A YouTuber and a Harvard Law School professor walk onto a debate stage. A cross between a scene from a Platonic dialogue and the beginning of a bad joke, this was the unlikely combination presented by conservative Steven Crowder and progressive Professor Randall Kennedy on Monday, September 28, in an event hosted by the Harvard Republican Club. While the topic of debate was officially “free speech is dead on campus,” the two floated between discussing Trump, DEI, book bans, affirmative action, and the state of academia, especially at Harvard.
Crowder began the debate with an opening statement heavy on statistics, rightly emphasizing the extent of left-liberal dominance on campus. His figures included a nine-to-one liberal-conservative split, or the fact that no HLS professors had donated to Trump in 2023 or 2024. For Crowder, these statistics overwhelmingly indicated that Harvard’s left-wing “monolith” could not have arisen “organically.” In response, Kennedy made two points: first, that Trump, by cutting federal research funding, poses a greater threat to free speech, and second, that academia is largely self-correcting.
A notable sticking point was the DEI pledges that junior professors were previously required to sign at HLS, before the policy was later repealed (a point emphasized by Kennedy). Crowder’s best moments were on this subject, including when he brought Kennedy to an extended silence after asking whether Kennedy would have signed such a DEI statement when he was a junior professor. By contrast, Crowder was quick to deftly redirect (or interrupt) any particularly penetrating questions from Kennedy regarding specific Trump policies, such as, for example, that the Naval Academy had pulled one of Kennedy’s books from its library shelves.
Crowder also pointed out the fact that Professor Kennedy had been the only faculty member at any institution who had been willing to debate him. For this intellectual bravery, Crowder repeatedly praised Kennedy. Indeed, it was hard not to feel sympathetic to Kennedy for enduring a heckling, ideologically antagonistic crowd. On the other hand, this is precisely what conservative academics must face every day in the academy.
As the debate progressed, and for as much as they sparred, Crowder and Kennedy agreed on two principles.
First, while Kennedy downplayed the degree of anti-conservative discrimination on campus, he did concede that there was, in fact, something of a problem. Indeed, he noted that he would not, in principle, oppose a “conservative affirmative action,” though Crowder was (perhaps ironically) against such measures.
Second, the two seemed to largely agree upon, and argue from, a certain bedrock, classical liberal conception of justice. In critiquing Trump’s cutting of federal funding to Harvard (and other research institutions), Kennedy, in a thunderous tone, accused Trump of betraying the conservative (really, classical liberal) values of “free speech, due process, and private property.” To this, Crowder offered that Trump’s funding cuts, primarily aimed at DEI programs, were mere cases of government management of publicly funded institutions. That is, schools like Harvard, having received federal money, could no longer claim to be wholly independent, private institutions, but instead were regulatable by the federal government. Crucially, when cross-examined on this by Kennedy, Crowder pointed out that he would not be against conservative discrimination at a purely private institution. The key difference was that Harvard, in Crowder’s view, was not a purely private institution. In any case, the role of the government remained largely negative for Crowder: neither to actively fund things which it dislikes nor to enforce a broader agenda of non- or anti-discrimination otherwise.
It is, however, in this latter area of agreement that both are vulnerable to critique.
Insofar as Crowder attempted to emphasize the “inorganic” nature of the liberal rise-to-power on campus, at which the Trump administration’s efforts are presumably aimed, Crowder’s examples do not serve him. Take the DEI pledges and hiring/promotion guidelines (requiring candidates to demonstrate their commitment to furthering DEI) that Crowder repeatedly brought up. Certainly, this is a case of progressive excess run rampant. However, nothing about this is inorganic, in the sense of being mandated by an external (governmental) force. In fact, precisely the opposite is the case — given that academia’s left-wing credentials outstrip even the most blue counties of America (a point made by Crowder), this could only have arisen internally. Nobody else could be progressive enough to impose it. But, because this discrimination is self-imposed by the academy, through various more-or-less subtle means, Crowder’s proposed negative justification for government actions does not work. Merely getting rid of active discrimination on the College administration’s part is not enough. Eliminating DEI pledges does not eliminate the environment which produced them — an environment which was cultivated not by any governmental overreach, but by an autonomous self-selection of increasingly progressive academics now over a century in the making.
The case is more dire for Kennedy. If, as he concedes, there is some problem of conservative under-representation on campus, and that “something should be done,” the only natural question is: what, exactly, is to be done? Furthermore, given Kennedy’s commitments on race, it seems that he must take the principled stance against merely “neutral” governance (compare how on affirmative action, facially “race-neutral” admissions were claimed by liberals to be substantively racist).
In this way, as Kennedy observed, the positions of the conservative and liberal have flipped. That is, the conservative is now in a position to argue for a substantive, and not merely formal, conception of the “good”; the right must take a stand on which values, ideologies, or “truths” will be encouraged to flourish, and which will not.
The grounds that conservatives are treading on now are not uncharted; indeed, we have the left to thank for mapping it out. For, it was the critical left which paid particular attention to ways in which “knowledge” is “produced” by institutions with ulterior, truth-defeasing motives, or how “power” is exerted subtly through institutions and social arrangements, not merely by the government.
But just as much as the left crusaded with suspicion against our received institutions, so too, now, may we be rightly skeptical of our ideologically captured institutions — be they academia, administrative agencies, or NGOs. While the left may object to the right’s swapping of “bourgeois ideology” and “systemic racism” for “DEI” and “critical race theory” as ideae non grata, they cannot object to the form or means Trump has adopted. The left has given us their declaration of ideological warfare, and their playbook to prosecute it. The question for conservatives is only: are we willing to fight fire with fire?