration overstepped by making illegal requests in addition to legitimate ones, and may have undermined the prospects of long-term change. Yet, Harvard should follow the Civil Rights Act; defying it will not end well. President Alan Garber is incorrect that the government can’t enforce laws regarding whom the universities can admit and hire. (Editor’s note: in a public statement, Garber said that “No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”) Yes, the government can: racial discrimination is illegal, and no one should be admitted, hired, or promoted based on race, gender, or sexual orientation. Harvard appears to me to be willing to sink the ship to keep its racist policies and practices going, because those ideals are so central to the self-concept of the median wealthy liberal.

CJ: Do you still consider Harvard a university in the proper sense of the word?

Haque: Outside of fields where people use equations, Harvard is a non-sectarian university only in name. It has been captured and subverted: from syllabi to exams, from admissions to graduation, from hiring to promotion. Harvard remains in denial of its own radicalism. It sneers and looks down on most of America and on American values like color-blind equality, meritocracy, free speech, hard work, and individual responsibility. Today, Harvard resembles an aging billionaire secluded in his mansion, consumed by narrow moral obsessions, clutching his treasures, disconnected from a world he scorns. He fades into sanctimonious irrelevance, even as the world moves on to create alternative, courageous, and truly American educational institutions—better ones—unapologetically committed to the pursuit of truth, wherever it leads.

***

Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution. Ryan Thorpe is an investigative reporter at the Manhattan Institute.

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Students who have been protesting the actions of Israel in its war with Hamas — an occurrence mostly at elite and extremely wealthy universities —

have set up encampments that violate university policies and therefore have been sanctioned, for example, at Columbia, Princeton.

Given this context, it is important to ask a basic question: Is all expression on campus—anytime, anywhere, and by any means—protected speech?

Take as an example what transpired on March 15, 2024, when Harvard Medical School held its Match Day.

After months of applications and interviews, students and their loved ones were finally able to celebrate the day they found out which hospital they will be training at for the next few years.

According to the Boston Globe, students and faculty protested a speaker—the president of the American Medical Association (AMA)—because the AMA declined to consider a proposed resolution demanding a ceasefire in Gaza that would allow Hamas to continue with its horrors, including exploitation of hostages and human shields, and its own genocidal designs as spelled out in the Hamas charter.

The AMA Board of Trustees affirmed its “commitment to ‘medical neutrality,’ a principle of noninterference with medical services in times of armed conflict.” The Boston Globe noted, “Students and family members walking into the normally celebratory annual event were greeted by a wall of mostly silent protesters bearing signs saying, ‘Let Gaza Live!’ and ‘AMA is complicit in genocide.’” Also, “students unfurled a large banner from a balcony inside the building’s atrium that said, ‘AMA is complicit in genocide.’”

Oddly, the disruptors taped their mouths because they implausibly believed they were being censored by Harvard Medical School, because Dean George Daley sent a message days before reminding the school of “mutual respect and public discourse” university guidelines: that disrupting school events could be punishable, and that such violations could have “long-term professional consequences,” given the questions asked in future physician licensure and credentialing applications.

Daley’s warning regarding disrupting the Match Day ceremony is an example of the fact that— given the vast opportunities for protected public demonstrations—universities also have reasonable policies about time, space, and manner restrictions on speech that prevent the disruption of the ordinary scholarly and educational activities of the university itself. Every institution must have policies that enable it to operate without unreasonable disruptions. Time, space, and manner policies are designed to do this; to comport with the First Amendment (at public institutions) and with free speech principles (at private institutions), they should be explicitly content-neutral, meaning they apply no matter the ideological content of that speech—whether radical left-wing international socialism (Marxism) or radical right-wing national socialism (Nazism), or whether theism’s transcendence or atheism’s materialism.

Having reasonable time, space, and manner policies is what actually sustains possibilities for exercising academic freedom; otherwise, a university would have no content-neutral procedures and structures to support open inquiry and civil discourse. Every speaker could be heckled into silence. Every square inch of university property, and every hour of the day, could be commandeered for biblical sermonizing or secular postcolonial preaching. FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) notes that “the First Amendment does not require schools to allow a loud protest in the dead of night.”

Similarly, many schools have narrow policies that prevent disrupting classroom lectures, blocking hallways or routine walking pathways between buildings, using bullhorns to disrupt educational events, protesting in administrative buildings where people work, or setting up indefinite 24/7 encampments that prevent others from using university property.

For instance, Harvard disciplined students who a few months ago violated Harvard policies and interrupted classroom lectures with protests and, despite warnings, protested in the central administrative building where staff work.

By providing a reminder of the school’s policies, thereby preventing more sensational and flagrant disruptions of the ceremony, Daley probably saved many medical students from future career problems with licensure, job applications, and insurance and hospital credentialing.

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Strangely, the disruptors leveled false accusations about their dean and the Harvard Medical School leadership. They taped their mouths shut for media consumption to illustrate their groundless accusation of being silenced. Being told that you are not allowed to disrupt a schoolwide event just because you don’t like the views of an invited speaker is not infringing on one’s right to speak or protest. It is merely a reminder of the university’s norms of respect and public discourse at a ceremony where people with different views will be present, and that the goal of the event is a once-in-a-lifetime, sacred, professionally formative ceremony, not a soapbox for maligning others as genocidal. This would be equally true if the disruptors were protesting a ceremony speaker who does abortions or sex-change operations on minors, and they were warned by their dean to follow time, place, and manner policies that prevent ceremony interference.

Outside of narrow technical questions of what is legal or a procedural violation, there is also the question of what is ethical, even if legally allowed. We believe the actions of the disruptors corrupted Match Day.

The disruption may have intimidated many students into not attending. Dr. Richard Schwartzstein, a faculty member with extensive experience teaching in the amphitheater where the disruption took place, told us he estimated that only 25 to 30% of the medical school class was in attendance.

A possible explanation is that the disruptors intimidated up to 70% of their fellow students into not attending Match Day, therefore robbing them of one of the more meaningful and hallowed days in their professional development as doctors.

Why did so many students not attend? A clear implication of what the disruptors’ signs and the giant banner said is that those who would attend the ceremony and hear the speaker would be “complicit in genocide,” like the AMA. But this is a false implication. Anyone in attendance has a right to disagree with the Match Day speakers, or even the disruptors. Attendance of the Match Day ceremony by no means would signal support of genocide or any other violence. Yet, so many avoided their own Match Day to not be painted as genocidal. This is wrong and it’s why ceremonies and classrooms have different rules and norms of respect and collegiality than those governing a more public forum on campus, where there are ubiquitous opportunities to signal one’s beliefs and where others can ignore or engage as desired.

