My grandfather, a refugee from the modern-day Democratic Republic of Congo, spent his career working for the Canadian postal service. He was a union member. The Canadian posties were never shy about a fight. Their union defied Parliament, the union president was jailed, and the strikers got maternity leave for workers decades before it was fashionable. I grew up respecting that tradition. Unions like my grandfather’s fought hard for real things: fair pay, job security, protections that actually showed up in workers’ lives. What is happening at Harvard is not what my grandfather’s union was. The posties fought for their members. The Harvard Graduate Student Union (HGSU) is using its members to fight for itself. This is because, as we will show, the HGSU is trying to use these strikes as a way to take over Harvard and repurpose it as the center of a Communist revolution.1

While they publicly advertise their demands on immigration policy and academic freedom, these demands are a smokescreen for their true motivations. Harvard is already doing much of what the union is demanding on these issues through daily SEVIS monitoring, a 24-hour emergency attorney hotline, and active federal litigation on both issues. Indeed, the union has recognized their demands amount to little more than the “formalization” and “codification” of current Harvard policies. These wedge issues delay negotiations and polarize campus while inevitably resulting in nothing except for the continuation of the status quo.

The real demands which the HGSU are making are, rather, about seizing power for the union. For instance, look at the HGSU’s demands on Title IX. Currently, Harvard uses the imperfect, but legally required, Title IX system, ensuring that the accused get a fair hearing. However, the union wants to change this system to get rid of basic due process. Instead of the current system, the HGSU demands that the school allow the HGSU to “investigate” and “arbitrate” cases “without necessarily waiting for the University to conduct an internal investigation.” What this means is that the union would be able to unilaterally punish and even remove professors, for reasons completely opaque to anyone outside of union leadership. This is a ridiculous, unprecedented policy. It is also obviously illegal, a fact in light of which the union has refused to change their demands.

The HGSU has defended their demands by saying the only options are Title IX or union control. That is a false dichotomy. Columbia’s graduate union contract requires Title IX cases to exhaust the university’s internal process before proceeding to outside arbitration, preserving federal protections for victims while adding an independent appeal option afterward. Stanford’s graduate union won a grievance procedure operating in tandem with the Title IX office with third-party arbitration as a backstop after internal processes. Both institutions gave workers real recourse without bypassing Title IX. But this is not the same as the HGSU’s proposal. The HGSU has demanded a policy that simultaneously gives the least standing to victims and the most power to union apparatchiks. This union-first policy has never been implemented at any other university. It is a power grab dressed in the language of survivor protection.

Further, the union’s demands on pay are more about enriching union leaders than ordinary graduate students. The HGSU has demanded an increase in pay for the average graduate student of 12%. Harvard has agreed to an 11% increase. But the HGSU is not happy with this offer. This is because the offer does not meet one of their main demands — cutting graduate students’ wages. The HGSU has demanded Harvard force graduate students to pay the HGSU dues — even if graduate students are not members of the union — in order to increase pay for union leaders. At a school where the graduate student union is extremely unpopular, the HGSU is paradoxically demanding Harvard cut the wages of Harvard students while increasing pay for union leaders.

This demand is even more ridiculous when we recognize that little of these dues will ever go back to the Harvard ecosystem. Last year the HGSU collected $757,578 in dues from roughly 2,000 dues-paying workers. Roughly 60% was sent directly to the UAW. Of the $300,000 remaining locally, more than half goes to salaries and benefits for three external organizers. The rest covers Google Workspace accounts, legal fees, and political lobbying. The worker paying $379 a year sees roughly $150 of it stay in Cambridge. The remaining $227 flows to a national apparatus that funds partisan left-wing political campaigns such as Kamala Harris’s presidential run. If Harvard gives into union demands, HGSU’s dues collection would more than double to over $1 million annually, with the same 60% flowing to national left-wing politics. If Harvard is serious about “viewpoint diversity” and “academic freedom,” forcing students to give to left-wing political organizations should be a complete nonstarter.

Indeed, the HGSU’s other demands on wages are equally strange. Their primary demand on wages is to increase pay for an extremely small subsector of Harvard students. Harvard pays graduate students $45-50,000 per year for the first 5 years. After this, Harvard covers tuition and fees and pays students over $25,000, but since students no longer work for Harvard full-time, they no longer get full pay. Students in STEM, who still work full-time in research labs, still receive $50,000 annually.2 This is a sensible policy. Those who do not work full-time should not receive full-time pay. Further, it is very difficult to take in new PhD students when the same PhD students are being paid after a decade of being graduate students. It also affects a tiny minority of Harvard’s student population. Most students receive their PhD within 6 years. 96% receive their PhD in 8 years.3 This is hardly the most pressing issue faced at Harvard. But it makes sense as a central demand when we look at the people who run the union. For instance, Denish Jaswal, who leads the union in negotiations, is an eighth-year PhD student with no signs of graduating. The union is at this point seeking an increase in union leaders’ wages paid for by cutting the normal graduate student’s wages.

This callous policy is motivated by a mission that views Harvard’s graduate students as a mere building block of a broader political project. The pattern of HGSU leadership tells the story directly. The founder of the union, Brandon Mancillam, led the 2019 strike coordinating team he described as “planning university disruptions,” before leaving his doctoral program entirely for election as a regional Union Chapter Director at $223,744 a year. He told the Young Democratic Socialists of America that his goal in leading strikes is to “change the entire landscape of power in this country.” This deserves repeating. Mancillam’s goal was not to get Harvard’s workers a raise. It was to change the “entire landscape of power.” It was to lead a revolution. The union was then led by Evan MacKay, who later left to run for Massachusetts State Representative on the DSA ticket, described the union as having the purpose of supporting the “socialist movement” and “climate justice.” Not, of course, actually helping students. The question the union does not want asked is simple. Is the HGSU an organization that represents graduate students or a launching pad for activist careers dressed in the language of labor solidarity?

The current leadership seems far more committed to the latter goal. The current president is Sara Speller, a fifth-year Music PhD candidate. Her published research examines how Western classical music enforces what she describes as “supremacist ideology.” The Vice President, Sudipta Saha, introduces himself on the union’s official executive board page that his passion is “not” improving “material” conditions for workers (that is, the point of a union) but rather building a “militant” union for “internationalist causes.” He has further proposed naming the union Halloween party after the opening line of the Communist Manifesto and, on an official level, recommends a Marxist podcast to union members. Indeed, the union’s bylaws commit the organization to “solidarity” with “progressive organizations” before any reference to wages or labor conditions.

Neither Mancilla, President Speller, nor Vice President Saha responded when asked for comment by the Harvard Salient.

This explains why the union has been completely uninterested in actual negotiations. After fifteen months and sixty hours at the table the union has agreed on two articles out of twenty-five. ICE non-collaboration clauses are not mandatory bargaining subjects under the NLRA, meaning the union has little leverage to push Harvard to negotiate on them. Harvard’s lawyers correctly identified this and used it as cover while the union spent nine months on proposals the school had no legal obligation to discuss. Harvard’s own working group said urgent action was required on wages. A union focused on wages would have spent fifteen months on wages, an issue on which Harvard was clearly willing to negotiate. This union did not, because wages were never the point.

The HGSU’s open political extremism is why most Harvard graduate students do not support it. Only 1,700 of the claimed 5,500 workers pay dues. Nearly 68% of covered workers have declined to fund the organization. In its own materials, the union shows nothing but contempt for this silent majority, who they dismiss as not doing their “fair-share.” Indeed, union leaders allegedly sent messages warning graduate students that continuing to teach would be viewed as a “betrayal,” and union representatives have gone around campus monitoring compliance by fellow graduate students. In a field like academia where connections determine success, the HGSU’s thought-policing cannot be viewed as anything but threats to unaligned graduate students. To force students to give to this unpopular, extremist organization would be to betray them. It would be to put national left-wing politics over the concerns of Harvard students.

Harvard must retain its resolve against the HGSU, which is fundamentally negotiating from a place of weakness. The HGSU is deeply unpopular among graduate students. Normal graduate students looked at an organization whose VP wants to build a militant internationalist movement, whose dues fund presidential super PACs, and whose hardship fund runs through the DSA, and decided this was not an organization they wanted to fund. That is not freeloading. Harvard has rightly refused forcing these students to fund the HGSU across three consecutive contracts. If it turns its back on graduate students by negotiating with the HGSU’s extremist leadership, it will only legitimize an organization trying to threaten and attack its way to power. If it gives into the HGSU’s absurd demands on Title IX, it will make Harvard into a union-controlled school.

This is not to say nothing should be done to help Harvard’s workers. The fix is concrete: close the funding cliff, extend the humanities guarantee to six years like Yale and MIT, and pay workers what peer institutions pay theirs. None of this requires a Marxist VP, all-powerful thought police threatening professors and students, or funnelling graduate students’ money into national politics. Indeed, Harvard has already recommended what the strikers want. The goal, for union leaders, however, was never to close the gap. The goal, stated plainly by the people running this union, is self-enrichment through international revolution.

My grandfather’s union got him fair pay and decent working conditions. It did not force members to give money to presidential campaigns. It did not aim towards international Communism. It did not spend all its time trying to enrich and empower union bosses. It did not send coercive messages to workers who just wanted to show up and do their jobs. Harvard’s graduate workers deserve that kind of union. What we have instead is a spectre. Until the HGSU replaces its leadership, Harvard must end these farcical negotiations. We cannot negotiate with extremists who want nothing less than total control over the university.

And the people most at risk from the HGSU are the ones they claim to protect.

The Harvard Republican Club’s (HRC) recent rejection of Republican values should have been a unifying moment, when all students, conservative and liberal, can come together and defend religious liberty at Harvard. However, Harvard’s largest newspaper, the Crimson, has chosen in the past week to use this moment to amplify the message of an organization with extremist views, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). In doing so, the Crimson has tried to smuggle extremist viewpoints into Harvard’s discourse under the guise of “civil rights.” This is unacceptable. CAIR is not a “civil rights group,” as the Crimson has described it. It is in fact an extremist organization that has, as we will show in this article, defended domestic abuse and antisemitism. Instead of being amplified, this extremism must be rejected.

In two articles, coming out within 24 hours of one another, the Crimson amplified CAIR’s criticism of Harvard. Following the HRC’s post about Harvard Eid celebrations, CAIR complained in a letter and a Tweet about “false allegations of antisemitism,” while demanding Harvard take action against the HRC. It is a slightly odd decision to report on this – the Crimson does not usually report on outside groups condemning the school, let alone clubs at the school – but this is not in itself especially suspect.1

The second Crimson article, however, was odd. This article covered a seven-month-old letter (presumably provided to the Crimson by CAIR) which CAIR had sent to Harvard criticizing its policies against antisemitism. In the Crimson article, CAIR is presented as a benign “civil rights group,” while Harvard is shamed for not having responded to CAIR’s demands for less action against antisemitism. This is not news. It is the propagandistic amplification of CAIR’s previous advocacy efforts and, simply put, an attempt to inject CAIR’s views into Harvard public life.

And CAIR’s views, we will make clear, are extreme. CAIR has sought to train police officers to avoid prosecuting domestic abusers in favor of “counselling” with religious authorities.2 Indeed, CAIR allegedly overlooked allegations of sexual abuse within its ranks for nearly half a decade, driven by the same extremism that led them to avoid action against domestic abuse. Furthermore, CAIR has faced consistent allegations that it discriminates against non-Muslims, against non-Sunni Muslims, and against women.3 The Muslim women whose beatings CAIR allegedly covered up and who were discriminated against might be shocked to hear the Crimson’s assertion that the entire time, CAIR is a defender of “civil rights.”

Notably, of course, where CAIR has proven most directly opposed to civil rights is in its approach towards Jews. CAIR has consistently defended antisemitism. CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad stated that he was “happy to see” the October 7^th terrorist attack against Jewish civilians in Israel; indeed, Awad had previously worked for an organization directly funded by Hamas. Even after his remarks led to CAIR being blacklisted from the United States government, Awad has remained CAIR’s Executive Director, showing how ideologically committed they are to extremism.

Indeed, in the past few months, CAIR has continued defending antisemitism, no matter its ideological source. For instance, CAIR has praised Carrie Prejean for her statements defending conspiracy theories about Jews. Indeed, they have promoted Prejean even after she endorsed James Fishback’s fringe and openly antisemitic run for Governor of Florida. CAIR’s persistent defense of antisemitism helps to properly contextualize its attacks on Harvard’s actions against antisemitism. CAIR is less motivated by an interest in the “civil rights” of Muslim students as they are by a (negative) interest in the civil rights of Jewish students. Of course, the Crimson did not provide the basic context necessary for readers to understand CAIR’s suspect perspective.

The President of the Crimson did not respond on the record to our request for comment.

The Crimson’s amplification of the extremist CAIR has been so egregious because it is completely unwarranted. CAIR is not a significant group with influence over Harvard; when the administration received CAIR’s letter, it responded with a template message about referring to the University’s guidelines.

CAIR does not represent a vast majority of Muslims in America. Indeed, a Gallup center poll states only 12 percent of American Muslims feel that CAIR represents them. CAIR has even allegedly misled donors to receive donations from people who do not support their radical agenda. The United Arab Emirates, a Muslim nation, has even officially classified CAIR as a “Terrorist Organization.” Indeed, CAIR’s radical ideology and extreme distance from mainstream America is why the organization has allegedly been reduced to relying upon surreptitious foreign funding.

That the Crimson would unquestioningly inject extremists like CAIR into Harvard debate for the sake of clicks and quotes is an indictment on its seriousness as a journalistic institution. It is imperative that we all avoid bigoted extremism, whether coming from CAIR, the HRC, or even the Crimson. Hopefully, the Crimson can recognize its failure to defend against bigotry and retract its inaccurate and dangerous depiction of CAIR as an innocuous “civil rights organization.”

At a moment when university administrators, progressive activist groups, and student organizations are eager to police belief, Christians should be the loudest defenders of religious liberty. Not because all religions are equally true–they are not–and not because truth is relative–it is not–but because religious freedom is not just a constitutional birthright but also the most reliable safeguard for the public practice of Christianity.

The First Amendment is unequivocal: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”1 The framers were not naive. They knew that government power expands quickly and retreats rarely, witnessing state churches, political persecution, coerced conformity, and rulers who presumed authority over conscience. Their answer was not a sanitized public square scrubbed clean of religious expression. It was ordered liberty, a republic in which faith could flourish free from government interference.

The framers understood religious liberty is not a blank check. No serious person argues that constitutional protection extends to terrorism, criminal threats, or violent intimidation. Maintaining public safety is a legitimate function of government. But peaceful worship is a fundamental right that precedes the state and the university administrator. These are not privileges that university administrators grant or revoke at their discretion. Our Constitution recognizes these truths.

