Class, SFFA, and Ideological Diversity at the Harvard Kennedy School

A guest post by David Weidman

Credit: Harvard Kennedy School

David Weidman is a Master in Public Policy candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where he is the Chair of the Republican Caucus.

During my second required racism course at the Harvard Kennedy School, the instructor, a key leader during the Ferguson unrest, boasted that, by the time he departed from the city, only the church and the McDonald’s remained standing. Taken aback, I asked whether he thought he had left the city of Ferguson better than he had found it. He did not answer. Instead, I was summoned to a Dean’s office several days later, where I was berated for an hour and a half by the instructor and the Dean. It was made clear that my uncomfortable questions were not welcome at the Kennedy School. This was just one of many overt attempts at ideological intimidation and exclusion that I experienced as one of the Kennedy School’s few conservative students. I do not bring up these issues merely to air my gripes or to elicit sympathy. I do so out of concern for my classmates and for the defenseless 18-year-old children arriving at Harvard, away from home for the first time, guilty only of thinking the wrong things, and against whom these tactics are certainly also used. It is long past time for Harvard to acknowledge that its hostile environment toward intellectual inquiry is damaging to its students, risks further diminishing Harvard’s credibility, and undermines public trust in higher education’s commitment to truth-seeking.

Conservatives may be the target of Harvard’s ideological suppression, but, perhaps counterintuitively, it is the liberals who seem to suffer most. During my first year at the Harvard Kennedy School, I have met American progressives who have never had their beliefs challenged–certainly not at the Kennedy School–and thus never learned to defend them. They leave the University completely blind to the concerns of “average Americans” on the right and the left, making Harvard progressives ill-prepared to serve as leaders. As a point of illustration, of the current contenders for the 2028 Democratic primary and the last two Democratic presidential candidates, none has an Ivy League degree. The Harvard Kennedy School claims that its mission is “to improve public policy and leadership so people can live in societies that are more safe, free, just, and sustainably prosperous.” Yet, students cannot become effective public leaders in a democratic society if they lack any understanding of the concerns of the demos.

The monolithic culture is particularly harmful to international students who have come to America, at least in part, to learn about the leaders of a country that has significant influence over their own. My international classmates frequently express a desire to hear what Americans think about foreign policy, but professors are either unwilling or unable even to entertain the policies that countervail HKS norms. This is true even of policies that are being actively instrumentalized by the US government. Instead of learning about the views of America’s current ruling party, international students are only exposed to the opinions of a specific variety of Democrat—a variety becoming increasingly irrelevant in their own party. In a school with hundreds of tenured professors, the burden of presenting a strong, honest case for American foreign policy should not fall on the shoulders of a small group of conservative students.

The lack of conservative instructors at Harvard is due, in part, to apparent ideological filters in the hiring process. Earlier this semester, and apparently unaware that a conservative was present, one Harvard Kennedy School instructor mentioned that “you could not be hired at Harvard if you even knew Niall Ferguson.” This rare peek behind the curtain belies a faculty hiring environment with strict, self-imposed constraints. The result of this ideological gatekeeping is revealed through surveys, which indicate that fewer than 3% of Harvard faculty define themselves as conservative, and only .4% of faculty define themselves as very conservative. The presumption that the scholar class is inherently progressive is a particularly American problem: throughout the world, conservative academics have played and continue to play an important role in shaping public discourse. American academia has distinguished itself in its active efforts to bar conservatives from taking part in that discourse. The problem is obvious, leading me to believe that Harvard simply lacks the desire to fix it.

Beyond removing barriers for conservative scholars, one way to improve Harvard’s intellectual environment is to refocus admissions on merit, rather than ideological markers. Currently, the elite have numerous ways to game the admissions process. Everyone else must make efforts to demonstrate their ideological submission to the admissions committees. Essays, in particular, are used by admissions officers as a means to filter applicants on the basis of their capacity to disrupt the prevailing power structure. Graduate school admissions consultants, typically experienced admissions officers, advise applicants with conservative indicators in their background to scrub or countersignal any hint that they might have voted for the “wrong” person. For example, I was cautioned that if I referred to my “wife” instead of my “partner” in my applications, they would be thrown in the trash. Consciously or not, these committees prefer not to grant conferral on anyone who might use their credentials against the prevailing orthodoxy. Ultimately, these litmus tests distort what elite institutions should be selecting for: merit.