As opposed to protests in a quad on campus, in a classroom, or in a once-in-a-lifetime ceremony like Match Day, we cannot assume everyone thinks the same way about the day’s controversial issues. In such environments, people should not be bombarded with someone else’s parochial and highly controversial belief system, especially when the event in question has nothing to do with that belief system, and the university is nonsectarian. To do otherwise suggests self-righteousness about one’s own beliefs and a lack of humility about respecting others in attendance. If you do not agree, consider how you would feel about a Match Day disruption in which students and faculty held up images of Jewish women raped on October 7, 2023, with demands for justice? Signs demanding reparations for people killed in recent months by migrants who crossed into America illegally? Signs with images of third-trimester babies who were aborted? Signs with images of people recently tortured in communist nations, like North Korea?

Such disruptions also threaten ethical patient caregiving. A physician must be able to connect with their patients, regardless of a patient’s ideology or religion. Ideologically motivated disruptions threaten the ability of patients to trust the students and physicians who engaged in the protest, and Harvard Medical School and its affiliated hospitals in general. Patients, regardless of their view of how best to stop Hamas horrors, need to have confidence in their clinicians’ care, competence, and good judgment. Similarly, false accusations of suppressed speech and being complicit in genocide, and intimidating others to not attend a crucial ceremony, undermines that confidence.

The disruptors probably didn’t consider the Holocaust survivors and their families—some of whom attended Match Day, others of whom are their current or future patients—who see in current events, and in antisemitic reactions, resonances of pre-Holocaust discourse, blood libels, dehumanization, and racism. Indeed, this very story was brought to us by a terrified child survivor of the Holocaust who has reasonable concerns with potential quality of care in a Harvard Medical School–affiliated institution.

Beyond the moral myopia toward patients and colleagues, patients also may be concerned by this display of conformity and limited critical thinking, in this case about what is historically an extraordinarily complex geopolitical conundrum for physicians. As we have described in our own research, physicians were among the earliest and most enthusiastic joiners of the Nazi party.

Because of their agreeable and conscientious personalities and hierarchical training, physicians—of any worldview—are susceptible to succumbing to groupthink and conformity (at Harvard, there are about 5,500% more liberal than conservative faculty).

For example, we wonder how many of the Match Day disruptors had ever heard about the racist historical roots of the Hamas charter, the history of Islamist antisemitism, and the meetings in Berlin in 1941 between Hitler and the Jerusalem Mufti (a father of Palestinian nationalism),

c

where Hitler confirmed that he supported the “struggle against a Jewish homeland in Palestine” and had aimed at “the annihilation of Jewry living in Arab space under the protection of British power.” The Mufti noted that “the Arabs were Germany’s natural friends because they had the same enemies as had Germany, namely the English, the Jews and the Communists.”

Though educated to carefully examine randomized controlled trials, the Match Day disruptors appear not able—or not motivated—to probe beyond the questionable statistics that Hamas cites. For instance, there is strong evidence showing that the Gaza Ministry of Health has faked its casualty numbers.

This does not bode well for disruptors’ ability to go beyond confirmation bias and critically analyze quantitative data and its sources when they agree with the hypothesis presented. In addition, the Match Day disruptors likely have not considered how they may enable Hamas terrorism by calling Israel’s actions genocidal. Joining a revolutionary movement dedicated to the status of an entire group as “oppressors” has been observed before, and we must not repeat the mistakes of the 20th century, where doctors became pawns and stooges of Nazi and Communist ideology, and the practice of medicine become hijacked by revolutionary pseudo-religions.

But all can learn from this event. Amid ideological fervor, it is easy to forget that academic freedom and civil discourse on campus very much depend on having reasonable time, space, and manner restrictions elaborated in policies, and that having such policies make the abstract right to academic freedom possible in an actually existing university. Campus rules should be enforced in content and viewpoint-neutral manners, no matter who is protesting. As a thought experiment, imagine if protestors were not members of the highest intersectional social justice caste on campus and were instead heterosexual, Christian males of European origin who were disrupting Match Day or setting up unauthorized 24/7 encampments in Harvard Yard to protest the hundreds of abortion procedures done per day at Harvard hospitals. How many hours—or should we say, how many minutes—would it take for the administration to disband and sanction every last one? It is clear that in today’s campus culture, rules are applied differently depending on which group one is in: If one claims the status of “oppressed,” one operates by more charitable rules than if one is slandered as an “oppressor.” This is illiberal, unfair, and unbecoming of an institution that strives to foster academic community.

When plenty of opportunities exist on campus to publicly express one’s moral and religious beliefs, universities have a right—in a content-neutral manner—to narrowly safeguard the classroom, the safety and functioning of public spaces for educational purposes, and special ceremonies against disruptions that protect possibilities for learning and professional development for all.

Omar Sultan Haque, M.D., Ph.D., and Harold J. Bursztajn, M.D., are both Harvard Medical School alumni and faculty. The views expressed here are theirs alone.

Why would Harvard Professor Avi Loeb – one of the most respected physicists in the world – and a tenured Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Center for Astrophysics, say that Harvard University “became more of a police organization”?

When one enters a crime scene, little often needs to be said. That is because the problem is so apparent already.  The primary question is not “what happened”, but “who did this”?  Nonetheless, since many people are still at the “what happened” stage about Harvard, let me try to tell the truth about our current situation. 

The historic levels of grade inflation on campus also match levels of denial, insularity, truth-inflation, and ideological capture.  For instance, a shorter version of this heterodox essay you are reading at this moment was rejected by the Harvard Crimson. The well meaning editor told me they “didn't feel this particular piece was a good fit at this particular time”. I wondered, when exactly would be a good time? Faculty job applicants already have to do diversity/DEI loyalty oaths, and students can’t speak their mind in an academic institution. 

Openness to dissenting voices and free inquiry are as rare at Harvard as is spotting the mythical dodo bird of the Ivy League in Harvard Yard: a student who is working class, conservative, religious, rural in origin, heterosexual, and believes their gender matches their biological sex.

I.

What is the telos, the purpose, of a secular university?