For Christians, this is not merely a matter of constitutional principle–it is a matter of biblical faithfulness. Scripture recognizes that authentic faith cannot be coerced. The Apostle Paul wrote to the Romans that “the authorities that exist are established by God,” but also that each person must be “fully convinced in his own mind” on matters of conscience. Christ himself drew the boundary: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.”2 Government has a legitimate and limited role, but the conscience does not belong to the state, and certainly not to a university’s diversity office. Thus, truth must persuade rather than compel.

The framers established a republic in which religion could flourish without government interference, in which dissenting and minority faiths could exist alongside the majority without administrative permission. Universities, which claim to be the custodians of free inquiry and open debate, should honor that legacy—not by endorsing any particular faith, but by protecting the freedom of all to gather, pray, preach, and associate without harassment or penalty.

At Harvard, when a student organization challenges another religious group’s right to congregate outdoors, every student who values liberty ought to take notice–regardless of whether they share that group’s theology or sympathize with its politics. The question is not whether we agree with the theology of the people praying. The question is rather whether any group of students has the authority to decide which forms of worship are acceptable. Once that power is claimed, every minority faith on campus becomes vulnerable. Today’s target is someone else’s religion. Tomorrow’s may be yours. While not affirming every religion as equally true, when Christians defend religious liberty for themselves, they must also defend it for everyone.

Conservatives have long understood that a state strong enough to silence your “enemies” is strong enough to silence you. A government empowered to define “acceptable religion” could one day—as both national Democrats and Harvard have often attempted—classify biblical teaching on marriage, sexuality, or the sanctity of life as discriminatory, harmful, or disruptive to campus community standards.

Christians in particular should think carefully before inviting administrators to regulate religious expression, even when those officials are seemingly sympathetic. Institutional power does not dissolve when leadership changes. It is inherited. The regulatory machine created under a friendly administration is available to a hostile one. Powers built to suppress one faith will not sit idle when political winds shift.

Some might say that providing an open forum for expression of all beliefs is an affront to Truth. However, the argument that Christians must seek protection from certain beliefs through political dominance reflects a lack of confidence that Truth will prevail through open engagement. If we bind religious truth to political power, we will subordinate it to forces which it should stand above.

The curtain opens. The audience quiets. The air buzzes with excitement for a play millennia in the making. Teachers at the Academy, Aristotle, Kant, and Kierkegaard gaze upon the production from box seats, while Plato is characteristically absent. Their students watch from the ground floor, each ticket stub reading the date and seat number, along with the title in bold: The Tragedy of the Academy.

Our protagonist, like that of all other great tragedies, is one who, in an attempt to do good, releases unintended havoc upon the world. Hamlet, seeking justice for his father, dooms his entire family. Oedipus, in his attempts to outrun fate, fulfills prophecy. Lear, seeking stability, splits his own kingdom. And in this play, our hero, Humanitas, seeking the betterment of Man, has brought about his own rejection.

Aristotle, addressing the great thinkers around him, describes the essential aspects of Tragedy. “Hamartia!” he proclaims: the fundamental error of the tragic hero, the seal of his often ironic fate. Hamartia is what makes those who seek life find death, those who seek justice find lawlessness, and, in our case, those who search for meaning find purposelessness. Humanitas strove to improve the people around him, to forge character in the furnace of culture. Yet, from him emerged Scientia, who rejected the humanistic progress that Humanitas thought would lead to the betterment of humans themselves.

In many tragedies, this world-inverting mistake results from the protagonist’s hubris and blindness to potential repercussions. One of Aristotle’s students asks, “What was the grave hamartia of Humanitas?” At this, Aristotle falls silent, unwilling to speak without understanding: The hero’s fatal flaw had not yet been revealed.

The play continues. Humanitas, in his devotion to refinement, drifts from his purpose. Intoxicated with the beauty of rhetoric, he teaches his students how to argue but never how to wonder. His pupils study as if nothing were at stake; they can break down but not build, dissect but not give life; their ideas are ribcages without lungs or a heart.

At the climax of the production, Humanitas begins a monologue directed at his child Scientia, who led an overthrow of his father from the Academy:

“Why do you reject me so? Why do you think you can live without me?

I oversaw your birth. I ushered you into the world.

Remove yourself from my company and you will see,

A hand without an arm can only grasp at rocks and dirt.”

By this point in the drama, St. Augustine, carefully avoiding a disordered love of theatre and emotional excess, applaudes Humanitas’ speech. He reminds those around him that it is better to own a tree, know its Creator, and eat from it than to know the tree’s height and width and its number of branches, while enjoying none of its fruit. At this, the students on the ground floor began to growl. One calls out, “Humanitas’ fruit is bitter and rotten!” Another bellows, “At least Scientia is practical.”

They see science as the means by which man is made healthy and lives are improved. But they forget that the humanities, not the sciences, taught us that it is better to be healthy than sick and that human life has infinite value. In this way, the fruit is a life well-lived, not mere progress. It was the humanities which brought the sciences into the world for a simple reason: to discover what is so that we can build what ought to be.

The humanities must direct that knowledge toward the Good. The sciences can keep us alive, but the humanities ask why that life is worth living. In the decline of Humanitas and the dilapidation of his aged halls, the world increasingly rejects that humanity is a part of its progress. Technology and science may improve, but what about character? Will Humanitas remember who he is, who we all are, before it is too late?

The box seats weep. The ground floor cheers. The curtain closes.

Over the past ten years, STEM at Harvard has become increasingly dominated by a small number of majors–Computer Science, Neuroscience, and Applied Mathematics. These fields went from comprising 37% of STEM concentrators in 2016 to over 48% in 2025. While greater economic opportunities in software engineering likely motivated the shift toward Computer Science, the rise of the other two majors is more difficult to explain. Neuroscience has indeed been a locus for significant scientific discovery over the last 10 years, but it is hardly a booming sector of the economy. The rise of Applied Mathematics is even more confusing. Applied Mathematics was first founded at Harvard to allow, among other things, students to study computer science before there was a Computer Science department. As Harvard’s Computer Science department expanded, we should have expected Applied Math to decline in influence. Instead, these two fields have exploded in popularity, with the number of concentrators doubling since 2015.

A significant reason for the rise of Neuroscience and Applied Mathematics may be the fungibility of each field with more difficult alternatives. Neuroscience, for instance, is a common path for pre-medical school students, both at Harvard and elsewhere. Unlike other pre-med fields, however, Harvard’s Neuroscience department imposes less onerous requirements on its students. While a student may take the more difficult “quantitative” track, the main track of Harvard’s Neuroscience department, “neurobiology,” does not require a single course that demands more than 3-5 hours of work per week, according to a plurality of students.1 By comparison, Harvard’s two other main tracks of biology, “Molecular and Cellular Biology” (MCB) and “Human Development and Regenerative Biology” (HDRB) require multiple courses that demand at least an average of 6-8 hours of work per week.2

Distributional “Physical Sciences” requirements in traditional biology fields also make them more restrictive and demanding than Neuroscience. For both the traditional biology tracks at Harvard, physical science requirements include courses in sub-fields of chemistry and physics, which are often extremely intensive.3 On the other hand, students can earn Neuroscience degrees at Harvard without taking a single course in chemistry or physics. While these differences may seem small, at a school with such a focus on optimization and graduate school admissions, even a minor increase in GPA can change student behavior significantly. Indeed, the relatively easy pre-med pathway offered by neuroscience has been openly cited by students when asked why they chose it as their concentration.

The popularity of Applied Mathematics is even more clearly a function of relative grade inflation. Students do not just concentrate in Applied Mathematics; they concentrate in Applied Mathematics with a different application concentration. This means that one can get a Computer Science degree at Harvard, or at least a degree that says “Computer Science,” without taking the ordinarily required Computer Science courses. The idea of an Applied Mathematics/Computer Science might seem like a befuddling notion at Harvard. Harvard’s Computer Science department offers plenty of math options for concentrators. The department requires students to take multiple “theoretical computer science” classes, that is, classes in applied mathematics, to graduate with a Computer Science degree.4 These are usually the most difficult courses a Computer Science concentrator is required to take. Indeed, Harvard’s Computer Science department is considered unusually focused on mathematics and theory. It is hard to imagine students looking at Harvard’s Computer Science department and viewing the department as not focused enough on applying mathematics!

Unintuitively, Applied Math is likely popular because it allows students to avoid complex mathematics. Harvard requires Computer Science concentrators to take at least two of Computer Science 1200, 1210, and 1240, three of the most challenging math-focused courses required for concentrators.5 To be considered for honors, a student must take Computer Science 1240, which requires an average of ~15 hours per week. If this weren’t enough, all Computer Science majors must take Statistics 110, a probabilistic mathematics course that requires an average of approximately 15 hours per week.

Applied Mathematics/Computer Science, however, has very few requirements.6 While Applied Mathematics/Computer Science concentrators must take CS 1200 and “2 more core courses drawn from the 1200s, 1300s, 1500s, 1610, 1750, or the 1800s,” this is far easier than the policy of the Computer Science department. Applied Mathematics students also need not take Statistics 110, removing one of the most difficult math course requirements from the Computer Science degree. Thus, Applied Mathematics fills a unique niche for those who want a degree in computer science without taking many of the most challenging courses.

This is not to say that getting a degree in Neuroscience or Applied Mathematics is easy. Indeed, both of these concentrations are significantly more difficult than nearly all humanities concentrations. But more important than the student experience is the fact that grade inflation has redirected many students to undergraduate concentrations that are relatively easier. As a result, when administrators look at what departments should receive greater funding or resources, they see departments that have been chosen as a direct result of grade inflation. Administrators looking for whom to fund may naturally focus on these popular fields, because greater student enrollment means research in these areas is more in need of resources than, say, smaller biology departments. Thus, STEM grade inflation can cause highly distortionary results, where grade-inflated departments receive funding rewards because of their grade inflation.

Of course, academic decisions are not this simple. Both funding cuts and increases are often more functions of donor interest, institutional competitiveness, and academic trends than anything as rational as demonstrated student interest. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that student interest has some impact on academic decision-making. Harvard’s largest donations over the past 10 years, for instance, have been focused on a small number of fields – Computer Science, Neuroscience, and the broader School of Engineering and Applied Sciences – all of which saw significant increases in student interest prior to outside investment. At the end of the day, big donors want their names on big departments. Meanwhile, the humanities, facing a rapid decline in student interest, have seen a significant decline in funding. Student interest plays a significant role in determining which sciences are funded and which are ignored.

While student interest may seem like a heuristic for determining which areas of study should receive more funding, the metric becomes incoherent when there is rampant grade inflation. In an ideal world, students pick fields that are academically exciting or have high economic returns. These are fine measurements of how innovative a field is or how economically beneficial its research, both of which are important factors in deciding what departments ought to be funded. But when students choose a field not because of these value-tracking traits but rather because it will improve their GPA, funding will be misallocated to fields that do not need that money and talent. It is hardly reasonable to say, as Harvard’s behavior implies, that money ought to be spent on Applied Mathematics or Neuroscience research rather than Computer Science or Biology research because of those departments’ grading practices.

Where research is most important and difficult, the university will as a result fail to effectively innovate. Universities are already failing to keep up with research in the most important, innovative fields. In artificial intelligence, perhaps the central research program of our day, American universities are becoming peripheral, producing few of the basic research papers that order modern AI research.7 In biology, too, universities are losing importance, with biotech industry research reaching an all-time high of 35% of basic research output in 2022. Indeed, two of the three laureates of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Medicine, Mary Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell, had never worked at a university, winning instead for their work in private industry.

To maintain Harvard’s role in American research, we must recognize that grade inflation will not just lead to poor repute but a dislocation of Harvard from its research mission. Harvard’s current battle against grade inflation seems more focused on making easy courses harder than in drawing resources and talent to the most challenging and productive areas of study.

To effectively curb inter-departmental grade inflation, Harvard’s administrators must enact policies that are targeted and disruptive. Such policies may seem overly punitive, particularly for those researchers currently benefitting from the relative ease of their departments. But Harvard’s administration cannot take its usual laissez-faire approach to our problems. In Harvard’s recent conflict with the Trump Administration, our most important defense was our research. At a time when the status of elite universities is in question, Harvard cannot afford to lose that defense.

If we fail to stem inter-departmental grade inflation, Harvard will no longer be able to contribute to the most fruitful scientific problems of our time. It is difficult to imagine why a donor, or a government, would view an institution so dislocated from mainstream science as a proper recipient of funding.

In general, Harvard’s grade inflation debate has become repetitive. Traditionally, the debate focuses on fields in the humanities and social sciences which require little work, and even less (if any) good work. According to this view, easy grading causes students to learn less, or makes their degrees less economically useful, or demotivates them. But these concerns hardly threaten the fundamental mission of Harvard; at worst, Harvard becomes a little less trustworthy to employers.

But this story hides a more pernicious form of grade inflation. Because getting into the right medical school or getting the right big tech job is just as easy for someone concentrating in an inflated as an uninflated field, these differences have fundamentally altered what our school considers a significant research question and what our students learn. If we continue on this path, Harvard will lose its dominance as a research institution, and students will no longer learn the skills they need to excel in the fields to which they aspire. Thus, what we need is not more initiatives or task forces on grade inflation in Dance Media or Education Studies. What we need is fair standards across STEM concentrations.

In the past week, Harvard’s campus has been abuzz with a variety of religious events. On Sunday, Easter celebrations were held in the middle of Harvard Yard, inside and outside Memorial Church. Harvard Hillel created a 9-foot-wide Sedar plate outside of Harvard’s Science Center and organized a celebratory dinner with Harvard Dean of Students Thomas Dunne. And the Harvard Islamic Society held an Eid Mubarak celebration near Quincy House. The authors of this piece are Jewish, Christian, and Muslim conservatives, and as conservatives, we celebrate this flourishing religious life on Harvard’s typically secular campus.

But, strangely, the Harvard Republican Club (HRC) attacked the presence of religious life on campus. In a recent social media post, they derided Muslims celebrating religious life by declaring that “Harvard has been captured” and spreading lies about what occurred at the event. This attack is indicative of a clique that has taken over the HRC and moved it away from Republican principles. As the American founders understood, once the civil rights of one religious community are restricted, no religion, whether Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, is safe.

The story of the takeover of the HRC starts with Leo Koerner, who assumed control over the HRC last year. As President, he altered the HRC in his vision. As the former head of the John Adams Society, a social organization closely associated with the current leadership of the HRC, Koerner allegedly presided over neo-Nazi Hitler Salutes, which became pervasive under his leadership. He also allegedly proposed the later-conducted removal of all women as members of the organization. Koerner pushed an extremist, exclusionary ideology that departs from conservatism. Republicans are not Nazis. Republicans do not support removing women from the conservative movement. The HRC no longer reflects Republicans.

