Harvard's One-Sided Veritas

By Jason Morganbesser

Source: Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

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.

1. When measuring the presence of Marxists, critical theorists, or postmodernists in a syllabus, we exclusively count secondary readings in the area of study (historians for History, literary theorists for English, and political theorists for Social Studies, for instance), including those who either describe themselves as Marxists or critical theorists or openly use Marxist or critical theoretical methodologies (such as, for instance, dialectical materialism). Some examples are Angela Davis in Social Studies, Robin D.G. Kelly in History & Literature, Georg Lukàcs in English, Frantz Fanon in History, E.P. Thompson in History, and Loï Wacquant in Sociology.

When measuring the presence of conservatives in a syllabus, we count only those who either describe themselves as right of center or are aligned with traditionalist critiques of contemporary critical theoretical or Marxist analytical frameworks. Some examples include Edmund Burke in Social Studies, Lionel Trilling in English, John Lewis Gaddis in History, and Talcott Parsons in Sociology.

2. While Sociology, Social Studies, and History are technically parts of the Social Sciences, we will count them here as the Humanities, as all three fields have a historic affinity with the Humanities as well as a focus on secondary literature rather than quantitative analysis.