It is supposed to be a non-sectarian place with a primary purpose of the pursuit of truth, come what may.  Any idea or theory – no matter how sacred or taboo or orthodox – should be up for intellectual scrutiny.  It should employ freedom of inquiry on any academic question, and use meritocratic and rational – and not ad hominem – standards for the assessment of ideas.  Universities are supposed to be places where everyone is judged as an individual based on their actual contributions to truth-seeking, not their group membership, or whether the results of their research are socially and ideologically acceptable.  In a university, a diversity of viewpoints and ideas should be sought out primarily so that one may better pursue the truth and eliminate falsehoods and errors, regardless of which bodies and brains those ideas originate from. Period.

In contrast, a partisan think tank is explicitly factional and partial in its aims. There are many think-tanks in America that have explicitly partisan aims and practices, such as the Center for American Progress (liberal), Claremont Institute (conservative), Cato Institute (libertarian), Guttmacher Institute (pro-abortion).  Though intellectually oriented and often producing robust scholarship, these are not universities.  Consistent with their ideologies, these institutes tend to only ask a small range of all possible intellectual questions, and their answers are more predictable than not.  The Guttmacher Institute, for instance, rarely does a study on post-traumatic stress disorder and moral injury after abortions, and the Cato Institute rarely writes reports documenting the needs of the most vulnerable in society and how social safety nets could help.

Harvard, by these standards, is much more like a left wing progressive Institute, than it is a university. In its most passionate moral exhortations, Harvard resembles a secular ideological church. There are some quantitative pockets of flourishing, non-partisan academic life, but in general, Harvard does not live up to the values of a university, and is more like a think tank.

There is nothing wrong with that, as everyone eventually worships something; and radical left wing thought — if you can look beyond its history of barbarism in practice — has a number of moral truths which I and many endorse, such as the importance of helping the dispossessed and unfortunate.  

There are many exemplary think tanks in America, and Harvard could be one of them.  But most people in America and the world do not know the truth about Harvard.  They think it is more like a university. So folks, we have a problem here.

How did this happen?

I believe that most people at Harvard - faculty and students alike - are good natured people devoted to learning and teaching and scholarship, who mean well. As devoted expressive individualists, they have buckled under the weight of heroic self-creation, and have been lured into an all-encompassing and creeping secular religion with its mask of compassion; this ideology — whether you call it wokeism, identitarian neo-Marxism, or critical social justice — takes advantage of their atomized state, trait agreeableness, and their breathlessness from lost meaning from traditional sources (sacrificial responsibilities in marriage, parenthood, faith, and citizenship). This secular religion tends to be anti-Semitic, anti-Asian, anti-White, sexist against males, heterophobic, and more.

This great awokening and cultural revolution has happened in many institutions in America. But Harvard is in many ways ground zero; Cambridge, MA is the Wuhan of what is often referred to as the “woke mind virus”. A number of Harvard’s intellectual entrepreneurs have been the wet market or lab managers that culturally produced wokeness. And today, it is where some of the most florid and acute infections and fascinating case studies can be observed. Unfortunately, as wokeness spreads, herd immunity decreases, rather than increases. Therefore, our only mask — and our only vaccine — is civil discourse and direct exposure to sunlight, to the intrinsic luminosity of telling the truth.

II.

Except for the hard sciences and their cousin departments where mathematical reasoning and statistical evidence predominate, Harvard tends to not be primarily committed to the disinterested pursuit of truth.  In its admissions, hiring, research, teaching, and administrative practices and goals, it chiefly values political and social orthodoxy, and outcomes consistent with those norms, to filter people and scholarship and teaching.  Just join a faculty meeting, or a student discussion room, or an administrator’s conference room.  Truth-seeking too often takes the back seat to competitions towards orthodox thinking or ritualized virtue signaling. 

Academic discussions, and even the results of research and scholarship, are often implicit – and sometimes explicit – post-hoc rationalizations to meet ideological ends. Independence of mind and dissent are not often encouraged.  Not in every single corner; but in enough corners to create a culture of orthodoxy, with taboos, blasphemy, heretics, a secular liturgy, and worst of all, a stultifying and perpetual fear of wrongthink, and being found to be unworthy.

Most observers agree that the problems of pious insularity, and born-again cult-like thinking and behavior, are more pervasive and severe in the humanities and social sciences, which research consistently shows are the most radicalized.  For instance, in 2022, Harvard disinvited the philosopher Devin Buckley from speaking at the English Department when her blasphemous views on transgenderism were found out, even though she was scheduled to speak on an unrelated arcane philosophical topic.  Buckley is a feminist herself, but not sufficiently radicalized for Harvard.  Here we see the 99.9th percentile of the radical left canceling the insufficiently orthodox mere 75th percentile leftist.  

Similarly, because the African American Harvard Law School Professor Ronald Sullivan – a Democrat – provided legal representation to a very distasteful and famous man accused at the time of sexual violence, Professor Sullivan had a mob form against him. 

Sullivan was canceled, and was forced to step down at his job as Faculty Dean of Winthrop House at Harvard.  He had to explain to his 9 year old son how to interpret the left wing KKK-esque spray painting of “Down With Sullivan” on the wall next to his home done by true believer radicals intending to intimidate and terrorize a family where they live.

He explained the context of this political vandalism to his son by saying:

“that representing unpopular clients serves an important constitutional role in our democracy and that I had done nothing wrong. As you might imagine, it was hard to see my son read that piece of graffiti. The administration said and did nothing in response to the vandalism.”

Shera Avi-Yonah/The Harvard Crimson

Sullivan concluded that:

“Unchecked emotion has replaced thoughtful reasoning on campus. Feelings are no longer subjected to evidence, analysis or empirical defense. Angry demands, rather than rigorous arguments, now appear to guide university policy.”  

Yes, my dear colleague, this is pretty much what people observe it is like when they are in a religious cult.  Welcome to the revolution.  Again, here is a case where the 99.9th percentile of the radical left has canceled the insufficiently orthodox mere 75th percentile leftist. 

Although you may find it amusing to observe the self-cannibalization that results among radicals competing for the trophy for most puritanical secular progressive, the zealotry is no laughing matter: students, faculty – and knowledge itself – tends to be systematically corrupted for generations.  Entire fields of inquiry tend towards becoming unreliable and useless to those outside the cult. 