As president of the HRC, Koerner adopted structural changes to consolidate his influence. He rewrote the Constitution of the HRC, removing elections so that, under the new rules, he could handpick the incoming Board.1 At this point, HRC leadership rejected the very idea of the Republic in order to keep power. This open rejection of Republican values by removing elections shows the HRC has forsaken its Republican name.

This handpicked, illegitimate board is the current HRC leadership: as such, it is closely affiliated with Koerner’s vision. Koerner handpicked the former Chairman of the John Adams Society as current President of the HRC. The current President has continued to enact Koerner’s vision. If anything, he has displayed support for taking it even further by allegedly implementing the expulsion of all women as Chairman of the John Adams Society. Indeed, in the past month, even after Koerner’s alleged facilitation of Nazi salutes went public, he is the only student who has been retweeted multiple times by the HRC’s Twitter account.

In this context, the HRC’s recent attack on student religious life makes more sense. They are objecting to religious celebrations as an extension of their desire to remove religious minorities from Harvard, just as they have sought to remove religious minorities and women from Harvard conservatism. Indeed, when we look at the comments on the HRC’s post, like “Fuck Muslims. Fuck Jews,” “Why is a Single Muslim at Harvard,” and “It looks like a small village in Somalia,” we can recognize the crowd that the HRC has fostered. The HRC is not motivated, nor does anyone believe they are motivated, by “defending Harvard.” The desire instead appears to be remaking Harvard without women, Jews, or other religious minorities. This is neither an American nor a Republican vision.

When asked, former HRC President Leo Koerner, incumbent HRC President Elliott Detjen, and HRC Treasurer Evan Doerr did not respond for comment.

The HRC leadership, both in practice and in their selection, no longer represents Harvard’s conservative community. We are not interested in expelling women, or Jews, or minorities. We are proud to be American and defend her founding ideals. The leadership of the HRC was not picked by the Republican process, and thus is not representative of Republicans on campus. It is a shame that Harvard’s Republican Club has given up Republican values in favor of something else.

These failings are not just abstract, they have led the HRC to attack Harvard’s religious communities. One of our co-authors, Daniel Patel, provides an account of the HRC’s recent misrepresentation of Harvard’s Eid Mubarak celebration:

My name is Daniel. I am a conservative and a Muslim. I am the Treasurer of the Harvard Islamic Society, the organization that organized the Eid Bazaar.

The blatant lies in the HRC’s post were staggering. What the HRC identified as a “prayer mat” was a simple tarp laid out for seating. What they described as a “capture” consisted of students, faculty, and families gathered around sizzling lamb kebabs and perusing trinkets. The HRC described our guests as “unvetted strangers.” They were families. They were alumni. We had a clear policy of asking attendees to RSVP. That meant the people who attended were families, alumni, and other vetted Bostonians. The HRC’s claimed that “Burqas and Qurans” were being sold. There were no Burqas. There were no Qurans.

It is difficult to imagine how such ridiculous oversights could have been a simple “mistake.” The HRC leadership looked at photographs of a community event and decided to invent a more threatening image. My co-authors have already documented what animates that impulse: an illegitimate leadership selected by a man who presided over Hitler salutes, that abolished member elections, and that has proven itself unbothered by open antisemitism and misogyny in its ranks. What the HRC did to our event is what that kind of organization does. It manufactures threats where there are none to justify illegitimate organizational capture. History has a name for that. It is not Republicanism.

The intellectual roots of modern American conservatism are more entangled with the Islamic tradition than the HRC’s leadership seems to know. In 1981, Ronald Reagan cited the 14th-century Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun by name to justify his economic platform, specifically Khaldun’s argument that excessive taxation destroys the very productivity it seeks to tax. One commenter on the HRC post wrote “Reagan was right.” On Ibn Khaldun, on faith, on the need for moral and religious community in this country, they are more right than they know.

Reagan and Khaldun both understood that a healthy nation rests on a society that exists outside of direct government control. Families gathering in a public square to celebrate their faith and trade goods is an expression of that society. This was a Muslim event, yes. It was also an American event. I know that the leadership of the Harvard Islamic Society consists of American citizens born and raised in this country, and who love this country, because I am one of them. The HRC called it a “capturing” of Harvard. I call it the American dream. I call it religious liberty. And I am genuinely uncertain what they find threatening about it, rather than the mangled, misrepresented event that they shared on social media. Unless, of course, their objection was never really about the event at all.

Today, many on the right fixate on the Western historical heritage. Rather than choosing a set of values irrespective of its historical context, they emphasize the cultural norms, aesthetic preferences, and traditions that gave rise to those values. Simultaneously, many on the left reject the Western historical heritage in its entirety; rather than condemning specific values within Western intellectual history, they condemn the surrounding culture and the traditions that produced them. The heritage with which both the left and right engage, however, is composed of intellectual trajectories that generate tensions in both movements. In order to resolve those tensions, the left and the right must treat their heritage not as a monolithic entity, but as an amalgamation of distinct values that require evaluation independent of their historical context. 

The main proponents of the conservatism I describe claim to want a return to “Christianity” and a renewed focus on the Western historical heritage. These conservatives embrace the Western historical heritage because they see it as the root of their European identity; they categorize its culture and ideals as inherited wisdom that must be protected from modernity. But in order to embrace their heritage through such criteria, they must reject a core facet of that heritage: the value of criticism. The Enlightenment was marked by a distrust toward all forms of inherited wisdom that contributed to the West’s scientific advancement and its philosophical sophistication, characteristics that conservatives celebrate as proof of Western superiority. By categorizing the Western historical heritage as inherited wisdom, however, some on the right suspend critique of the values within it. In order to embrace their cultural inheritance in its entirety, this faction must betray the values of that inheritance.

One might argue that given the diversity of ideals within the Western intellectual canon, embracing the Western historical heritage does not require embracing Enlightenment values. If this were true, conservatives could embrace the Western historical heritage without betraying its values. Such an argument, however, would require that one pick and choose from the values of the Western canon: a task that would require a prior normative commitment. An ideology that claims to protect the Western heritage but chooses selectively from within that heritage uses its “conservatism” to mask and justify moral prejudices. Such an ideology cannot honestly use the conservative label to describe itself. 

Moreover, a conservatism that seeks to embrace the heritage of pre-Enlightenment Europe without embracing Enlightenment values relies on a false separation between the two. Enlightenment values grew organically out of pre-Enlightenment Europe. The scholastics, for example, sought to use reason to illuminate Christian dogma. Enlightenment thinkers did not generate the value of critique in a vacuum; rather, they applied the skepticism that had been cultivated over centuries of theological debate to the dogmas their predecessors had uncritically accepted. Thus, an embrace of pre-Enlightenment Europe entails an acceptance of Enlightenment values, albeit in an inchoate form; such an ideology must sacrifice its consistency by stunting the growth of the values it strives to maintain. 

Similarly, one might claim that a commitment to the Western historical heritage is primarily cultural rather than ideological; just as one can celebrate certain holidays out of respect for the past rather than ideological devotion, one can celebrate European culture in the same way. This argument, however, relies on a separation between culture and ideology that does not exist in practice. Cultural practices not only assume ideological commitments but often exist to celebrate them. In the absence of those commitments, the traditions deteriorate. In today’s political landscape, those who claim they desire a renewal of Western culture rarely argue their ambitions are solely cultural because they understand that without strong values, culture cannot sustain itself. 

But the tension that arises from an uncompromising engagement with the Western historical heritage does not merely implicate conservatism; the left’s rejection of this heritage generates a similar tension. Many on today’s left assert that the Western historical heritage is morally compromised by its association with slavery and colonization. Academics in the humanities, for example, often justify their focus on European thought and history by citing the overwhelming prevalence of critique in such scholarship; scholarship that does not condemn the Western historical heritage would, they claim, have little value.

When I attended a lecture on Olaudah Equiano, a freed slave who wrote a memoir describing his conversion to Christianity, a professor argued that his invocation of European values was solely valuable insofar as it facilitated his argument for the abolition of slavery; to her, his religious conversion had no value outside of its use to further a political objective. Further, she argued that this intellectual dishonesty was virtuous, demonstrating the depth of his commitment to dismantling colonialist oppression. Her interpretation thus turned a plausibly spiritual narrative into an attack on the Western historical heritage that left no room for redemption. 

This moment serves as an example of the broader trend that has captured the left-wing movement I describe; it strives not to isolate specific aspects of the Western historical heritage deserving of critique, but to dismantle the heritage in its entirety. In this act of destruction, the left applies the same value of critique that its predecessors applied toward the dogmas of Christianity to the tradition in which it was formed. Today’s left is the inheritor of the intellectual tradition that it seeks to devalue; by dismantling the Western historical heritage, the left destroys its own roots. The left-wing ideology I describe is therefore inherently self-destructive. 

The tension underlying the historical orientations of both left and right results from a broader moral framework that treats a historical heritage as a monolithic entity that must either be accepted or rejected in its entirety. In the case of the right, it evaluates tradition through its connection to one’s ancestry, and demands an uncritical commitment toward one’s historical heritage. In the case of the left, it evaluates tradition through its status on a power hierarchy and applies critique selectively to dismantle traditions deemed “problematic.” To resolve the tension that results from the application of these orientations to the Western historical heritage, the left and right must shift their gaze from the past to the ideas within it. Rather than taking historical heritage as a monolithic entity, they must apply both critique and rehabilitation to build a consistent set of values.

On March 26, former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan discussed his career and America’s political future with former Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx at Harvard’s Institute of Politics forum. Ryan argued that America’s current ills are caused by a “populist” moment fostered by social media that treats politics as “entertainment.” Instead, Ryan argued that America needs “evidence-based analysis” about “what works” through the traditional institutions of policymaking.

Throughout the night, a belief in Congress’ institutions and consensus-making practice animated Ryan’s arguments. He argued that Congress had unduly lost power to the Executive Branch, pointing out that “the legislative is the more powerful branch in our constitution,” something which Presidents on both the right and left had forgotten. He argued that modern politics has been taken over by “entertainers” who just wanted to “get famous,” supplanting legislators “who wanted to do something.” Instead, we need to return to a focus on “evidence,” a repeated focus of his remarks. In our current “TikTok culture” a “majority” of legislators in Congress are now there not to debate policy but to entertain their supporters, damaging our political culture.

Ryan argued that the populist era had facilitated the rise of a form of conservative “nationalist populism,” which he argued is not even a form of conservatism. Instead, it is a form of “paleo-conservatism,” based upon “blood and soil nationalism” and “moral relativism,” that rejects the fundamental tenets of American conservatism. In its place, Ryan advocates a return to the conservatism of his day, one which is not the defense of a value system or nation-state but rather a “classically liberal” political culture, which is based upon “a rich tradition of great thought that goes back to the Enlightenment,” one which defends “liberty, freedom, self-determination, pluralism…equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome, and [conservatives] premise all of this on a philosophy of natural law.” This conservatism, in Ryan’s view, is based upon the view that America “is built upon an idea,” as opposed to being built upon long historical “legacies.”

Yet, Ryan did not simply seek to defend the traditional institutions which have been supplanted in the Trump era. He openly recognized that attempts to “extend the Reagan era,” which he supported, were rejected in 2012 and the 2015-16 primaries, beginning a “new era” for conservatives. Further, he recognized that much of what he sought, like a “Congressional Commission” that would resolve the ballooning national deficit in a bipartisan manner, is unrealistic in today’s era of polarization. Nevertheless, he argued that some “scare big enough” from the “bond markets,” or the American “people getting sick of” our entertainment-focused political culture among voters, could lead to “a political incentive structure” dedicated to fixing problems.

Ryan said, thus, that whatever comes next will not be just an extension of Reagan-era conservatism but rather a set of new political “solutions” to new political problems that are being thought about at places like the “American Enterprise Institute.” He argued that a new political perspective would take hold after Trump’s tenure ends, as Trumpism is not based on “a set of core principles” but rather a “cult of personality.” It is odd that, while recognizing that the policies conservatives will advocate for in the future will never return to Reagan-era conservatism, Ryan nevertheless seems to believe that the basic conservative ideology which underlies those policies will revert to the consensus-based fusionism of the Reagan era.

It seems quite unlikely, however, that we will return to the Reagan-era consensus about the basic goals of America. We are not in the Cold War era in which the ideas of Ryan and his political mentors were incubated. As national security concerns no longer unify us, no clear consensus understanding of America is taught at schools or universities, and our culture rapidly fragments, Americans increasingly do not share the same cultural or even informational sources. It seems highly unlikely that the Reagan era and the overlapping consensus upon which it was based will return any time soon. While the rise of ideologically empty populism is to be lamented, what it displaced is nevertheless unlikely to return, no matter whether people get sick of the current wave of political populists.

Even though many of the ideas which have historically animated the American conservative movement have lost public purchase, that does not mean that American conservatism will be itself without ideas. Instead, what it means is that we must recognize that conservatism is not encompassed by the classical liberal political goals which Ryan described. Throughout the discussion, Ryan alluded to cultural aspects of conservatism – assimilation of immigrants, a “social contract” based on a “safety net for the poor,” and the rejection of modern “TikTok culture” of “fake it ’til you make it.” These arguments seem to be based on not just a political conservatism but a moral conservatism as well, one which values the basic moral and cultural ideals that unite America as well as our political ideals. Classical liberalism alone cannot defend against threats to these ideals.

Instead, we must recognize that our contemporary political debates are fundamental moral debates that require moral solutions. TikTok culture is not just a political plan for a government but a moral plan for our lives. This culture requires a response not just in political but in moral terms. Conservatism must therefore seek to rebuild a new moral consensus justifying conservative political goals, not just appeal to a moral and cultural consensus that no longer exists. Only conservatism offer answers to the moral debates of the contemporary world.

Of course, basing a conservatism on moral values does not entail a rejection of America’s traditions of pluralism and ordered liberty. Instead it means a return to our Founders’ recognition that our classically liberal political values can be best understood in conjunction with morality, not abstracted from it. Thus, while Ryan is right that the future of conservatism will likely require new thought, he does not recognize how wide-reaching those ideas will have to be. Not only must the future of conservatism develop an economic plan for our new era, but it must also develop a cultural plan that can defend American values against the moral threats of this new era. Building this new moral consensus requires more than just trying to extend a Reagan era that has, sadly, long-since vanished.

Last year, I spent several months campaigning for an “important” position in Harvard Law School’s chapter of the Federalist Society (FedSoc). It was not the most edifying experience. The election cycle devolved into “he said, she said” at its worst. Various factions battled back and forth, and the more drama there was, the more invested everyone became — not in the position or the club, but in the controversy itself. Even professors and podcasters, yes, podcasters, got involved.

It all seemed so important.

So important that, one night just two weeks before the election, I could easily have rushed past an acquaintance of mine in the HLS Pub. He wasn’t in FedSoc, so he wasn’t a potential voter. But I felt a nudge from God, a rare occurrence in my political heart, to sit down and chat with him. So I did.

