Is Harvard irredeemable?
Yes, unless they are forced by external forces to reform.
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) May 21, 2025
That’s not the assessment of a conservative curmudgeon or some extreme partisans exacting revenge on institutions filled with lefty lunatics.
That is what several Harvard professors and researchers who have watched a once-great institution become what it is today–practically totalitarian.
Omar Sultan Haque, M.D., Ph.D., a Harvard researcher, penned a cri de cœur on his Substack arguing that Harvard has betrayed its very reason for being: the search for truth.
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.
Harvard’s motto is, famously, Veritas–Latin for “Truth.” Just like Pravda, come to think of it, and the modern Harvard is as dedicated to truth and the search for truth as Pravda was during the Soviet years.
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.
That seems about right to me. Harvard has every right to be a lefty lunatic asylum–but in no way can it be called an educational institution as we tend to think of them. It is, with some exceptions, an indoctrination center for the cult of transnational leftism.
Christopher Rufo sat down with Haque and shared his fascinating conversation on the invaluable City Journal website, and the whole thing is worth reading. Since I know many of you will never get to do so, let me share a bit of it with you to give you a flavor of just how corrupt Harvard has become and why President Trump is perfectly justified in pressuring an institution that could not function for long without billions of dollars a year in federal funds.
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.
Harvard, even with its bizarre obsession with recruiting celebrity students of questionable academic talents like David Hogg, and its obsession with DEI, still snaps up more than its share of intellectually gifted students. Teaching great students is fun, and things must be pretty awful if teaching becomes a “poor use of time.”
It’s pretty awful.
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.
The Trump administration will not succeed, I assume, in changing the ideological leanings of Harvard, and it shouldn’t try to do so simply on the basis of the institution promoting awful ideas. To the extent that the administration tries to push Harvard rightward, they are both on a fool’s errand and engaged in arguably unconstitutional meddling in content monitoring.
But there is no question that Harvard is violating civil rights laws, and it is arguably true that much of what the institution does is only educational in the way that Pravda used to be.
On the first basis alone, the Trump administration has a tool they should use to reshape Harvard’s behavior, and hopefully its culture. Harvard doesn’t just enforce ideological uniformity; it breaks the law, and the Supreme Court has told it so. The court can’t enforce its judgment by itself, but the Trump administration can and should impose punishments for its lawbreaking.
Harvard is a great example of the lefty definition of “nobody is above the law.” The unsaid statement that follows is “My name is Nobody, so I am above the law.”
As long as Harvard hires, admits, promotes, or supports faculty and students on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, or any of the other “protected” statuses that civil rights laws lay out, they are violating the law and is ineligible to receive federal funds or even maintain nonprofit status.
They retain their First Amendment rights, of course. But we are not required to pay for their exercise.
So let’s not.