The most obvious example at Harvard is the case of president Lawrence Summers who presented a wrongthink paper in a 2005 academic conference talk. 

While also mentioning two other competing hypotheses (including discrimination/socialization, and personal preferences for types of work), and while also mentioning ways to test hypotheses, Summers speculated regarding a possible third empirically well supported hypothesis in the social sciences about greater male variability at extreme ends of population distributions (due to larger standard deviations in traits), as explaining some portion of sex differences in representation in the sciences at top universities.  In many trait distributions, the ratio of men to women is higher at the bottom (i.e. persons with intellectual disabilities), and at the top (i.e., physics professors at MIT). Summers was clear that these are just his “best guesses” and, “They may be all wrong. I will have served my purpose if I have provoked thought on this question and provoked the marshalling of evidence to contradict what I have said.”

This happened not at an Islamic fundamentalist meeting in the 16th century at the Kabul Institute for Advanced Islamic Sciences where someone presented a non-orthodox hypothesis of the nature of the Qur’an; it was an academic conference in the social sciences in the 21st century in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  However, similar fundamentalist dynamics ensured. Spasmodic protests against Summers emerged, and soon thereafter, he was no longer president of Harvard.

As a result of this high status persecution, since 2005, how much research and teaching of sex differences was never proposed or pursued in the social and medical sciences? Any mildly reasonable scholar would conclude, “If that is what happens to the president of Harvard, I better study or teach a different topic”. Yet, despite being less likely to be taught and researched, sex differences will go on existing anyway, and will continue to be consequential to human life and human social dynamics.

III.

Perhaps in your mind you cleave these non-serious departments and factions off as you would a rotten part of an apple that you can nibble around with convenience.  Unfortunately, the worm at the core of your fruit has spread, and the rot has left very little that is nutritious and left to consume.  The entire academic culture is spoiled, festering under its frothing dogmatic mold, and has even undermined parts of the sciences themselves. 

Honorable and brilliant faculty like Kit Parker (Engineering), Carole Hooven (Evolutionary Biology), and Tyler VanderWeele (Epidemiology) have been persecuted for wrongthink by mobs of convulsing left-wing fundamentalists for freely expressing reasonable and well-argued non-radical left wing ideas.  For example, Professor Parker had his course canceled because students didn’t find his reading list included enough radical left wing explanations.  I thought Professors determined what was in their courses?  Parker believes the university has been taken over by left-leaning activists.  

These harassments and cancellations have happened not in grievance studies departments teaching “me-search” seminars on things like “intersectional autoerotic-ethnography of the semiotics of self-oppression”.  Rather they transpired in extremely quantitative and scientific fields in the natural and biomedical sciences: Engineering, Evolutionary Biology, Epidemiology.  

Everyone, please wake up. 

I would suggest anyone who thinks these oppressive puritanical dynamics are limited to the humanities and social sciences to go to the Harvard Medical School campus and look for the portraits that used to exist of all the famous scientists and physicians over the centuries who contributed heroically and devoted their every waking moment to discovering cures and unlocking mechanisms of disease that have saved millions of lives. 

Boston Globe.

Their portraits have been taken down for being too White, too Jewish, too male, too heterosexual, etc.  The same cancellation of dead and brilliant scholars has happened in the Harvard Economics department’s portraits in the Littauer Center of Public Administration, and in Harvard’s Department of Psychology in William James Hall, where the powerful woke leaders felt students needed to be protected from looking at faces that were too Jewish and White, male, and heterosexual, etc. 

Yet, genius is by definition non-egalitarian, and The Universe doesn’t have a DEI department; there is no affirmative action for getting universe-shattering discoveries.  Truth is a jealous god that inherently says no to most who want to wrestle away its secrets, no matter their immutable characteristics or ideology. 

True brilliance is so rare on this earth, and is as consequential as it is hard to find.  Innovative discoveries are so impossible to uncover, and authentically world changing research so hard to fake.  Framing a single portrait representing a lifetime of sacred dedication and discovery is the least Harvard can do to show respect for its rare scholarly gems that have changed the world through genuinely meritorious and life-changing discoveries, no matter what their representation is in the population, and no matter what are the nature of their melanin or gonads or sexual proclivities.

Instead of focusing on improving the pipeline diversity of future scholars by increasing opportunity for scholarly careers by investing where disparities first emerge (in elementary and middle school), Harvard basically says, “nevermind all that”.  By fiat from on high – *POOF* – revisionist history wins; projectionary presentism wins; the lazy way to make us all the same wins; Kurt Vonnegut's "handicapper general" is in charge now.  The radicals are not content with merely de-platforming the living and breathing heretics and apostates among us; even the dead have been canceled for their immutable characteristics. 

This is not only racist and sexist and heterophobic, but it is demeaning to the minority scholars who replace the pale and male and straight visages: the process of cancellation suggests the portrait was not earned, but politically forced.  What if Olympic medals were awarded in this manner to Asians/Whites/Jews to make them feel more welcome amidst the more athletic bodies they see when they walk into the stadium to compete?  Obviously, our potbellied gold medalist would know in their hyperlipidemic heart that the medal around their neck was political, not meritorious.  The same is true in the admissions office, the graduate seminar, the faculty roster, and other iterations of the academic olympics.

Perhaps you are not concerned?  You should be, because YOU will be next.  If you are not Jewish, Asian, White, male, or heterosexual, perhaps you are something else considered “oppressive”, such as being attractive and guilty of lookism privilege.  Non-infertile? You are guilty of fertility privilege.  The list never ends.

If you don’t fight this ideology on campus today, know that you will be eaten by this ideology eventually. To keep churning, the Revolution needs to consume a continual supply of micro-aggression fodder. 

IV.

Diversity at Harvard is superficial and merely skin and gonads deep, as everyone tends to look different, but think alike.  

Look at any survey of Harvard’s faculty and students on their political beliefs and you will see a monoculture that makes the Mormon Church seem diverse in its viewpoints (this is what a Mormon colleague at Harvard told me).  In 2023, 30% of 18-29 year olds in America say they are "very conservative or conservative" on social issues,

Gallup Organization.

…at Harvard it is 6.4%, according to 2022 data.  Only 3.4% of students have a favorable view of Donald Trump. 

Harvard Crimson

Among students, there are approximately 900% more very progressive vs. very conservative students (the approximate ratio of very progressive to very conservative is a whopping 10:1). 