I began the conversation as anyone might, asking about how he was doing, what he’d been up to lately, and other, similar pleasantries. But he had little interest in small talk, and our conversation quickly turned to Christianity and personal identity. I learned that my friend was not just an agnostic; he was a self-described “man without a chest,” a moniker from C.S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man.1 In other words, he felt little sentiment towards the world. He recounted to me how reflecting upon his own memories felt like reading a newspaper from the 1920s, merely world events that had happened in one place or another. No feelings, just words on a page.

For me, a self-described hopeless romantic, his outlook was shocking, to say the least. I had always evangelized by appealing to the very emotions he now said were entirely alien to him. This man seemed to pose an impossible challenge: he claimed he just could not feel what I did. My heart broke for him.

I asked several follow-up questions and discussed my relationship with Christ. He pondered my words with consideration but seemed mostly unmoved by them. We chatted for a bit longer and then parted ways. I prayed for him, and that was that.

The election season came and went. Life went on.

Then, a year later, we met again. I had just arrived at a Christian Fellowship gathering when I turned to see him walk in through the door. I was puzzled, but approached him and picked up where we had previously left off, with the same pleasantries we had shared a year before.

I asked him why he was there, expecting it was out of some academic interest. But he paused, reflecting for a moment, clearly not knowing how to say it:

“I actually got baptized last spring.”

In light of what I knew about him, those words shook me to the core. He — of all the people I had ever met, the man I thought most difficult to convert — had converted.

He went on to recount how he had begun to think more deeply about faith. Through a series of strange events and sound reasoning, he said, he had come to the inevitable conclusion that he must become a Christian.

I’ll admit, as I listened, I nearly broke down in tears. How I had forgotten what mattered! I would have easily rushed past him that night at the pub, off to the next meeting with the next voter, or to strategize over whatever speech I wanted to give on election night. I would have and could have.

And still worse, how many more have I rushed by? How many times have I felt that impulse to pause and talk, to show the love of Christ, yet had something ‘more important’ to get to? How many?

It was in the course of this terrible revelation that I came to another.

That conversation, even if it didn’t mean all that much to him, meant more to me now than any one of the conversations I had over the course of that entire election cycle. Any of them.

In the drama of that season, in the ‘high stakes’ of partisan politics, I had so easily forgotten who I truly was.

But it’s not just me who has forgotten. So have many conservative Christians.

It is easy to convince ourselves that our political mission requires our primary focus. But we must not forget what this is all really about. We are not on a mission so important as to be excused from being the hands and feet of Christ, to be excused from caring for the lost, the poor, or the brokenhearted, nor from turning the other cheek.

Our political movement, which will surely fade from this Earth as quickly as it appeared, is not so important. We are not so great.

None of us is.

Now, this is not a popular lesson among Harvard’s right-wing. “We need anger,” one of my HLS peers once told me. “There are traitors in our midst,” another said. “We have a country to save.” All of these words may convey some element of the truth: Winning now matters as much as ever, and we should strive to be firm, direct, and effective in our politics.

But the need to ‘win’ is never an excuse to be anything less than Christian. There are worse things than losing. I would rather die a righteous man than live with the blood of the innocent on my hands or bend the knee to a tyrant.

And yet, in our day and age, I easily forget that. I forget the man in the pub. I convince myself that my mission is more important than stopping for him. I convince myself that I am excused from charity, from humility, from striving towards Christ — because that’s just how important my politics is.

But if we are “to save” this country, if we are to root out those “traitors in our midst,” and if we are to use a dangerous tool as “anger” to do so, then we must be men of honor and God. It is not enough for men such as us in a time such as ours to excuse ourselves from the standard of the Christ-follower, from the weight of glory.

Of course, then, this means that we must follow a different playbook from the other side. We are different from them. And of course, to do so makes it harder to win. To be a man of God, in politics as in life, is to do the harder thing.

But that sounds much like weakness to many on the Right. It sounds like I’m espousing your local RINO politics. “Don’t vote for Trump because he’s mean.”

The truth is much harder: Many of the same people who say we shouldn’t vote for mean politicians are just as morally blind as those who say we should always support the President. The Good is not bound to a sense of self-righteousness nor to the support of one mortal man. The Good is God’s. Our mission is His, our party His, and our lives His.

So yes, we live in troubled times. But all of these troubles will be and have been resolved. We know who wins in the end. So we must stop acting as if it would only be through niceness or cut-throatedness or whatever other political tactic we may contrive that we’ll summon Christ and triumph in the end.

God may not want us to win an election or get that one piece of legislation across the line. But he certainly wants us to stop for the man in the pub.

On Monday, Jon Baskin, Becca Rothfeld, and Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein discussed the aesthetics of liberalism at a Harvard Public Culture Project event. Baskin and Rothfeld are both editors at The Point magazine, and Rothfeld is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. The conversation was moderated by English professor James Wood.

The discussion was sparked by an article written by Rothfeld in The Point, where she argued that liberalism fails to attract adherents because it lacks a clear conception of the “good life,” a portrait of beauty that we can look to to guide our actions and endow our lives with meaning. Her article directed its criticism towards a recent book authored by Sunstein, In Defense of Liberalism. She claimed the book failed to focus on the principal limitation of liberalism: not its lack of cogent arguments, but its lack of a compelling aesthetic. In other words, while the “bad art” liberalism produces has little to do with the value of its arguments, it is nevertheless responsible for the growing unpopularity of liberalism and the appeal of traditionalist political ideologies.

According to Rothfeld, the solution to this problem lies in the potential of liberalism to provide “a home for great art and culture” – in other words, a set of spaces where aesthetics can flourish. She pointed to the Partisan Review, a now-defunct literary magazine, as one such space. She argued that a moral framework with pluralism as one of its core tenets cannot provide a single coherent vision for the good life. Rather, a liberal society must strive to foster a multiplicity of visions, while retaining the conviction that such visions cannot affect policy-making.

In contrast, Sunstein presented a more traditional argument for liberalism. “The liberal commitments aren’t aesthetic,” he argued, but rather the “content of policy.” Baskin, meanwhile, was more pessimistic about liberalism’s aesthetic prospects; “the left is very good about producing criticism,” he argued, but lacks the capacity to offer a constructive vision for the future.

Rothfeld’s diagnosis of the problem is admirable, and her analysis of the limitations of liberalism is both insightful and honest. Her solution, however, does not adequately solve the problem. A framework that sequesters our vision of the good life to the realm of “private” expression will fail when that vision has sufficient strength. The strong vision that conservatism provides, in contrast, cannot be separated from its implications in policy; even if it should be separated, the nature of the problem makes it unlikely that conservatives will stop at private expression. In other words, a liberal framework cannot survive confrontation with a strong conservative vision.

We have seen this play out most obviously in Trump’s second election. Many critics seek to paint his leadership as an “autocracy,” appealing to liberal values in order to undermine his legitimacy. But these appeals to liberalism have had little effect in changing his popularity with the electorate. Rather, the failure to effectively weaponize liberal values demonstrates just how brittle liberal frameworks are. Even if the protestations were true, they would say more about liberalism’s insufficient durability than Trump’s alleged authoritarianism.

Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal, Palantir, and Founders Fund, as well as being an early investor in Facebook OpenAI, and many other major technology companies. He is also a major public intellectual on the right and a major intellectual influence on Vice President J.D. Vance. This interview is focused on his thesis, first articulated publicly in 2011, that technological growth has slowed since the 1970s, leading to economic stagnation.

THE SALIENT: You have argued that many of our current social and economic ills are the result of stagnation in scientific and technological progress over the past five decades. I’d like us to go through that process of decline. Mr. Thiel, what changes in the late 1960s and early 1970s do you see as beginning this long stagnation?

PETER THIEL: In 2026, the word “technology” usually means information technology and computers. One could call this a failure of imagination, but on another level, if we define technology as that which is progressing, our narrow-mindedness simply reflects our narrowed range of progress. By contrast, “technology” in 1967 would have meant computers, but also rockets, supersonic aviation, the Green Revolution in agriculture, new medicines, and more. Society was advancing on many different fronts.

I believe progress has slowed since then. How does one measure this? It is extremely difficult, but that is no excuse for nihilism. There’s a basic, Econ 10 intuition, which is that cornucopian tech progress should trickle into productivity gains and income growth, which we have not seen. The younger generations, starting with the millennials and their boomer parents, believe they will do worse than their parents, and unless something changes, I am inclined to believe them. Or there’s the literal question of how fast we’re moving—after building ever-faster sailing ships in the 16^th through 18^th centuries, ever-faster railroads in the 19^th century, and ever-faster cars and airplanes in the 20^th century, we hit a peak with the Concorde, which was decommissioned in 2003. If you factor in the post-9/11 airport security theater, we travel considerably more slowly than we did in the 90s. Or on health, life expectancies are not going up as fast as they were earlier in the 20th century.

I prefer to measure outputs than inputs, but there are around 100 times as many PhDs being produced today as there were in the 1920s. Even if we say things haven’t slowed, and we are making as much progress as we did in the ‘20s—when we formalized quantum mechanics, discovered penicillin, etc.—then the productivity of the average scientist is 99% lower today. That in itself is worth understanding and is at odds with the cornucopian story of progress that we normally tell.

Figuring out “why” we stagnated is even harder than the already difficult question of how much progress we are making. My cop-out answer is that “why” questions are over-determined. There’s a “nature” explanation—we picked the low-hanging fruit and ran out of ideas. The “nurture” explanation that I’m more inclined to, which is more optimistic, is that our culture changed, that people became risk-averse; science became feminized, bureaucratic, and regulated.

This happened, in part, for understandable reasons. In the 20th century, we could no longer avoid science’s “dual-use” problem. It was already evident in World War One, and by Los Alamos we began to wonder whether science and technology were giant traps that humanity had built for itself. Of course, the stagnation only kicked in twenty-five years later. My best explanation for the delay is that cultural changes start to manifest in childhood and take a while to catch on. The Boomer kids were weaned off violent childhood literature like Tintin and the Hardy Boys and fed a diet of Dr. Seuss. You ended up with a generation less motivated to go to the moon, that instead decamps out to Woodstock, retreating from outer space to inner space.

I’ll give an example of how the dual-use problem was both all-important and totally concealed. The stagnation manifested very sharply in the 1970s through the oil shocks, when economic growth was energy-intensive. We had a choice—do we shift economic growth to less energy-intensive sectors, or do we develop cheaper forms of electricity as an alternative to the oil, hydrocarbon-based world? Eisenhower in 1954 gave a speech encouraging the latter option, saying that with nuclear energy, we could have power to be too cheap to meter.

But by the late 70s, nuclear energy gets ramped off. What happened? The official story is the three disasters: Three Mile Island in ‘79, Chernobyl in ‘86, and Fukushima in 2011. My alternate story is that Canada and the US transferred nuclear reactor technology to India, and India got the bomb in ’74. It turned out the technology was dual-use and could easily be weaponized. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was then established in the late 70s, officially to make nuclear reactors safe. Its real mandate is to stop nuclear proliferation. We then have an almost 50-year period where basically no nuclear reactor designs have been approved. Small modular nuclear reactors, for example, are probably safer. But if you have thousands of small module reactors, is there some terrorism risk? And will the DOE really give you guidelines on how to terrorist-proof the small modular reactor? Because maybe that becomes a handbook for the terrorists.

SALIENT: One way of understanding the shift, which you suggested in a 2011 article, is that left-wing progressives have replaced scientific progress with social progress. The general population lost interest in science. This leads to a loss of money, of cultural status, and other incentives for scientists. On the other hand, in your recent interviews with Ross Douthat, you place more emphasis on changes within the academy. You argue that among academics, risk-seeking has been replaced with risk aversion. In your view, is one trend more significant than the other?

THIEL: In terms of funding, that’s not quite the right place to look because the inputs have gone up a lot. The humanities get funded less relative to the sciences than they were, certainly pre-World War Two, but I would emphasize World War II’s massive bureaucratization of science as a partial explanation of what happened in the universities. The way I understand Los Alamos was you had a pre-existing free market of science which you could scale massively by adding money. But it came at the cost of creating a monoculture. The New York Times editorial board celebrated the development of the atom bomb in three-and-a-half years, because the Army told scientists what to do, and said if you let the Prima Donna scientists work on their own terms, it would have taken half a century.

So it did work on that level, but my libertarian intuition is that the bureaucratization and formalization of science came at a long-term, multi-decade cost. DARPA in the 1950s and 60s was one person who knew 20 great people and just gave them money. At some point in the 1970s, this was seen as too arbitrary a process, so we set up formal applications. It became a peer-reviewed process, which sounds rigorous, but leads to fewer idiosyncratic scientists getting support. My sociological observation is that the eccentric professor is a type of human being that’s going extinct. There still were some people like that when I was in college in the 1980s, but there were almost no Boomer professors like that.

SALIENT: Many analysts have discussed the decline in innovation, but they tend to focus on an institutional level, rather than on a cultural or ideological level. Anya Plutynski, who’s at Washington University, has argued that cancer research has slowed due to the privatization of research.1 Kyle Stanford, who’s at UC Irvine, has argued that growing institutionalization of science has caused scientists to require more mentorship and thus resulted in fewer ideas. Since 1980, there has been a 75 percent drop in awards to researchers under the age of 35.2 These are broader institutional problems that are very difficult to change. Your perspective, however, emphasizes a shift in the ideology of scientists. What are the merits of your more idea-based approach, as opposed to these institutional or economic approaches?

THIEL: I am sympathetic to Stanford’s view. Einstein was twenty-six in 1905 when he proposed the special theory of relativity. He once said that somebody who has not made their greatest contribution to science before the age of thirty will never do so. Today, only about 2 percent of NIH grants go to scientists under age 40. I made this point to Francis Collins in January 2017, who was running the NIH. And I got a bureaucratic answer that yes, this is a problem, we’re looking into it; but the tone of voice suggested nothing would ever get done.

I don’t like the purely institutional critique because it absolves responsibility. At the extreme end, the “nature” critique is that science became too hard. It takes half a lifetime of study to get to the frontier of string theory, and then you can’t study anything else. Similarly, we are told, big science may be less efficient, but it’s necessary if you need a giant particle accelerator.

I resist these explanations because they feel self-serving, and these people who failed want to say the fault was in the stars, not in themselves. Further, not all these things had to be done by the universities. Lots of basic research could have been done directly by the government or the private sector. I’ve episodically tried to invest in nuclear reactor technologies and done some biotech investing, and my rough telling is there are a decent number of pretty good ideas out there, and it’s wickedly tricky to run the regulatory gauntlet of getting them implemented. If it takes you 15 years to build a nuclear reactor instead of two years, that suggests it’s not just a university problem.