Fortunately, a similar means of filtering was outlawed in Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard. Yet, it remains unclear whether Harvard has meaningfully complied with the ruling, a striking irony given the concern over "constitutional crises" during the early months of the Trump administration. Indeed, Harvard’s admissions process remains opaque, and the change in incoming class composition after SFFA was small relative to schools like MIT, suggesting a potential unwillingness or inability to comply faithfully with SFFA. Motivating this may be Harvard’s view of itself as, among peer educational institutions, a certifier of the American ruling class. As such, I believe they have an interest in maintaining and controlling an ideological uniformity so as not to grant that certification to those with the incorrect politics or background. One means of doing so is by disqualifying large numbers of low and middle-income white and Asian students on the basis of their race. Political affiliation among white Americans now closely tracks income—less affluent individuals are more likely to be conservative. Asian applicants also tend to be conservative when controlling for geography, income, and age. All else equal, Asian-Americans, in a given geography or around people of a similar income, will push culture rightward. These may seem like esoteric statistical phenomena, but they manifest themselves in a palpable paranoid feeling among the precarious political ruling class which leads to a defensiveness against perceived interlopers. By limiting the number of admissions on the basis of these race-class indicators, elite institutions are able to mute their voice. They admit just enough low and middle-income students of all ethnicities to keep them outnumbered and dependent, making it easy to pressure them, through lopsided power dynamics and administrative leverage, into adopting the “approved” way of thinking.

It is, further, my opinion that low-income, heritage African-Americans have been the unfortunate collateral damage of the Students for Fair Admissions decision. They, too, have been subject to the same pressures of conformity I highlight in this article. To illustrate its compliance with SFFA, Harvard points to a drop in African‑American admits yet has failed to show significant corresponding gains for the low and middle-income whites and Asian-Americans discussed above. Even before SFFA, in meeting its de facto quotas, Harvard tended to accept rich or recently immigrated African-Americans at the expense of low-income, heritage African-American applicants. Rather than accept the population of students who are rightfully owed a debt by American society, Harvard instead gave preference to students superficially, using skin color as a single-dimensional proxy for “privilege.” After SFFA, and at its earliest convenience, Harvard has further restricted admissions for the same population. In using SFFA to reduce admissions of a vulnerable minority while maintaining its bias against white and Asian applicants, Harvard reveals that racial justice was always a pretext used to retain an incestuous control of its “ruling class certification.”

In order to foster an environment of truth seeking, Harvard must make efforts to move toward the race-blind, meritocratic admissions standards prescribed by SFFA. In his recent letter to the Harvard community, President Garber frames Harvard’s fight to maintain its authority to employ these litmus tests as just and warns that funding cuts could harm several meritorious programs intended to “improve the prospects of children who survive cancer, to understand at the molecular level how cancer spreads throughout the body, to predict the spread of infectious disease outbreaks, and to ease the pain of soldiers wounded on the battlefield.” But potential funding cuts are not unusual: the federal government has a long history of attaching conditions to taxpayer funds and threatening to withhold grants in order to advance policy goals. For example, equally meritorious was the Medicaid funding, intended to provide healthcare to low-income Americans, particularly in red states, that President Obama threatened to withhold unless states continued allocating taxpayer dollars to Planned Parenthood. What is unusual is Harvard’s refusal to allow federal oversight to ensure compliance with a binding Supreme Court decision. As Harvard fights to maintain its prejudiced admissions policies, it should tap into its ample $50 billion war chest to protect those programs worthy of protection and spare the Harvard community from unnecessary hardship.

Curtis Yarvin, a trusted voice among several key figures in the Trump administration, is a long-time critic of Harvard, academia, and other ideologically captured American institutions. Weighing in on Harvard’s personnel selection and the federal funding debate, he states, doubtfully, “it is quite impossible to coerce Harvard into instituting a “merit-based” admissions or hiring policy. It is just like conquering Germany in 1945 and issuing new directives to suppress anti-Semitism in the Waffen-SS. No authority could do it. No authority could make Harvard understand it—to the Harvard admissions department, ideology is merit.” I am more optimistic. If Harvard stops penalizing students on the basis of their race and perceived politics, low and middle-income white and Asian students will necessarily be admitted in higher numbers. If these populations are admitted in higher numbers and if Harvard makes a concerted effort to cleanse its faculty of those who abuse their position of power against students, unorthodox politics will reach a critical mass, and open discourse will once-again flourish in Cambridge.