There is data to support the stereotype that conservatives have on average lower IQs (and liberals on average have more psychopathology), so we may expect non 1:1 representation in elite universities where an IQ of around 130 is the average.  But a 900% difference is far from a non-echo chamber in intellectual discourse on any topics of social and moral concern.  

This imbalance explains why radical Left wing protestors disproportionately disrupt classrooms with screaming, occupy the Widener Library and harass people who are trying to study, and occupy university administrative buildings. 

Daily Mail.

Wall Street Journal.

Harvard Crimson.

If the causes these radicals were proselytizing on behalf of were right wing, what would happen?  Imagine if a mob of Mormon or Orthodox Jewish students (if they even existed) started harassing everyone around him or her in classrooms and libraries and administrative buildings to start praying more and divesting from abortion clinics.  Probably, everyone would be arrested in a few minutes by the Harvard police, and even involuntarily placed in a hospital for urgent psychiatric evaluation.  But this is less likely to happen if you are protesting for radical left wing causes; then deans will bring you food as you occupy university hall.

How did this happen?

A likely primary cause of this identity-based neo-Marxist capture is the Harvard admissions office discriminating against non-progressive students.  Ask any college counselor: it is beyond obvious that among equally qualified students, those with progressive stories are more likely to be accepted.  In admissions reviews, “I worked on opening the Mexican border” has a higher chance of getting bonus points, whereas, “I worked on securing the Mexican border” is more likely to be penalized. 

Student applicants obsessively researching schools know this better than us.  Akin to an aspiring pastor writing for admission to a seminary, Harvard applicants spin a self-hagiography congenial to the pedagogy of the oppressed, and fudge and nudge their salvific narratives and missionary-like extracurriculars towards left wing orthodoxy tales that rival the collected tales of the lives of saints of old.  Again, this is not what should be happening in a non-sectarian secular university, where truth seeking should be the telos, not cultivating foot soldiers for a missionary political ideology.

If you can believe it, the numbers among faculty are even more anomalous and eye-popping.  As former Dean of Harvard College, Harry Lewis, has written, “The political bias in our faculty is now widely accepted”.  Only 1.46% of Harvard faculty in a survey said they were “conservative” or “very conservative”, whereas 82.46% said they were “liberal” or “very liberal”. 

Harvard Crimson

That is a ratio of 56.4:1.  That means that among faculty, there are approximately 5540% more liberal than conservative faculty. 

These are the people teaching our next generation of elites.  Imagine if nearly all our faculty were Mormons or Islamic fundamentalists; perhaps you would be OK with that?  Mormons in general are exceptionally nice people with large and loving families, and Muslim radicals at least believe in truth as objective.  Yet I doubt you would be OK with such conservative religious people so disproportionately over-represented among university faculty educating your children.  So why put up with the symmetrically opposite ideology doing the same? 

Beyond the protection of quantitative subjects, sit in on a few classes at Harvard and you will tend to hear an echo-chamber so predictable you could guess most of the discussion topics and trajectory and conclusions before the class starts.  A colleague who is an expert in Islamic intellectual history tells me that intellectual diversity and freedom of academic inquiry is more common in a modern Islamic madrasa than at Harvard, which resembles a neo-Marxist DEI seminary.  Anyway, the comparison is an insult to madrasas, where rigorous disagreement and different legal and ethical positions are entertained as there are many competing and dissenting schools of Islamic law, and which are among the first institutions where systematic academic study emerged centuries ago.  

Beyond the progressive/liberal bubble, it is true that there are some minority of students at Harvard who are libertarians, economic conservatives.  The fact that we have a substantial fraction of Harvard students who contribute to discourse with economically conservative/libertarian perspectives is promising.  However, libertarian answers to social questions only represent a fraction of "conservatism". Social conservatism is actually quite opposed to libertarianism on many, many issues.  In terms of their moral foundations, work by moral psychologists have shown that libertarianism is more similar to liberalism psychologically.  A libertarian is just a liberal with a few more IQ points, a bit more disagreeableness, and an extra emphasis on freedom. 

So the disagreements at Harvard between what we call liberals and libertarian "conservatives" is more akin to a local skirmish between two cousins of liberalism.  Whereas social conservatism – with its emphasis on flag, faith, and family – is much more unique. We become innovative within a narrow frame of reference and exclude actual social conservatives from most discussions, even as they are more representative of our nation and the world, and would actually provide true intellectual diversity to Harvard. 

V.

In a totalitarian ideology — whether secular or sacred — everyone is a possible informant against everyone else, and people tend to walk on eggshells, lest they offend the dear leader or the ruling orthodoxy.  Similarly, the majority of Harvard students cannot speak openly in class, and do not think the university protects free speech.

Students appear to have been either radicalized by each other, or brainwashed by their administrators and professors to internalize their soft totalitarianism, as an astounding number of students endorse the use of violence to silence dissent. 

Specifically, Harvard ranked last among over 250 universities in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s (FIRE) 2023 ranking of universities on freedom of expression, and had the singular distinction of being the only university in the “abysmal” category of ratings. 

According to FIRE, “just over a quarter of Harvard students reported they are comfortable publicly disagreeing with their professor on a controversial political topic; only roughly a third think it is “very” or “extremely” clear the administration protects free speech on campus; and an alarming 30% think using violence to stop a campus speech is at least “rarely” acceptable”. 

Except for the hard sciences and cousin disciplines, Harvard tends to not employ meritocratic standards of assessing ideas and knowledge or practice. 

From top to bottom – from grading students to hiring faculty to funding grants to awarding degrees to creating departments and proposing courses – most ideas are judged and reviewed primarily by their social and political and ideological utility and coherence to the prevailing orthodox beliefs.  Students know this when they write papers for the tenured radicals who grade them, and therefore cover their real views and arguments temporarily to get better grades.  

At the faculty level, one recent example is that two esteemed faculty from our Council on Academic Freedom with different viewpoints (Tarek Masoud, Flynn Cratty) collaborated and proposed a genuinely new general education course (“Hard Questions: Searching for Veritas Across Deep Divides”).  The impressive course on heterodox thinking in the university aimed to encourage students to engage in civil discourse around ideologically and politically controversial questions, and aimed to teach “how to disagree honestly and productively in an open society”.  This is exactly what a monocultural think tank needs to act like if it is trying to become a university.  The professors met with the administration multiple times, and revised the syllabus after getting feedback.  The final version was 13-pages – much longer than typical proposals – and was filled with extensive reading lists, pedagogical structure, and clear descriptions of educational goals and metrics for evaluation. 