SALIENT: My next question is about this scientific slowdown in the private sector. In your view, we have failed to recover from this relative stagnation, in spite of the government’s attempts to stimulate innovation over the past 50 years. In the 1980s, for example, the Bayh-Dole Act gave patent rights to private industry for discoveries made using public money. As a result private R&D spending has annually outstripped public R&D spending since the 1990s. But this, in your view, seems to have failed. You just talked a bit about why. Elsewhere, in your interview with Douthat, you have been even more stark. You called the biotech industry, which the Bayh-Dole Act created a “stupid racket.” Why did the industries that came from this privatization fail?

THIEL: You have to drill down on it, industry by industry. In biotech, we have a half-socialist, half-crony-capitalist health care system, and drug pricing has spiraled out of control. I suspect the FDA can’t approve too many blockbuster drugs because it would bankrupt the country, and we compromise by allowing orphan drugs through. Orphan drugs are very expensive, but if it’s a few hundred people with some weird disease, you can let those through. But if we actually had some broad blockbuster drug, the FDA process would be quite tough.

The biotech companies cannot complain about the crazily difficult regulatory process. They’re supposed to flatter the FDA, say the most wonderful things about them, and then tell their investors the same: because our product is so good, it’ll have no problem getting through.

I have long believed the best businesses are monopolies. Biotech companies have legal monopolies on drugs and extraordinary price-setting power. So there has to be something really wrong if runaway pricing hasn’t been enough to offset the stagnation. It’s probably the FDA.

One specific change that would accelerate drug development would be getting rid of the need for double-blind studies. If a drug is safe, you would just let people use it and not slow things down massively with a double-blind study.

I invested about 6 years ago in psychedelic drug companies. My thesis was that they would hack the double-blind study, because patients would know whether they got the real thing or a placebo. The FDA response was, “Okay, we know what game you’re playing. And because you’re trying to hack the double-blinding, we’re going to implicitly move the goal posts and say if one person has depressed suicidal thoughts, the whole thing’s too unsafe.”

SALIENT: In your view, the economy has failed to maintain its historic rate of growth due to a lack of technological innovation over the last 40-50 years. But of course, technological innovation isn’t the only possible cause for economic growth; human capital also plays a significant role. The percent of Americans who had been to college in 1970 was just 14 percent; now it’s nearly 40 percent. The statistics for graduate school are similar. You have been skeptical that modern scientific education has led to the same level of competence as it historically did. You said in this interview, for instance, that PhDs nowadays must be something like 99 percent less productive than they were 100 years ago. Why hasn’t this improvement in American human capital brought the desired economic gains? Does it have something to do with the decline in higher education that you’ve otherwise discussed?

THIEL: Yes, but to abstract just a little bit, I tell people that you can measure progress however you want. You can measure it by plane speeds, or curing cancer, or per capita GDP. But it has to be measurable. If you insist on metrics that are very hard to measure or unmeasurable, like happiness, then my suspicion is that you secretly agree with me that measurable progress is lacking. Human capital is more like happiness and less like the economy. It’s a non-measurable form of progress. And the fact that you’re asking the question shows that the more measurable ones are not improving.

Second, I am very opposed to the Luddites—people who want to destroy machines. But if I had to say something nice about Luddites, they are a symptom of a society in which people are building machines that are replacing people and some actual progress is being made. So if we have industries that are beset by Luddites, that’s in some ways a healthier society than one without them. There are an awful lot of these non-tradeable service-sector jobs. A kindergarten teacher or a waiter, for instance, isn’t really that different from 100 years ago.

Even at an elite college like Harvard or Stanford, where I went, I would like more measurable ways of how the elitism translates into better opportunities for people. The illusion that I had as a high school senior when I got into Stanford was that I was set for life because I was part of an elite club. And then, when I arrived at these places, they didn’t have a precise answer on how that works.

Something similar has happened at Harvard. When in 1986 Allan Bloom spoke at Harvard, he started his speech with “My fellow elitists.” It was annoying because they still saw themselves as elites but used more egalitarian terms. I don’t know if that works 40 years later. The elitism has become taboo precisely at the moment that Harvard has forgotten how to produce elites.

SALIENT: Let’s discuss how these economic consequences result in the social instability you were just describing. In your view, our economic stagnation will likely cause people to turn to socialism or other radical anti-capitalist ideologies. But this analysis goes contrary to traditional political theory, which says that economic stagnation should result in political stability. Economist Joseph Schumpeter, for instance, argued that innovation-based “creative destruction” would lead to the rise of socialism as interest groups align against capitalism to avoid displacement.3 Why, in your view, does economic stagnation rather than economic growth result in greater political and social instability? Why was the time of greater technological growth not a time of greater political instability?

THIEL: Technology is not a panacea for everything, and there are dangerous technologies. Nuclear war would be catastrophic, and even if climate change is exaggerated, there are environmental challenges that one shouldn’t dismiss altogether.

But my negative claim is that a lot of problems will get worse in a zero-sum society where people only get ahead by taking from each other. This is true in business. It’s true in the give-and-take of our political systems. As for inequality, it went up a little bit between 1945 and 1968, but our current period of stagnation has correlated with a much larger increase in inequality in the US. And this was not what people expected.

The Club of Rome wrote an interesting book in 1972, Limits to Growth. They were normatively arguing that we should slow growth down and in some ways won the argument. A Chinese rocket scientist named Song Jian picked up the book while in Helsinki for a conference in the late 70s and then wrote a report on it that pushed China toward the one-child policy. It was an influential book, even if it was wrong. But the most incorrect, optimistic prediction it made was that if we have a slowdown in extensive growth with faster planes and cars, we can still have intensive growth in hard-to-measure things: Human community and healthcare can still be better as we degrow. There’s this intuition that a stagnant world would correlate with a more egalitarian world. And that was spectacularly wrong.

What instead happened was that the decline at least correlated with a significant increase in inequality. One intuitive place that this becomes intolerable is inherited wealth. Inheritance is not that problematic in a high-growth world, because most wealth will be created in the future. Inheritance is not the only way to make money. While we’re not there yet, I think for Gen Z, inheriting wealth will be the most important metric for how successful you are economically, if the stagnation continues. I imagine this will also lead to more resentment of people who inherit their wealth. What does that do?

SALIENT: I can see how this would lead to political instability. But just, as a first further question about that instability, if scientific decline has led to a broader replacement of positive vision with fear for the future, what does instability even look like? How can that instability ever develop a new vision for change or the replacement of institutions?

THIEL: Today’s powerful political movements have some picture of the future that looks different from the present, and this vision is not pro-technology. If we have more technologies, it’s just seen as scary. The slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety, and I think that appeals to people politically. Environmentalism is a form of peace and safety. The Boomer gerontocratic vision of the future, a locked-down society for 75-year-old grandmothers, is a form of peace and safety. I don’t think stagnation is sustainable, because so much of our society—the budget deficits, the overproduction of PhDs, the student debt—is predicated on a lot of future growth, but that doesn’t mean it won’t appeal to people in the meantime.

SALIENT: It seems that throughout the past 30 years, institutions have responded to stagnation by bringing in scientists from abroad who are not skeptical of technology and can thus stimulate growth. The identity of scientists has changed rapidly. Somewhere around 40 percent of doctoral-level scientists and engineers were not born in the United States. In engineering, the most directly practical academic field, that number is around 60 percent. More recently, the Trump administration has attempted to make top universities grant approval to candidates from diverse political backgrounds. In your view, is this movement toward diversity of background a solution to our scientific decline?

THIEL: I don’t know how one fixes the universities. I spoke at Harvard around 2013 and made the obnoxious argument that it was better for people to major in the humanities than to go into STEM, because, in the humanities, you at least knew that you would be unemployable, whereas the scientists were deluded into thinking they would be saved by the natural goodness of the universe. I asked a simple economic question: how well are PhD graduates going to be paid? What are their employment prospects? Especially if we adjust for the riskiness of getting a tenured position and the time involved, the returns are dismal.

At the margins, if you had less indentured servitude from China in the PhD programs, it would make them more expensive and might partially offset things. But my ultra-pessimistic view is that the messed-up PhD economics are healthy, because they discourage conservatives from going into academia. The ever-longer string of PhD years, postdoc-years, and adjunct-years signal that something has gone terribly wrong. I used to think that the universities discriminated against conservatives. And I think they did in the 80s, when the boomer Republican professors failed to get tenure.

But by the 90s, by the time people of my generation would have gotten PhDs, the conservatives got the signal that the universities didn’t want them. And so signaling how much they despise conservatives was actually a very nice thing the universities did, because it saved young conservatives from this hyper-competitive, underpaid, Sisyphean academic gauntlet. And so maybe there are talented people who are being discouraged from going into the sciences, and maybe that is a bad thing that one should fix if possible. But it’s very hard to fix, and in the meantime, the deterrence is partly a feature, not a bug, because these bright young people at least won’t be encouraged to waste their lives.

It’s like Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, which is very pessimistic, but shows it’s too late to become a Renaissance painter. If someone reads the book and becomes depressed because they had their heart set on being a Renaissance painter, maybe they’ll be so depressed that they won’t do anything with their lives, or maybe they’ll be set on the right track. It’s a healthy book.

SALIENT: So, if the institutions themselves cannot be reformed in your view, what can undo this scientific stagnation?

THIEL: First of all, one striking place where the universities have failed spectacularly in the last decade is the AI revolution. A lot of AI progress comes from basic research, which the universities should have dominated. Further, the computer science departments were dominated by AI experts, much more so than, say, crypto. It’s shocking how little the universities contributed to the AI revolution of the last decade.

So my answer, which always feels like propaganda, is that I think it can happen in the private sector. I don’t believe everything can be solved through the free market. It’s not great at basic research. But there is still room, at the margins, to build businesses that make scientific and technological progress.

Over the past decade, young Americans rapidly radicalized. The percentage of young adults supportive of political violence has reached a historic apex, and anti-Semitism among the youth is more common than at any other time in American history.At Harvard, even supposedly mainstream institutions are entertaining extremism. In a recent Crimson column, a writer stated that it was morally neutral to refuse to be friends with “Zionists,” that is, those who believe there should even exist a Jewish state (a view that is for many Orthodox Jews a central tenet of their faith). The previous president of the Harvard Republican Club also previously chaired the now fringe John Adams Society during its own period of radicalization, where he allegedly presided over Nazi salutes during meetings and the expulsion of women. Broader cultural trends likely explain some of this phenomenon, but at Harvard, an institution of putatively rational people, radicalism likely has an intellectual rationale, too. So, then, why are young Ivy Leaguers falling for extremist ideologies, and how can we combat this trend?

The story of William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review and longtime leader of the modern American conservative movement, offers an instructive example of both radicalization and de-radicalization. As a young man in the 1940s, Buckley’s attitude toward segregation was standard among moderate Northerners: while segregation was wrong, desegregation would require time. Young Buckley, in particular, believed this because he thought that, due to an absence of educational opportunities, Southern black people were “less advanced,” and thus, their votes would be determined by “passions.”1 While this view was incorrect, it was not necessarily racist; indeed, Buckley always qualified his statements on segregation with the recognition that differences between Southern blacks and whites were “environmental and not racial.”2

As decolonization movements succeeded internationally, however, Buckley’s defense of segregation became more extreme. In the late 1950s, Buckley declared that segregation was not just necessary but right—and that employing violence to defend it was therefore justifiable. Following the success of the decolonization movement in the Congo, Buckley’s rhetoric became actively racist, declaring the necessity of a “race war” to defend “civilization” against “Black Madness.”3 Buckley’s reasonable conservatism had been replaced with overtly racist radicalism.

Yet, some time during the mid-1960s, Buckley deradicalized. Central to this shift seems to have been the rise of populist politicians in the South who defined themselves by their racism. Buckley’s contempt for these politicians was unusually extreme, given that he was otherwise politically aligned with them. He described Alabama governor George Wallace’s rhetoric of “racial integrity” as “galvaniz[ing] the demon” who committed the 1963 Birmingham bombings, Georgia governor Lester Maddox’s discrimination against black people as “morally inexplicable,” and Southern politicians opposed to expanding the franchise to black Americans as “primitives.” Seemingly driven by disdain, Buckley eventually became unusually vocal in his support of civil rights among conservatives of his day. He said there was “no moral” reason why black people should be unable to vote, approvingly compared desegregation to de-Nazification, praised civil rights leaders such as Bayard Rustin, and repeatedly obstructed attempts to bring racists like Wallace into the conservative movement.4 Buckley had not just rejected his previous views; he had rightly become a committed egalitarian.

At first glance, Buckley’s evolution seems strange. Both Buckley’s radicalization and subsequent deradicalization were rapid and irrational. It was odd that after explicitly rejecting racism, young Buckley came to advocate for race war during conflict in the Congo. Similarly odd was Buckley’s subsequent disdain for politicians advocating the segregation he often defended. Condemning these changes as cynical attempts to mimic public opinion, however, would be too quick a judgment—Buckley’s bigoted racial radicalism was unusual in the 1950s among Northern conservatives, causing public ire even from his own family members, while his later views antagonized many significant players in the conservative movement who viewed Southern racists as natural allies to conservative Northerners.5

Joseph Heath’s concept of “self-radicalizing views” can help us better understand Buckley’s confusing ideological journey. Heath examined the Marxist methodology of “ideology analysis,” which asserts that when people act in contradiction to their materialist “interests” (as defined by Marxism), it is because they have been duped by “ideologies” which have (incorrectly) convinced them that they have other interests. For instance, feminist theorists often argue that the reason why women continue to purchase cosmetics that perpetuate traditional gender roles is because women have been duped into believing that their outward appearance is the primary source of their personal worth.6

However, Heath points out a problem with ideology analysis, that it resists falsification. If people do not respond to their “ideology” being identified and rebutted by immediately enacting Marxism, then, rather than recognizing ideology analysis’ explanatory failure, analyzers can instead claim that there must be some \textit{even deeper }ideology to blame. For instance, when feminists like Naomi Wolf found that women often did understand the negative ramifications of the cosmetics market yet nevertheless still purchased cosmetics, she argued that ideology had so permeated women’s lives that they were affected by an “unconscious hallucination,” something that duped them on such a fundamental level that women’s lives resemble those of people who live in “a cult.” Worryingly, as this example shows, when ideology analysis fails to explain agents’ actions, the analyzer is led into a cycle of self-radicalization, in which they continually “discover” some “deeper” and more universal ideology underlying agents’ actions, one which the agents are not privy to, until their theory loses any tether to reality.7

Buckley faced a similar self-radicalizing cycle. By assuming that less educated black areas sought political change only because they were duped by their personal emotions, Buckley was, at first, able to reject desegregation without relying on racial essentialism. As civil rights and decolonial movements became global phenomena, Buckley’s view was falsified—it couldn’t be that each and every instance of black political action had the same misguided emotions behind it. Buckley could only salvage his view through a self-radicalizing escape hatch—racism. If all black people had some common irrational passions by virtue of their race, then Buckley’s methodology still seemingly worked. Thus, race now had to play a central role in Buckley’s explanation for the civil rights movement. In this explanation, Buckley’s radicalization resulted from a similar self-radicalizing spiral as that faced by Marxist ideology analysts.

