Harvard’s dearth of conservative faculty is the fault of conservatives, at least according to The Crimson. This week, The Crimson Editorial Board declared, in response to Harvard’s effort to create viewpoint diversity by endowing professorships to conservatives, that, in fact, Harvard has no problem with viewpoint diversity in the first place. The Board instead argued that Harvard’s 9-to-1 ratio of liberal to conservative faculty is really the fault of conservatives’ own choices. When Harvard effectively fires professors for acknowledging men aren’t women, that’s really just conservatives’ fault for not choosing to be liberal.
The Board opens by warning against the danger of Harvard hiring enough conservatives to accurately represent America. It is about time someone took a stand against the idea that Harvard should represent Americans, because a fringe group has been pushing that view for years; they’re called the Harvard Crimson. In 2018, The Crimson Editorial Board complained that Harvard’s professors “do not reflect America,” ideologically. By 2022, The Crimson had seen the light, replacing its view that Harvard should accurately represent Americans’ opinions with the good liberal view that it should instead seek to accurately represent Americans’ skin colors. Of course, no one actually thinks Americans’ politics will be reflected at Harvard in the foreseeable future. Only seven percent of current faculty is conservative, meaning Harvard would have to hire over a thousand new professors to endanger the liberal majority. But most of the faculty don’t even want to hire one: a majority opposed any effort to bring viewpoint diversity to Harvard.
The donation numbers are even more extreme. In 2020, 98.82 percent of partisan donations from FAS faculty went to Democrats, a similar margin to North Korean elections. At the Law School, 56 professors gave only to Democrats, and one gave only to Republicans. Fifty-six to one. That one professor, I’m told, prefers it that way, at least according to The Crimson.
So where did the conservatives go? The Crimson Editorial Board argues they either do not want to be professors or do not want to be professors here, and either way, the decision is theirs. So, says The Crimson, Harvard should not even try to change anything at all. Interrupting these professors’ preferences with a job offer would be rude.
The Board explains this strange argument with a gratuitous quotation from sociologist Max Weber, who observed that scholars often study what their values tell them matters. Conservatives, The Crimson reasons, like business and engineering, while liberals like the humanities, where they can spend their lives studying Capitalism without ever taking part in it. In the Board’s words, “it should hardly surprise us that the liberal arts turn out to be liberal.” Next week’s article will presumably reveal that the United States Mint is full of peppermint candies.
But The Crimson’s Weberian claims are plainly wrong. By the newspaper’s own data, 42 engineering faculty gave $183,399 in partisan contributions between 2017 and 2020, every dollar of it to Democrats. The one department that The Crimson claims leans conservative is the most uniform of all. The Weberian argument also assumes conservatives do not value the humanities, which is an odd thing to say about an intellectual tradition whose whole focus is civilization, the family, religion, history, and the moral life.
Instead, the constraint at Harvard is the culture, not conservatives’ lack of interest in education, nor a lack of qualifications to be in education. Conservative academics with the same publication records as their liberal peers, for example, end up at worse institutions, so whatever is keeping them out of Harvard, it isn’t the standards. It more likely has something to do with the fact that nearly half of Harvard’s conservative faculty said they often or always keep their politics to themselves around colleagues. Meanwhile, in classes, professors regularly misrepresent the state of academic debate in order to justify left-wing policy efforts. Conservatives are not anti-education; they are uninterested in the one Harvard actively enforces, where getting through means having the conservatism “educated” out of you first.
One particularly clear example of how Harvard has spurned conservatism is when it effectively fired Carole Hooven. Hooven taught at Harvard for twenty years before she acknowledged that sex is biological, which, here at Harvard, is about as close as one can get to registering as a Republican. Her department told her it could not defend her because of the “optics,” and the next spring, not a single graduate student would help her teach her course. She eventually concluded that her “only choice was to leave.”
Nobody forced anything. Administrators preferred good optics, the graduate students preferred other courses, and Hooven, in the end, preferred not to stay. In The Crimson’s view, nothing wrong happened. The real problem was that Hooven’s interest in the truth was just not consistent with the Harvard biology department’s focus on left-wing ideology.
But, of course, acknowledging cases like this would force Harvard’s newspaper of record to focus on the problems at Harvard. In fact, while The Crimson’s article is ostensibly about the College, it is actually just another method of criticizing conservatives.
The Board announces, having proven that Harvard’s discrimination against conservatives is not discriminatory, that the real threat to academic freedom is that same tiny sliver of conservatives. According to The Crimson, Republican legislatures are trying to “control curricula, weaken tenure, and restrict what can be taught by professors.” This “growing political control of liberal-leaning faculty at other universities,” the Board says, matters far more than Harvard’s particular partisan head count. In other words, a liberal professor being forced to teach even-handed courses in Florida is a crisis, while a conservative professor barely existing at Harvard is a statistic.
Thus, having identified the wrong problem, it is no wonder that The Crimson’s solutions are somehow worse than its diagnosis.
First, the Board says Harvard must “eliminate its reputation of hostility to conservatism.” Not that it must eliminate its hostility to conservatism; just that it must lie more effectively. More articles like The Crimson’s must be produced which mix superfluous social science quotes with obvious misrepresentations of the facts. If we just have enough articles like this one, The Crimson seems to say, that’ll convince the rubes of middle America.
Meanwhile, The Crimson also proposes that Harvard could hire in subfields which conservatives tend to study, like “family structures in Economics,” and hire the best candidate, who will probably be conservative. Sure, here’s the job posting: “Harvard seeks an economist of the American family. Must be able to describe a nuclear family without the word ‘problematic.’” Otherwise, on the issues that matter to both conservatives and liberals — on the effects of mass immigration, or economic policy, or the good life — students should just get used to the liberal point of view being the only one available.
Finally, the Board posits creating an “institute for pluralism,” partially modeled on Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Yes, The Crimson believes the only way that Harvard can stop conservatives from being shouted down is by siloing them off into a separate institute, independent of the school. But even if its effort succeeded, the Board’s proposed institute is nowhere near as sincere as Hoover. Namely, rather than specifically trying to house “the intellectual dimensions of conservatism,” the Board just recommends the institute “accommodate” them, making sure it’s “non-partisan.” It’s hard to think this will be successful. Institutes like Hoover have been taking Harvard’s conservatives for years, with Niall Ferguson, for instance, leaving for California in 2016. As such, recognizably conservative institutes like Hoover are attractive; why would any conservative in his right mind opt for the merely accommodating doors of Harvard?
Having offered these useless recommendations, The Crimson’s editorial closes by promising that Harvard “can build a culture [conservatives] would call home.” That is good news for the Board, but it seems like an answer to the wrong question. What matters is not whether professors would be able to call Harvard home if they got a job here. It’s whether an ideologically biased hiring board would consider them in the first place and whether, upon coming here, they would be effectively fired as soon as they expressed a forbidden opinion. The question is whether conservative scholars could call Harvard home. The Crimson’s Editorial Board gives a clear reply: no.