For whatever reason, it was still rejected.  Even if it was accepted, this course would be a rare example of intellectual diversity, free and open inquiry, and debate across deep social conservative-liberal differences. 

The examples of veritas betrayed are endless at Harvard. 

There are some exceptions in fields where there are limited ways to squeeze revolutionary fervor into equations. Yet in general, everyone needs to know that across Harvard’s many schools and departments, academic conformity routinely supersedes scholarly excellence and independence of mind.  

VI.

This is not just a problem of who has the podium and the microphone in the university; the problems are deeper and institutional.  Entire fields of knowledge and research have tended to become unrecognizable, and have been gnarled more than grandma’s garlic knots.  

With a few exceptions, whole departments and fields of inquiry in research and teaching have tended to become distorted and disordered by the tiny slice of questions that are allowed to be asked in the first place.  What gets funded and published is an even smaller misinformed fraction. 

Especially with DEI loyalty oaths -- but even without them, given the ambient culture of orthodoxy -- scholars tend to be hired in a manner that shows a clustering of select concerns predicted by the larger ethos and worldview that is quite particular, and crowds out the emergence of other lines of inquiry on empirical and normative issues germane to the preoccupations of dozens of other competing ideologies.  Consider the space of all logically possible questions any department's scholars can entertain about the human condition; then examine what is actually asked, and how it is answered.  You will tend to observe an ideological sieve that filters out a large percent of centrist liberal, conservative, and religious ideas and insights.  

As only one example, consider the ideas of African-American conservatives, who are relatively ignored at Harvard and other elite universities, when compared to their contributions at large.  For instance, Thomas Sowell is arguably the most influential African-American intellectual of the last 100 years (or at least in the top 5). 

Yet, one will rarely find his writings on Harvard syllabi, or find Harvard students or professors who know Sowell’s name at all.  If they have heard of his name, they will certainly know much more about the ideas of radical left-wing writers who are in comparison academic lightweights, who have published far fewer, and more mediocre, scholarly books and articles, such as Ibram Kendi or Cornel West. 

My concern is that we avert our eyes to that logically possible space of compelling concerns and questions in research and teaching, because a preoccupation with a few important topics colors out the rest. Again, we become innovative, and often self-congratulatory, within a narrow frame of reference.  As Harry Lewis, former Dean of Harvard College, noted, “the Harvard curriculum has become heavily slanted toward recent fashions of the progressive left”

VII.

Infected with progressive ideology, Harvard’s admissions processes for students is non-meritocratic, and the most obvious victims have been Asians, Jews, and White people, who are thought of as “overrepresented” and/or “oppressors”. Consistent with woke religion’s dogma, people at Harvard are not judged primarily as individuals, but as members of alleged socially privileged or alleged underprivileged groups.  Therefore, according to woke social justice, Harvard is required to hold different racial groups to different standards for admission and promotion.

This is why the average Asian American freshman at Harvard scored over 100 points higher on the SAT than their African American peer. 

Harvard Crimson

And it is why, according to detailed statistical analysis used in the recent Supreme Court case against Harvard, an African American applicant with a 95% chance of admission would only have a 25% chance if he or she was Asian American. 

The Economist

How can two equally competitive applicants have a 280% (not 28%, which would be egregious enough) difference in chances of getting in, just because one person checked off a different box under the race question?  Hundreds of Asian American and White students have been denied admissions primarily because of DEI ideology.  (And yes, I am also against all non-meritocratic biases in admissions: for legacy, affiliate's kids, donors kids, and athletes).

Now we are seeing the same logic applied to Jewish students, as their numbers have been decreasing at Harvard and across institutions like Harvard, as Jews become considered “oppressors” according to left wing thinking. According to the Tablet Magazine, “Harvard has gone from being 25% Jewish in the 1990s and 2000s to under 10% today.” and notes that among editors of the Harvard Law Review, Jewish representation has decreased by about 50% in the past 10 years.

This is obviously because progressive left-wing beliefs and metaphysics has an inherent antisemitic element. On Harvard’s antisemitism, Professor Harry Lewis of Harvard notes: “When complex social and political histories are oversimplified in our teachings as Manichaean struggles — between oppressed people and their oppressors, the powerless and the powerful, the just and the wicked — a veneer of academic respectability is applied to the ugly old stereotype of Jews as evil but deviously successful people.”

As an analogy, if the ruling religion on Harvard’s campus was Hinduism, then the relative representation of non-Hindus on campus would tend to drop over time due to all the biases against non-Hindus, constant “inclusive Hindu excellence” training programs and pledges of allegiance, and a Vedic monoculture crowding out meritocracy and people being judged as individuals.

Similarly, if Harvard’s ruling ideology was theocratic rather than a secular ideology, and the above cited disparities in acceptance rates at similar academic levels of accomplishment were not concerning race (i.e., Asian, Black, White, Hispanic groups), but rather were about religion, (i.e., Christian vs. Jewish vs. Muslim vs. Atheist students), the whole apparatus would be shut down in a few weeks and everyone would be sued and shamed. 

Probably the whole university would be closed down by the federal government and turned into an amusement park with rides.  However, because one never thinks of one’s religion as a religion, just as the obviously right worldview and set of norms, and because, as linguist John McWhorter has described, we are swimming in a progressive secular religion, many see DEI, affirmative action, inclusive excellence, and diversity initiatives as just obviously the right thing to do, or what is without question a good thing. 

Yet, any group based diversity program that fails to filter and treat students as individuals only – and not primarily as members of some intersectional ethnic or gender/sexual group – will necessarily exclude and discriminate against Asians, Whites, Jews, males, heterosexuals, etc. Just as salvation is the point of Christianity, discrimination on behalf of “oppressed” and “underrepresented” groups is the whole point of the DEI ideology.

This is immoral – and since the recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action – we can also say illegal.  

If Harvard actually treated all students and faculty as individuals with dignity and with their unique historical trajectories through life — with varying amounts of luck and suffering — and promoted intellectual diversity and free inquiry without cancellations, then no diversity programming would be necessary. Meritocracy is the best source of diversity without immoral or illegal discrimination.