Heath’s critique also helps us understand how Buckley de-radicalized, not by discovering an argument or a piece of knowledge but rather by reevaluating what the conclusion of his spiral would be. The views Buckley had held and the race war for which he had advocated were purely theoretical, maintaining a careful distance from practical politics. But what Buckley had advocated for theoretically entailed much of the demagogic, punitive policy of the populists he condemned. It is difficult not to read self-criticism, for instance, into Buckley’s condemnation of George Wallace for how his “galvanizing” rhetoric of “racial integrity” bred terrorism. After all, Buckley’s rhetoric from the same period was just as incendiary, only using more intellectual terminology. Many of those populists whom Buckley condemned, it seems, faced the same radicalizing spiral as Buckley—they were just further along that spiral. Seeing the endpoint he would have faced if he did not recognize the insufficiency of his explanatory tools in time was what ultimately resulted in Buckley’s moral redemption.

We can therefore see how we may enable de-radicalization for those enmeshed in modern radical movements, as well. By observing the evils of the most extreme, those on the long roads to right or left-wing extremes may be able to take heed and reconsider their trajectory and assumptions. 

Take, for instance, the Harvard Crimeson, a radical pro-Palestine imitator of the Crimson. Founded on the idea that Harvard is a member of a “colonial” conspiracy that has implicated itself with Israel, the Crimeson may have seemed like it had little capacity for further radicalization. That has not stopped them in their transformation from a merely conspiratorial fringe group to a completely crazed one. The Crimeson, assuming that “Zionists” are always motivated by a malicious, unified colonial conspiracy, is forced to explain how many different sorts of people with many different interests converge at Zionism. They have responded by alleging a worldwide Zionist project that controls every injustice, from Latin American dictatorships to war in the Indian subcontinent, and that self-interestedly supports every major institution, from major corporations to our very own Crimson. Just as Buckley came to see every black person as motivated by evil, so the Crimeson has come to see every “Zionist” as driven by an international colonial conspiracy.

If this all sounds a little ridiculous, that’s because it is. College-level extremism is ridiculous. While these people may become dangerous in the future, for now, they are just fanatics willing to take any position in order to avoid admitting error. Thus, even though the rhetoric of fringe groups like the Crimeson is corrosive, their presence on campus might well be additive. The self-radicalizing assumptions that the Crimeson fell prey to, in assuming that any disagreement over Israel must be motivated by malice or self-interest, can hopefully allow more well-adjusted students to recognize the dangers that result from assuming that one’s ideological opponents must be either ill-natured or mentally ill. 

At a school where many seem to think—as the President of the real Crimson has argued—that anyone who dissents from the “correct” political views (which they have somehow easily discovered by age 18) is  “[un]deserving of merit and consideration,” that students ought not befriend those who have committed the crime of disagreement, and that the school ought not “platform heterodox positions,” these negative examples can de-radicalize campus. When the Salient faces intolerance, we reject it. Hopefully the paper of the left at Harvard has the same principles.

So, when it comes to the fringe, whether the far-left or the far-right, let a thousand blossoms bloom. For those of us in the mainstream, if bigots like to emit ignorant bile, it is to our benefit. Their behavior helps us see clearly the intellectual mistakes to which even the supposedly thoughtful can fall prey.

Morgan Ortagus, former top Trump official, championed the administration’s recent military operations in Iran at an Institute of Politics discussion on Marth 10th. The event was moderated by Ned Price, a former Biden official. Ortagus claimed that the airstrikes were necessary to stop continued Iranian efforts to obtain nuclear weapons. Price disagreed with Ortagus, opposing the Trump administration’s recent strategy in the Middle East.

Ortagus argued that Iran’s repeated attempts to create enriched uranium and obtain nuclear capabilities have created a significant threat to our national security. Moreover, she argued that it is a threat to the wider region through its network of terrorist organizations, and to its own people through its systemic elimination of political dissent. The Trump Administration, she said, would not just sit back and watch “the massacring of innocent Iranian civilians” in order to defend the terrorist Iranian regime.

“The Iranians,” she explained, “would eat grass if they have to in order [for the regime] to get a nuclear weapon.” According to Ortagus, Trump does not intend to prolong the military operations like those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nevertheless, she said it was unclear whether his administration will attempt to force regime change. “All Politics,” Ortagus argued, “is local;” She believes that the West cannot unilaterally choose Iran’s next leader. Rather, the leader of the nation must be someone “the Iranian people feel like they have chosen.”

But while she denied the inevitability of regime change, Ortagus did not provide an alternative metric for victory. In Ortagus’ view, the war will end “when President Trump decides it’s going to end.” “As long as that man has breath in his body,” she added, “he will control the Republican party.”

According to Price, the future of both the war in Iran and the Republican Party are unclear. Both, Ortagus recognized, are at Trump’s whim. Price found it particularly disturbing that Trump barely mentioned Iran during the State of the Union Address, before bombing Iran a week later. It is unclear what Price wants Trump to have said, as it is generally unwise to reveal the plan of a military operation prior to its execution.

Throughout the discussion, it became clear that Price’s alternative to Trumpian politics was the incrementalist, unassertive policy of the past few decades, exactly the policy which has led us to the point where the current military operation has become necessary. Thus, what Ortagus and Price’s discussion showed is that the American people are caught in a necessary choice between the “analysis paralysis” of past administrations and the putative disorder of the Trump administration.

Of course, in ordinary times, a government should be cautious and attempt to include their constituencies in decision-making. But the threat of Iran is not ordinary. As outlined by Ortagus, the Iranian regime’s attacks on everyone and anyone within striking distance demand more than just diplomacy. Price may be familiar with the policy of endless and ineffective discussion and delay from his time at the United Nations. But effective military action requires action, not just committees revising subcommittee reports and condemning wrongdoers while refusing to stop them. As Americans, we can no longer mask delay with analysis. Instead, we must understand that there is a difference between caution and inactivity.

The recent removal of an image from the website of Harvard’s Department of South Asian Studies, following a coordinated pressure campaign by the Coalition of Hindus of North America (CoHNA), may seem like just another case of administrative oversensitivity, of wokeness gone wild. But it was not just that. Rather, it was a skirmish in an ongoing campaign of institutional capture. While administrators likely viewed their groveling apology for the “insensitive image” as a routine exercise in “inclusive” self-criticism, they unwittingly facilitated a movement that is fundamentally anti-American, segregationist in spirit, and strategically deceptive. In particular, Harvard has failed its Hindus by redefining their faith in the image of a bigoted, fringe movement.

To understand why the South Asian Department took down this fundamentally innocent image, we have to understand the CoHNA, the organization that pressured them. At first, the CoHNA seems to hold an incoherent ideology. The lobby simultaneously uses both woke and anti-woke arguments. In their official communications, CoHNA and the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) have begun characterizing protections from discrimination based upon the feudal caste system as “misguided and excessive DEI initiatives.” They have mastered a form of rhetorical ventriloquism, using conservative buzzwords like “woke” and “cancel culture” to characterize criticism of caste discrimination, a form of racial discrimination inimical to American values, as a form of social justice overreach.

At the same time, however, the CoHNA uses dishonest, left-wing “decolonial” rhetoric, arguing that the caste system is a “Colonial Invention.” In their official literature, CoHNA claims that caste is a 16th-century Iberian import and that British census administrators froze a “previously fluid” society into a rigid hierarchy. This argument is strategically designed to shift the moral burden of 2,000 years of social exclusion onto the shoulders of dead British ethnographers, framing any contemporary legal protection against caste as a form of “neo-colonialism.”

Of course, this “blame the West first” rhetoric ignores the millennia of Caste discrimination built into feudal Hindu theology. In the historic works of Brahminism, discrimination is a matter of theology. This theocratic view is rooted in the Purusha Sukta of the Rig Veda (10.90.12), which explicitly codifies a cosmic hierarchy: “The Brahman was his mouth, of both his arms was the Rajanya [Kshatriya] made. His thighs became the Vaishya, from his feet the Shudra was produced.”1

This is not a misunderstood metaphor; it is a claim of inherent, ethnic hierarchy. The Manusmriti, the primary law book of this tradition, elevates the Brahmin to the status of a terrestrial deity: “A Brahmin, be he ignorant or learned, is a great divinity.”2 This “great divinity” status dictates that the high-born possess an immutable right to rule over the “foot-born,” whom the text describes as created solely to be the slaves of the Brahmin. The text mandates, “But a Shudra, whether bought or unbought, [a Brahmin] may compel to do servile work; for he was created by the Self-existent (the Creator) solely to be the slave of the Brahmin.”3 By defining this servitude as a cosmic design rather than an economic contract, the theology ensures the hierarchy is inescapable, concluding that “a Shudra, though emancipated by his master, is not released from servitude; since that is innate in him, who can set him free from it?”4

Considering this history, the internal contradictions of the CoHNA’s argument on caste are profound. CoHNA blames the British for the rigidity of the system, yet they continue to defend the exact Brahminist theology of “Varna and Jati” that gives the system its power. By claiming that Brahminist India was a flexible, spiritual setup while defending a theology that birth-locks social status, the CoHNA is playing a semantic shell game. They cannot explain why a fluid system produced centuries of documented discrimination against ethnic “untouchables” long before the first British ships arrived.5 They are effectively arguing that the British built the cage, but the bars of the theology are nevertheless divine and must be respected. Their radical, outdated theology is a direct assault on American meritocracy, demanding that the U.S. legal system grant immunity to ethnicity-based discrimination under the guise of religious freedom. Their identification of this ideology with Hinduism is also a misrepresentation of American Hindus, the vast majority of whom reject Medieval Brahminist theology.

Nothing illustrates the CoHNA’s ability to manipulate American institutions better than the quiet closure of the Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation into the BAPS Swaminarayan temple in New Jersey in September 2025. Federal authorities ended a four-year probe into allegations that the organization used forced labor, specifically low-caste workers, to build a massive stone temple for just $1.20 an hour. After one worker died on the temple site and another died right after returning to India, the FBI raided the compound in 2021. They discovered workers allegedly confined to a “guarded compound.” Soon, the case expanded as similar practices were found at other BAPS sites in California, Illinois, Texas, and Georgia. Since then, the DOJ’s decision to close the case has been declared by the CoHNA as “proof” that the allegations were a “campaign of calumny.”

The closure of the case is deeply suspicious. In July 2023, 12 of the 21 plaintiffs withdrew from the civil lawsuit, claiming through a new attorney that they had never experienced “any pressure, any casteism or discrimination” and alleging that their previous lawyers had “convinced them to make false allegations in court.” The radical Brahminist lobby has repackaged this claim of legal coercion as a moral victory, successfully framing the state’s inability to prosecute as a complete exoneration of the labor structures that built the largest Hindu temple in the West. This isn’t justice; it is the strategic rebranding of $1.20-an-hour manual labor as a “religious practice” that conveniently exempts institutions from the Fair Labor Standards Act. By arguing that the Department of Labor misunderstood a core Hindu religious practice as a secular labor violation, the CoHNA successfully weaponized religious terminology to mask the same structures of birth-locked servitude documented in the Manusmriti.

This theocratic movement does not just ask for apologies; it buys policy through a sophisticated network of Political Action Committees (PACs) targeting the highest levels of American government. The Hindu American PAC and its affiliates have funneled millions into the campaign coffers of a bi-partisan group of lawmakers to ensure that Brahminist hereditary status remains unregulated.

The most egregious example of this influence was the 2023 veto of SB 403 in California. This bill was a common-sense civil rights measure designed to explicitly ban caste discrimination. However, the Brahminist lobby launched a scorched-earth campaign, framing equality as a tool to “profile Hindu Americans.” Through relentless donor pressure, they successfully coerced Governor Gavin Newsom into striking down the bill. At this moment, a major American governor and likely future Presidential contender chose to protect an ancient, exclusionary hierarchy over the civil rights of laborers in order to satisfy a theocratic donor class that rejects American values. The radical Brahminist veto has not stopped there. A recent bill designed to stop the Indian government from targeting religious refugees from India with violence was vetoed by Newsom, as well, partially due to CoHNA pressure. This is the end goal for the CoHNA and similar theocratic organizations—an America that cannot defend itself or its citizens from foreign governments for fear of perceived offensiveness.

Once we look past the CoHNA’s flashy PR and understand their actual goal, their apoplectic reaction to the puppetmaster image makes sense. When groups like the CoHNA declare themselves victims of Hinduphobia at the sight of a high-caste figure pulling strings, the CoHNA is likely not expressing offense but seemingly seeking to silence dissent. Proponents of radical Brahminism like the CoHNA paradoxically claim to be, by their very DNA, divine and superior while demanding safe spaces from the basic rigors of the academy. By allowing CoHNA to dictate the limits of imagery on an academic website, Harvard has chosen to allow this bigoted fringe to redefine Hinduism according to a Medieval, radical understanding. Therefore, by placing the power dynamics of historic Hinduism beyond the reach of scrutiny, Harvard has failed us all.

Harvard’s motto is Veritas, not Veneratio. Our job is to seek truth rather than to perform acts of social media groveling to appease a radical fringe that views entire ethnicities as natural slaves. The radical Brahminist movement is anti-American to its core, seeking to replace the meritocratic individual with the hereditary caste. The American experiment is built on the Enlightenment conviction that all men are created equal and that we are judged by our character rather than our bloodline. We cannot forget that because some people might find liberty or equality “offensive.”

By caving to the demands of the radical Brahminist lobby, the South Asian Department has signaled that Harvard is no longer a sanctuary for truth but rather a soft target for a racist fringe. It has further signaled that it will not defend the Hindu faith against the outdated and extreme misunderstandings which fringe Brahminist organizations seek to codify. It is time for us as Harvard affiliates and Americans to cut the strings of this puppetmaster.

America is experiencing a period of intensified political fervor. Politics is inherently combative, but the animosity between our political parties has developed from serious disagreement into personal grievance, with political leaders often assigning apocalyptic stakes to political outcomes. Concomitantly, the influence of organized religion, with its legitimately apocalyptic stakes, is waning. Religious adherence, particularly within mainstream Christianity, has declined since the mid-20th century. Even if Generation Z exhibits a high degree of spirituality, youth are less likely to engage with traditional religious institutions than previous generations. The speculated Christian revival among Generation Z appears to be occurring among a small devout minority, while the majority express their religiosity outside of conventional religious institutions. Broadly considered, America as a nation is becoming less religious. This decline in formal religion explains the eroding standards of decency in the public square.