At Harvard or elsewhere, any diversity initiative that does not discriminate in an immoral manner, and truly includes all persons of all backgrounds, will intrinsically dissolve itself and its reason for being. This is because the irreplaceable individual with a life that is unrepeatable in the entire cosmos, is the ultimate minority.  When we consider and respect the multilayered complexity of being a unique individual in a complex world, and avoid all the group-based stereotyping inherent to diversity programming, we will find the entire discriminatory apparatus redundant and unnecessary, like a second trachea going into the lungs, or a separate program for “inclusive sprinting” on a track and field team.  

VIII.

This reverse racism, and reverse sexism, and reverse sexual-phobia we see in affirmative action/DEI preferences also connects to the suppression of free speech. 

Have you ever noticed that most cancellations are in one direction? It is no coincidence that most of the things that trigger apoplectic fits of mob outrage and then result in the injustices of suppressing scholarly inquiry, cancellations, biases in hiring and admissions, and humiliating struggle sessions, are systematically predictable based on the content of the triggering ideas: they all threaten left-wing ideology.

Most of the challenges to free inquiry on campus today are coming from the the DEI ideology/critical theory/progressive left: on trans issues vs. biology (Carole Hooven; Devin Buckley), on the scientific but insufficiently woke analysis of policing (Kit Parker), on views of marriage and homosexuality (Tyler VanderWeele).  

A secular non-sectarian university should not have a ruling secular religion or ideology in the first place. 

We can't defend free speech without questioning that illiberal ideology as the default ethos and worldview on campus which all must bow down to.  The DEI/critical theory pseudo-religion has little respect for objective evidence, and per Marxist and Foucauldian dogma. It tends to see everything as ideology and mere political power plays (of course, except for when using reason to make the argument for ideology and power).  It scoffs at aspirations of procedural neutrality.  It has little respect for the use reason to understand the world, and prefers to focus on “praxis” to change the world.  

This is what the whole world already knows about Harvard, but we are in denial about it.

This ruling ideology, Harvard’s current pseudo-religion, is Intersectional Marxist Manichaeism.  With the most invidious forms of stereotyping one could imagine – in student admissions yes, but also in faculty and staff hiring loyalty oaths, awarding of grants, promotions, grading students, and many other domains – people at Harvard are sorted and categorized along an identitarian, DEI hierarchy.  The allegedly most “oppressed” are at the top (non-Asian and non-Jewish ethnic minorities, LGBT individuals, etc), and the allegedly most privileged are at the bottom as “oppressors” (Jews, Asians, Whites, men, heterosexuals, etc.). 

Status depends on how many intersectional points one gets across different variables of the oppression olympics.  The calculative assessment by revolutionaries of different groups as more vs. less oppressed is a temporary lapse in their commitment to praxis first, as one must use reason objectively to count oppression points.  Also, ironically, the DEI true believers want to subvert all binaries, except the oppressor/oppressed binary which is a taboo beyond critical thinking and rebuke.  But revolutionaries are not known for superlative reasoning skills. Anyway, following Marx and Foucault, these radicals tend to think of logic as epiphenomena of power relations. 

This silly and singular Manichaeian lens blinds, binds, and biases the entire university in the most shameful way.  In so doing, this catechism forces all who confess and conform to it to commit all the sins Harvard ostensibly is against, such as racism, sexism, etc. 

EIGHT SUGGESTIONS

Since some people are starting to realize that the crimson emperor has no scholarly clothes, what should be done? 

1.

We need to ask whether Harvard merits federal funding?  I do not know.  A woke university culture is as much a betrayal of the academic truth seeking telos of university as would be libertarian university, fascist university, MAGA nationalist university, communist university, Buddhist university, Hindu nationalist university, or Aztec university.

I doubt that taxpayers, if they really knew what happens at Harvard, would vote for their federal tax dollars going towards its thinly veiled, and often explicit, quasi-religious projects, discrimination against Jews, Asians, and Whites, and corruption of teaching, research, and the transmission of knowledge.  It will be for Congress and other agencies to assess whether such an ideological institution claiming the values of a university meets criteria for federal funding.  But the question needs to be asked.

2.

End DEI departments and sub-departments, and their intersectional trainings and orientations. Such programs are ineffective, divisive, demean and patronize minorities as perpetual paralyzed victims, and programming tends to be racist towards Jews, Whites, and Asians, sexist towards males, and heterophobic.

Reform attempts tend to be bait-and-switch sleights of hand — such as Orwellian-named “Inclusion and Belonging” departments and programs, which have substantial overlap with orthodox DEI programs. These diet-DEI programs, with their same underlying postmodern power, privilege, and identity-obsessed ideology and epistemology, still function in effect to exclude and isolate persons who happen to be in “oppressor” groups (Whites, Asians, Jews, males, heterosexuals, Christians, etc.). They just operate with less honesty, and more subtle, vague, and flowery euphemistic language. “Inclusion and Belonging” is only slightly less malignant than “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”. Swapping fructose for saccharine still results in empty calories.

As a reality test, imagine approving a similar right-wing or libertarian department on campus. How would you like a campus life department devoted to being “Anti-Treason”, making Harvard students more nationalistic, and filtering all academic teaching, research, and hiring and through a lens of patriotism? How about a university department for family formation and marriage (which actually has greater impact on the future lives of most students than diversity programming)? This right wing equivalent of diversity or inclusion programming is equally in conflict with the primary truth seeking and inquiry promoting mission of the university. It is glucose rather than fructose.

3.

End mandatory DEI statements for students applying to Harvard, and for applicants to jobs at Harvard. These are just pseudo-religious loyalty oaths. They are inimical to a free, open university, just as would be mandatory theological statements about one’s commitment to the Gospel, or the Pali Canon of Theravada Buddhism.

4.

Reform the culture and policies of Harvard to prioritize free academic inquiry, intellectual diversity (which grows from intellectual freedom), institutional neutrality other than on issues that directly impact free academic inquiry, and civil discourse without hecklers. My former teacher and adviser Steven Pinker’s 5 point plan along these lines is the best yet articulation of this vision.

5.

Pseudo-religious monocultures don’t easily give up their cushy self-legitimating beliefs and rituals. Reforming Harvard may fail, or take too long. We therefore need to build alternative institutions. The University of Austin is an a wonderful example. More competition is needed.

Alternative academic institutions committed to truth seeking, classical academic values, and free inquiry will help provide external pressure on Harvard to maintain its commitment to veritas, which it has betrayed. When the Catholic Church needed reform, alternative Protestant institutions were built. That outside pressure gave Christians other options, and also accelerated internal reform in Catholicism. The same is true for the catechism of the Woke Church, and its secular indulgences.

6.

Given the total saturation of wokeism at Harvard, and the millions of dollars and thousands of staff hired to implement the great woke commission, these changes will take decades to implement, if ever they come to pass.

Therefore, at this time, a first step, as with any problem -- from bad breath, to substance abuse, to institutional corruption -- is to admit one has a problem, and represent reality accurately.  As such, I propose that Harvard should change its name to “The Harvard Institute”, so it matches the naming practices of other sectarian institutes, because that is what it is.  For reasons discussed above, Harvard does not deserve the hallowed name “University”.

Even if measured as an “Institute”, Harvard would be among the more parochial, monocultural, and ideologically radical.  This is because there are a number of partisan think tanks that have much more intellectual diversity and free expression than Harvard.  The Harvard Institute – compared to other partisan Institutes – would be low-performing on metrics of intellectual honesty and robustness.  For instance, scholars at the center-right leaning American Enterprise Institute under Arthur Brooks were encouraged to seek out collaborations with think tanks that disagreed with them, to have a counter-viewpoint when having panel discussions, and outside reviews of the Institute were regularly done by experts with politically contrary perspectives.  Compared to this, Harvard’s culture and policies resemble an DEI ideological church education and reeducation program, with an attached 50 billion dollar hedge fund. 

7.

Unlike the progressive/secular identity Marxists, I believe in forgiveness and redemption, and we need a pathway for Harvard back to being a university.  Everyone makes mistakes, and just like an individual, an institution can become brainwashed into an insular wilderness, and wander off into the forests of Guyana on the verge of left-wing revolutionary suicide.  

Therefore, if Harvard comes to resemble a University – perhaps in the twenty second or twenty third century – it may, after being on probation for some time, apply for a name change back to “University”.  

The judges would need to be outside the university.  Adjudicating metrics would need to be objective and transparent.  No shadowy internal committees without procedure or transparency, with independent consultation by experts without names.  With a loss of trust, and a betrayal of a sacred duty – from a crime scene, to a broken marriage contract, to a corrupted truth seeking institution – one does not determine when one is trustworthy; that is for others to determine.  Many decades of Veritas betrayed can not be fixed by quick self-congratulation. 

8.

Thwart conformity and cowardice, and commit to telling the truth, as you see it.

I want to say something to all my fellow professors: my friends, I am a conformist coward.  I did not say or do anything when the neo-Marxist culture spread over the past decades, and when the DEI persecutions were happening, both at Harvard, and other universities like Yale (Nicholas Christakis) and Portland State University (Peter Boghossian).  When shameful Department Chairs and Deans refused to defend Carole Hooven’s right to say what she believed to be true about sex, I said nothing.  When Tyler VanderWeele was subjected to public shamings and struggle sessions for doing nothing but having a deeply considered view on marriage, I said nothing.  I deeply regret that I cowered out of a selfish concern for myself, and a desire for stability and social acceptability.  I watched with horrid amazement, waiting in disbelief for each example to be an anomaly.  Then another example, and another, and another. And here we are.  

99.9% of you also did and said nothing.  Now is the time to speak up.  Now is when you too must stop being a conformist coward. That is what we – you as well as I – have been for too long.  People who excel in the university setting commonly have this risk-averse personality structure.  With honest self-examination, accept to yourself that in your heart you know that this is what you are too; and commit to making things better.  Why did we spend decades of the best years of our lives stuck in a library if we didn’t care about truth, merit, fairness, and the preservation and transmission of true knowledge?  You must believe that truth has an inherent luminosity, will set you free, and lead to your flourishing.  Otherwise, what the heck are you doing in a university? Go become a political lobbyist and give up the charade. 

The truth is inherently offensive to those who primarily care about politics, whatever the direction of those politics.  Now is the time to give up a few friends on Martha’s Vineyard and Aspen and Miami Beach and Napa Valley, and say what you believe to be true.  Live not by lies.  Use the security of your tenure and say what you think is right and wrong.  Now is the time to defend the truth seeking institutions from the illiberal capture that has already become nearly complete.  Perhaps it is already too late.  

America is the most free nation on earth. Universities are supposed to be the most free places to speak and pursue the truth in our most free nation on earth.  They are not.  One has more diversity of viewpoints, freedom of speech, and freedom from censure for wrongthink, on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, MA as compared to 10 feet away when one enters the Harvard Yard gate.  This is why one will regularly observe more honest, wide-ranging, and respectful intellectual debate on a private podcast, than what is typical at Harvard University.

When universities are corrupted, soon the rest of the nation will be too.  Soon, it will be too late.  Eventually, the revolution will come for you, you “oppressor”.  Hide while you can.  You will be next if you are Jewish, or Asian, or White, or male, or heterosexual, or non-transgendered.  

So speak up now.  Stand up tall, shed the cowardice and conformity, and tell the truth now. 

In the words of Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment, “Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”

Social respectability is nothing, compared to what is at stake.  As Americans and academics, we all have a stake in fighting for the truth-seeking values of our university and our civilization, and to not acquiesce in the shade.

Welcome! I’m Omar Sultan Haque, and I aim to provide reasoned and evidence-based insights on Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, and Politics. You may not agree with me on everything — or anything — and that is good! I aspire to pursue truth with you, create dialogue, contribute to and defend free inquiry, and engage in civil discourse on what matters most in life.

I am a philosopher and social scientist at Harvard, and member of the Harvard Program in Psychiatry and the Law, and Harvard Council on Academic Freedom (The views expressed here are mine alone, and do not represent any other organization or group to which I am affiliated).

My work and ideas have been covered in, among others, the New York Times, Science Magazine, Harvard Magazine, Harvard Gazette, Atlantic Monthly, BBC, NPR, Forbes, Psychology Today, and the Boston Globe.

I graduated from Harvard Medical school with honors, and Harvard Divinity School, and was awarded the Peter J. Gomes, STB '68 Distinguished Alumni Honor. As a teacher, I received a number of awards, including receiving six times a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching from the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University, and for "Excellence in the Art of Teaching" for Supervision of a Harvard College Thomas T. Hoopes Prize-winning Senior Thesis (Anthropology) awarded by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University.

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