Secularization and political intensification are not unrelated trends. Instead, the iconoclastic fervor in contemporary politics is evidence of religious sentiment redirected. Society has a natural demand for a form of religion to address people’s associational and spiritual needs.1 When traditional organized religion no longer satisfies that demand, people find other communities as an outlet for what previously was expressed as religiosity.2 Political institutions increasingly assume that role. They are well-equipped for such a task: to a unique degree, politics contains the necessary elements to supplant organized religion. A political programme functions as a creed; a country’s founding myth is its creation story. In America, political factions offer distinct ways of living, as seen by the diverging aesthetics, lifestyles, and consumer habits of Republicans and Democrats. And, of course, politics provides an in-group community tied together by a higher sense of purpose. 

Yet, there is a significant difference between politics and religion in how they realize their purpose. Politics seeks to effect change in and to the world, whereas religion begins with effecting change in the individual. For the religious, problems in this world are addressed by remediating deficiencies in the human condition, including in the self. There is a greater standard to which the self must be conformed: allowing us to conform to this standard is the function of spiritual practices, codes of behavior, and submission to sources of religious authority. The importance of improving the self is accompanied by a general distrust of human nature. Man is considered sinful, or at the very least broken, and it takes work for him to become righteous. The Good demands limits on our base desires.

Politics is not oriented toward influencing the world through the difficult work of changing the self. Rather, a political faction’s primary objective is conforming the rest of society to a standard internally defined by the community’s members. The politically-minded seek an economic structure that rewards the worker, or the manager, or the philosopher; a legal system that protects their community’s interests; a culture that transmits their particular customs and worldview. Crucially, this vision is an expression of, rather than a restriction on, the desires of the community. Politics is oriented toward satisfying those same personal desires which religion teaches the individual to reform. As politics supplants religion, personal desire becomes not only acceptable, but even righteous.

The leaked messages from the Young Republicans group chat provide an instructive example of the consequences of this replacement of religion with politics. Commentators quickly latched onto the leaked messages as evidence of political radicalization and ideological hypocrisy. But the evil of the messages—including inviting the deaths of political opponents and celebrating sexual assault—illustrates a problem more fundamental than just ideology. These individuals exhibited character failures. They openly indulged in vice. In a previous era, religious and moral leaders would have placed strong enough standards on the public square that this kind of person could not easily rise to power. Politics alone, however, is ill-equipped for reforming personal behavior. Politics does not reward the cultivation of virtue; it rewards the realization of desired external outcomes. It is more interested in what the individuals accomplish for the political faction than who they are. 

The shift from religion to politics also recasts the conception of sin. In the view of religion, transgressions occur because an individual has indulged their base desires rather than conforming to a greater standard. That standard is universal. All members, including religious leaders, are continuously aiming to satisfy it. The religious community thinks in terms of moral versus immoral, or of holy versus unholy. For a political community, the higher program or vision to which they appeal is one defined by the leadership, either current or historic. Political judgment, then, must be cast in terms of loyalty or disloyalty to the community. It is therefore licit for political actors to commit egregious personal acts so long as they are not rendered “un-American” or a “traitor” to the party. Moreover, a morality based on loyalty lends itself to radicalization because the question becomes who can satisfy, in the most public, extreme way, the agenda of the leadership.  

This is not to say that political engagement is inherently morally bankrupt. What it does mean is that moral standards cannot originate from a political community because the political community is concerned with loyalty to an agenda rather than the conduct of a person. If political communities supplant religious or moral communities as most foundational in the life of an individual, then the sense of obligation to external standards disappears as well. The best way to stem immoral behavior in politics is for most individuals to identify primarily with some external religious or moral community that provides reasonable restrictions on behavior. Unfortunately, for many Americans, this is no longer the case. 

Some may respond that many of the loudest political leaders publicly invoke religious ideas. Admittedly, strong religious convictions can motivate political action, but it is hard to blame religion for the combative, prejudicial form of radicalization about which this essay is concerned. After all, the world’s most prominent religious leaders, including the recently appointed Pope Leo XIV, are advocating greater charity in the public square. Politics would improve if more people listened to these leaders. The true problem seems to be religious ideas entering the political discourse while the accompanying religious behaviors are checked at the door. Religion may be important to these indecent politicians. But by abdicating the behavioral standards underpinning their avowed beliefs, however, they have made religion subservient to their political vision.

A community that encourages people to satisfy their immediate desires will always be more enticing than one that encourages reform, as humans would naturally rather accumulate power over others than master themselves. Discouragingly, nothing short of a total loss of confidence in political institutions and the self-indulgent perspective they rely upon could bring Americans back to religion. But such a phenomenon can happen and has happened before. A common theme throughout the history of American religious revivals has been the triumph of conviction over the depravity of man. The Great Awakenings featured fiery ministers who preached messages of original sin and grace. In recent times, Billy Graham would begin his sermons with an honest, and quite negative, assessment of the human condition; only then would the altar call be effective. For Americans to return to religion, they need to be once again disillusioned by the fruits of entertaining their own desires.

Reminding the world of just how bitter those fruits are must be the job of our leaders. Playing the role of the prophet is difficult. An accusatory sermon will always be rejected with displeasure up until its climax, when the audience is finally convicted of its own imperfect state. It is far easier to levy critiques at political leaders selectively so that the preferred side will provide favor and protection, or even to abdicate the prophetic office entirely. But the prophet must speak truthfully, for only truth is weighty enough to defend the faith. 

As Harvard’s administration has recognized, Harvard has failed to uphold viewpoint diversity. Harvard President Alan Garber has argued that this has resulted from many professors’ choice to increasingly “push…activism” in the classroom. Similarly, according to Ned Hall, Co-President of Harvard’s Council on Academic Freedom, Harvard’s lack of viewpoint diversity is largely rooted in a set of “radical theories” that started influencing teaching just a decade ago. But while the past ten years have represented a steep decline in viewpoint diversity at Harvard, our problems with viewpoint diversity are much deeper.

The root of the problem is not methodology and teaching style, but rather the content of courses throughout the humanities and social sciences. An overwhelming number of these courses impose Marxist theory on students as though it were religious dogma, while neglecting conservative thought.1 To show this lopsidedness, we compare how many of the undergraduate Harvard classes in the 2025-6 school year (with publicly available syllabi) include conservative theorists versus how many include Marxist or critical theorists. Our analysis focuses on five departments: History, History & Literature, Social Studies, English, and Sociology.2 Together, these classes make up nearly 70% of Harvard’s humanities students.

Consider the History department. Professor James Hankins has recently exited Harvard, citing his concerns over the History Department’s alleged refusal to hire a single historian of Western civilization over the past ten years. Instead, the department hired historians discussing more critical theory than history.

Take, for instance, HIST 1926: “Decolonization: An Unfinished History.” Half the syllabus is devoted not to history but to Marxist critical theory about “methods of decolonizing.” Indeed, 43 out of 68 courses in the 2025-26 school year (over 60%) include at least one reading from a Marxist or critical theorist historian.

For those looking for a similar representation of conservative ideas, the History Department offers merely 9 courses out of 68 (under 14%) that include at least one conservative author in the syllabus. But even these courses view conservatism as only valuable insofar as it is criticized. Take History 185, “The Neoliberal Age,” which asks such open-ended questions as “by what means has neoliberalism undermined democracy?” and, “to what extent was the Mont Pelerin Society’s defence [sic] of liberal ‘civilization’ a defense of white, Western hegemony?”

With Professor Hankins leaving his teaching duties this year, the number of courses including any conservative readings declines to just eight, while the number with a positive view of the conservative intellectual tradition declines to nearly zero.

Sociology is a little different. In a field deeply intertwined with politics, it is not surprising that many fields include Marxist analysis and critical theory. Out of the 24 Sociology courses, 19 (over 79%) offered in the 2025-26 year with public syllabi include at least one Marxist or critical theorist in the reading. Excluding the three classes purely seeking to teach students methods of quantitative analysis, which include basically no sociological research, that number increases to over 90%. Worryingly, conservative analysis, once dominant in sociology, has been effectively excised from the department, with only four courses including even a single conservative sociologist (around 16% of courses). A field filled with debate and disagreement is, at Harvard, often reduced to one-sided laudations of left-wing political theory.

Rather than see their professors sneak one-sided political theory in through the back door, many students choose instead to directly study social philosophy. Students interested in political theory can thus concentrate in “Social Studies,” a field which promises to teach students “an understanding of classic and contemporary social theory.” This ambition means that a far greater percentage of classes in the field include some conservative social theory — 12 out of 27 courses (44%). However, this representation, too, pales in comparison to the percentage of classes which include Marxist or critical theory — 24 courses (89%).

While this relative inclusion of conservatives in Social Studies, particularly in lower-level courses, is encouraging, it is dwarfed by the general view among syllabi that conservatism is a symptom to be explained rather than a worldview to be considered. Take Social Studies 98VT (Solidarity), which promises students the opportunity to “examin[e] the far-right,” that is, to explain why people are attracted to right-wing views, without, of course, assigning a single right-of-center thinker. To reasonably represent “classical and contemporary social theory,” this approach is hardly a sufficient method of understanding one of America’s two dominant political ideologies.

When asked for comment, David Armitage, the Chair of the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, said he does not believe that the Social Studies curriculum has a problem with viewpoint diversity.

Even in more literary, less overtly political subfields, bias abounds. The History & Literature Department offers 14 courses each year. In 12 of them, students are required to read at least one Marxist or critical theorist as a secondary source. In comparison, there is not a single course that asks students to read a conservative secondary source. And, of course, conservative primary sources are only read so they can be rejected. The debate between William F. Buckley Jr. and James Baldwin, assigned in HIST-LIT 90HD (Literatures of the Displaced), does not explore the views of these two important 20^th century thinkers; instead, it asks students to understand the “exile and alienation” which Baldwin must have felt at the debate. Here, too, conservatism is posed as an evil or a social problem, perhaps, but not as a serious viewpoint.

When asked for comment, Bruno Carvalho, the Chair of the Committee on Degrees in History & Literature, said that “every program has some version of [the viewpoint diversity] issue, because curricula and syllabi are always balancing acts. And while I do not think it is appropriate to reduce history and literature readings to a right-left political spectrum, I do think syllabi should strive to expose students to a wide range of voices and arguments. It is also important to note that an assigned reading is not an endorsement, it should not imply agreement.”

Even the ostensibly apolitical study of literature in the English Department is affected by this lopsided ideological slant. While one might hope that English students are learning about the great literary tradition, they are often instead learning critical theoretical analyses of the canon. Take English 172AD (American Democracy), which putatively discusses American literature. Much of the course focuses on political criticism of America, including extensive readings of Roberto Unger–a postmodernist critical theorist who views Marxism as tepid—hagiographies of left-wing political figures, and a nonfiction book declaring America to be in a “New Class War.” This is hardly Robert Penn Warren.

Indeed, out of the 28 courses which the English Department offered in the 2025-26 school year, 12 (over 42%) included some Marxist or postmodernist secondary readings, while just two (slightly over 10%) included conservative or traditionalist secondary readings. Thus, Harvard’s English Department often acts as yet another venue for professors to spoon-feed left-wing theory to unsuspecting students.

This all is not to say that academics cannot or even should not teach Marxism, nor that Marxist academics should not be allowed to teach. It is rather to say that these Marxist views must be counterbalanced by more conservative views.

In real academic fields, things are hardly ever as one-sided as our syllabi make them seem. For every critical theorist reading queer theory into Hamlet, there is a traditionalist focused upon the beauty of the actual poetry. For every Marxist historian arguing that the American Revolution was just an expression of class conflict, there is a neo-Whig historian who recognizes it as arising out of and expressing fundamental American values.

However, students of the Humanities at Harvard only see one side of a two-sided debate between Marxists and neo-Whigs, or postmodernists and traditionalists, or structure and conflict-based sociology. Conservative or traditional historians, critics, and sociologists are not routinely excluded just because professors are activists; rather, the problem is that such perspectives are presented as uncontested truths, when in fact many thinkers have disputed and questioned them. Rather than merely excising the influence of recent radical teaching ideologies, Harvard must also integrate conservative thinkers into its courses.

In all of this, Harvard students are the losers. It is a disservice to any student — progressive, radical, or even politically ambivalent — when courses fail to challenge them, granting their attitudes and assumptions as gospel. How can students seek to understand America when they are not taught to understand one of its most significant political traditions?

And, of course, conservative students lose as well. The collegiate experience is an incredibly important time for students, when we are rapidly exposed to a range of new ideas. When students fail to see their own ideas represented among those options, we can hardly be surprised when, marching to their own drum, they arrive at absurd, even atrocious views. As Harvard bleeds conservative faculty and fails to teach conservative ideals, many conservative students will increasingly discover the mentorship and intellectual grounding they need is impossible to find at the College. It is our hope that Harvard recognizes the need to not just avoid imposing progressive ideology on students but also the need to offer students the ability to explore conservative ideals as well.

It feels trite to look back at Harvard’s history and say the good old days are over. The relatively merit-based Harvard of today, after all, serves an important role that the Harvard of the 1920s, when the main admissions criterion was your last name, did not fulfill. Returning to that time would be both impossible and undesirable. Nevertheless, there is a value that this historic Harvard held which we have since lost: a service-minded attitude.

Walk into Memorial Church, and you will see the names of Harvard students who, in times of national crisis, sacrificed their lives to crush fascism, end slavery, and defend this country. Read about the history of the college’s student organizations, and you will find stories of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals stopping their show so the cast could fight in World War One and Two. Or look back to 1919, and you will find the entire 125-man football team deputized to put down civil unrest following the Boston police strikes. (It’s hard to imagine the modern Harvard student putting down a riot; more likely, we’d be the ones trying to start one.) Extending beyond the students, this spirit of service characterized the entire institution. When the United States set out to establish a public school system in the Philippines in 1901, Harvard was the largest private institution represented in the mission.1

It is difficult to imagine today’s Harvard massing enough students to serve the Commonwealth, our country, or even humanity as it had in the past. But this is not to say that individual students don’t have these aspirations. Harvard has a remarkable number of students who enter with the vision that they will make some kind of significant positive social impact. To many applicants, Harvard ought to serve as a stepping stone in realizing their positive and impactful goals. Just as remarkable as this meaningful impulse, however, is Harvard’s ability to slowly crush these passions. 

Over the course of a student’s four years at the college, a student sees pre-professional programs and lucrative opportunities—oftentimes in consulting, finance, or technology–dangled in front of them. Regardless of how much someone’s concentration or post-graduation plans differ from these fields and their associated organizations, the allure is difficult to resist. New students flock to clubs that promise to help them succeed in industries that they previously could hardly define. As a result, where community organizers and artists enter, consultants and junior analysts leave. 

While many who go this route claim that it is temporary or that they will practice some form of “effective altruism,” it is hard to take these sentiments at face value. When a young Harvard graduate spends half a decade at one of these companies, it’s natural that their preferences shift, and any idealism may be supplanted by a sense of comfort. Once you sell your soul, it’s hard to get it back. 

While selling out is not unique to Harvard, we seem to have distilled it into a formula. According to The Economist, in the 1970s, 5% of Harvard graduates went into finance and consulting. By the 1980s, the figure was 20%, 25% in the 90s, and today, that figure hangs around half of a graduating class. In that time, not only have large consulting firms and financial institutions started actively recruiting from the college, wining and dining students at lavish events, but Harvard students themselves have joined in, creating soulless clubs with the express purpose of connecting 18–22 year old “Associates” and “Case Team Leaders” with consulting firms, placing them in summer internships and full-time jobs.

Harvard’s undergraduate pre-professional experience has become so absurd that 20 Harvard students each year pay nearly $6,000 dollars for a consulting internship in South Africa. Through DiiVe, a consulting firm which claims to “provide purpose-led experiential learning through high-impact, hands-on, client-facing consulting internships for smart, empathetic and ambitious students,” (whatever that means) students from every competitive liberal arts college pay the cost of a 2015 Honda Civic to spend five weeks making Powerpoints for a consulting firm. For these students, Harvard is not an educational institution—it’s a job training program. 

Most disappointing is that many of these students do not need the money a career in finance provides. In fact, a disproportionate number of those who go into high-paying, low-social impact jobs are from wealthy backgrounds. Students from families in the top decile of household incomes are 1.5 times less likely to choose public sector and non-profit careers than other students. It makes sense that students from difficult socio-economic backgrounds would want to pursue high-paying jobs immediately after graduation. But for the more than 50% of students whose families are in the top decile of earners, to use the advantages they have been handed simply to create more wealth for themselves reflects a failure in these students’ moral education.

Some may shrug this issue off as a failing of “Capitalism,” separate from questions of morality. But that assumption reveals the core problem that Harvard students face. America is a capitalist country, but Capitalism is not the summation of America is or should be. The Harvard men that came before us understood that what makes this country exceptional is that we have the freedom to pursue what we like, even finance and consulting. But if we, the most well-resourced and educated young people in this world, are unwilling not only to protect our society but also to enrich it, that freedom will slowly fade. And when an institution like Harvard fails to live up to its mission of helping talented young people discover how they can “best serve the world,” that institution begins to exist solely to perpetuate itself and its influence. Fortunately, this outcome is not inevitable. It is our responsibility to reform the culture we inherited and failed to change, both for the good of Harvard and for this country. But real reform does not begin with abstract critiques of culture. It begins with us students choosing service over convenience and responsibility over resume.

On Thursday, George Scialabba, Jesse McCarthy, and Anastasia Berg participated in a panel discussion on the role of public intellectuals in American life. The discussion was organized by the Public Culture Project, an initiative of Harvard’s Division of Arts and Humanities that aims to “revive our shared public life by placing existential, moral, and spiritual questions at the center of our public conversations.”

Scialabba is a critically acclaimed book critic and writer on contemporary social issues. McCarthy is a professor of English and African American studies at Harvard, and Berg is an assistant professor of philosophy at UC Irvine. Both McCarthy and Berg are editors at The Point, a literary magazine that aims to apply philosophy to societal, cultural, and political questions.

Their conversation focused on the distinctiveness of the American idea and its effect on public intellectualism, while addressing the role of public intellectuals in any society and time period. It suggested that while much of the academy is aware of the importance of intellectual dialogue and the exchange of well-reasoned perspectives, others use their “intellectualism” as a mere weapon in a moral battleground.

McCarthy cited Plato’s argument that an egalitarian society is inherently suspicious of all forms of expertise and authority, including intellectual authority. While recognizing the limitations of egalitarianism, McCarthy argued that our country is bound through ideas rather than shared ancestry; America is thus a country rooted in intellectualism. “Intellectuals,” he said, “are people who have the conviction that ideas matter, even when they’re not recognized.” His remarks constituted a clear-sighted diagnosis of the possibilities not only of American public intellectualism, but of the American experiment as a whole.

Berg offered insights into the role of a public intellectual in any society and time period. She suggested that social conventions prevent genuine moral discourse, leading not only to shallowness, but to evil. She cited Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil, arguing that conventions and stock phrases allow us to inhabit a comfortable but morally deficient posture. She noted that artificial intelligence, in its use of such phrases, is “the particular guise of this old and ancient threat.” Public intellectuals, Berg argued, can subvert this state of complacency by questioning societal assumptions. But while recognizing the potential of the role, she acknowledged its dangers; when we begin questioning long-standing assumptions, we can fall into destructive ideologies.

Scialabba’s arguments were more pessimistic towards the American experiment and reflected a narrower attitude towards the possibilities of public intellectualism. He argued that the problems of our society can be traced to “neoliberalism,” while their answers lie in Marxism. In his view, the role of a public intellectual is not to foster dialogue or subvert convention; rather, it is to “pound with the hammer of simplicity” in an attempt to mobilize support for socialist causes.

The event was successful; the speeches displayed a wide range of ideas, and the conversations that followed were spirited and fruitful. But it also showcased the least sympathetic elements of the left, and, more broadly, those who see themselves as the public intellectuals of America. As long as such individuals use their intellectualism as a “hammer” to impose doctrine rather than as a means to enliven debate, this nation will reject both them and their values.

Harvard students are rapidly losing interest in the humanities. From 2010–2020, the number of undergraduates concentrating in English declined by over 50%, while the number of undergraduates in Computer Science doubled. In response, humanities departments have attempted to create courses specifically designed to appeal to students. Courses like Humanities 10 (Hum10) give students the opportunity to read the Great Books and discuss them in a group of intellectually serious peers. These courses ought to be successful by attracting an eclectic variety of minds and focusing them on the foundational questions underpinning the human condition—questions that have occupied the greatest artists and philosophers throughout history.

But when I actually attended Hum10, I was shocked to find that the human condition was not, in the minds of our professors, the point. Rather, we were asked to answer narrow academic questions. One of the essay prompts, for instance, asked students to identify a puzzling moment from the Odyssey: an interesting start. But what should this moment be shown to reveal? Perhaps questions about how Odysseus exemplifies goodness? No, we were rather just asked to connect this moment to more facts about the scene and the poem as a whole. Just the same with the Oresteia: rather than being asked about the serious questions with which Aeschylus grappled, students were instead asked to analyze a repeated theme, but only to reveal the “larger dynamics of the trilogy.” Instead of considering the most profound questions of meaning and existence, instead of using the books as a launchpad to interrogate how we live our lives, the scholarly conventions of the humanities force us into narrow analysis of texts that serve neither ourselves nor our classmates.

In this way, Harvard trains us to write purely academic essays—and to think in a purely academic style. We are being trained to search not for meaning, but for humanity’s search for meaning. From this perspective, it is not that Shakespeare illuminated something timeless about revenge or jealousy. Rather, he revealed interesting ethnological nuggets about how people in his time viewed revenge or jealousy—tidbits that are only valuable insofar as they can be put on a graph and contrasted to other times and places (negatively, of course). 

This trend exemplifies a broader problem in the humanities. Professors do not recognize that students’ interest in courses on great literature is not a product of their own peripheral work. The model of writing that academic humanities departments not only promote but force on their students is meaningless. These courses do not teach students to think; instead, they destroy original thought. They do not preserve the beauty and power of great literature but obliterate it. They do not give insight into our lives; instead, they make us question why we’re investing them in the mundane task of textual analysis. Rather than facilitating the pursuit of truth, humanities academics ask us to engage in textual pedantry according to which ideas have value only insofar as they give insight into the text itself. Ironically, the actual ideas that the text aims to explore are explicitly set aside as irrelevant and implicitly understood to be trivial. The objective of a scholar is not to draw out the beauty and power of the text, but to analyze it in relation to other literary theories or the “historical context” which it supposedly could not possibly transcend. Never are the ideas themselves treated as worthy of consideration. 

I suspect this is a major culprit for fading humanities enrollment. Not all of us (in fact, very few of us) want to be career academics. Yet we are all human; we are all searching for meaning in our lives. We all want to understand why we exist, how we can find happiness, how we should deal with pain and suffering, what kind of person we should become, what to love, what to build, what to hope for. These aren’t simple questions. To understand them, we have to learn about the stories writers have told, the worlds they have created, and the ideas they have understood. The humanities can therefore help us learn not just about the world that writers have sought to depict but the world that we actually live. If the sciences and social sciences can save lives, the humanities should save what makes a life worth living.

Helen Andrews, public intellectual and contributor to Compact Magazine of “The Great Feminization” fame, argues in a new essay that Harvard has flouted the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against affirmative action, continuing to discriminate against Caucasians. Further, she argues that since the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA) case, Harvard has actually become more discriminatory, as the ruling purportedly forced Harvard to begin favoring Asians as well as African-Americans and Hispanics over Caucasians.

Andrews is wrong. She dishonestly cherry-picks data, misinterprets the data she does analyze, and appears not to understand how Harvard’s admissions process actually works. Arguably, Andrews misinterprets this data to justify a right-wing Woke-ism that mimics the worst impulses of the left.

Andrews bases her argument that Harvard discriminates against Caucasians on a statistical analysis of Harvard’s demographics. She claims that Caucasians “were 47 percent of freshmen in the class of 2025 and approximately 31 percent of the classes of 2028 and 2029.” This is false: the Class of 2025 was approximately 44 percent Caucasian, while the Class of 2029 is approximately 35.5 percent Caucasian.

Strangely, Andrews also claims that “Black and Latino shares [of Harvard College classes] have stayed roughly the same,” an obviously fictitious statement. African-American enrollment has dropped from 15.9 percent of students in the Class of 2025 to 11.5 percent of the Class of 2029 (a 29 percent decrease), while Hispanic enrollment has gone from 12.5 percent of students to 11.0 percent (a 12 percent decrease). These are significant drops.

But the most glaring error in Andrews’ article is not her defective research of publicly available facts, but her failure as a demographic statistician. She determines the percentage of Harvard College that is Caucasian by subtracting the number of students of non-Caucasian races from one hundred, an odd methodology that she calls “a matter of inference.”

This is a terrible way of measuring demographics. Harvard double (or even triple) counts multiracial students as members of all of the races with which they identify. The percentage of young Asian people who are multiracial is extremely high, somewhere around 36 percent. Around a third of these multiracial Asians are also some other non-Caucasian race. Around 12 percent of Hispanics are also African-American. Thus, around 6.5 percent of students are double-counted in Andrews’ statistics. Adding this to our earlier 35.5 percent number, we get approximately 42 percent of Harvard students who are exclusively Caucasian.

Andrews’ statistical methodology also does not take into account multiracial Caucasian students. Around two-thirds of multiracial Asians, or 24 percent of young Asian people more generally, are partially Caucasian.1 About 8 percent of African-Americans also identify as Caucasian.2 While statistics are slightly less clear for Hispanics, around a quarter of American Hispanic marriages are to Caucasians, making it a reasonable estimate that perhaps a quarter of young Hispanics are partially Caucasian. If one adds these numbers to our 42 percent number calculated above, we get a total of 55.7 percent of Harvard’s students who are Caucasian. If we perform the same exercise with respect to the Class of 2025, we get around 56 percent to 59 percent.3

In other words, the percentage of Harvard that is Caucasian has remained stable since the end of affirmative action, exactly what researchers thought would happen and exactly what had previously happened at selective colleges in both California and Washington in the 1990s.

It makes sense that Andrews’ math does not add up. SFFA prevents Harvard admissions officers from accessing information about students’ race. Immediately prior to the admissions review of the Class of 2029, Harvard imposed even more restrictive policies, including forbidding interviewers to mention race in their comments to admissions officers—even if the student mentions their racial identity in the interview.

Thus, it is not just that Harvard cannot take race into account; with respect to most students, Harvard’s admissions department cannot even know the race of applicants. Whatever the numbers may appear to imply (and in this case, they do not imply what Andrews is arguing), it is impossible for Harvard’s admissions department to receive the information which Andrews postulates they are using to discriminate against Caucasians.

Of course, this does not mean that it is impossible for Harvard to covertly discriminate in general. For instance, students may skirt regulations by providing information about the way in which their race affected their lives, something Harvard has wrongly promoted. This is a reasonable worry and absolutely should be investigated. However, it clearly does not impact the success of Caucasians vis-a-vis Asians, both of whom are obviously not attempting to covertly inform schools of their race.

There are also reasonable concerns that admissions officers may judge what race someone is based upon their name. However, this would not distinguish between mixed race Caucasians and non-mixed race Caucasians. If Andrews is objecting to non-mixed race Caucasians being favored over mixed-race Caucasians, the discrimination claims she makes are both theoretically and practically impossible.

The rest of the article is humorously bad. Andrews attacks Indian-American doctors because a single Indian-American doctor performed two medically necessary hysterectomies. The fact that these two hysterectomies were medically necessary is acknowledged in the article, making Andrews’ argument more incoherent than misleading. She argues that the growth of enrollment in Southern schools compared to those in the West and Northeast is a form of “White flight” from Asians, in spite of the fact that much of Southern schools’ growth since SFFA has come from non-Caucasian applicants – in particular, Southeast Asian, African-American, and Hispanic applicants. She also includes an entire argument about youth culture based solely on a single Twitter comment. How can a supposedly serious public intellectual write something so dishonest?

The answer can be found in the first paragraph. Andrews argues, “Meritocracy is like free trade. Countries or classes embrace it when it advantages them and view it more skeptically when they are no longer on top.” This, followed by a pseudo-conspiratorial portrayal of a “self-serving” “new class” of “non-WASPs” who cynically promoted meritocracy in the 1960s so that they could “swe[ep] through Washington in the Clinton years,” is an apt portrayal of Andrews’ political outlook. There is no room, in Andrews’ view, for American ideals or institutions or values. In fact, there is no room for any values. Where our founders saw universal ideals, Andrew sees only groups seeking to win power for themselves.

This is the root of Andrews’ misinterpretations: a failure of vision. She cannot understand demographic statistics, because to her, terms like “WASP,” “Asian,” or “Jew” signify merely discrete variables fighting for limited resources. Because she cares only about representing her group, she cannot maintain even a pretense of intellectual honesty. It is a shame that her attitude, a morally relativist identity politics that has long been the bête noire of conservatives since William F. Buckley Jr., is considered by some a serious form of “conservative” intellectual analysis. It is a shame that statistical honesty and truth seem to be increasingly disregarded in favor of a Nietzschean understanding of truth and morality as mere surface-level justifications for more “sincere” self-interests. It is my hope that this rejection of the Western tradition upon which our movement and our nation were built will one day be understood as a momentary aberration completely unrepresentative of American conservatism.