Is Harvard irredeemable?
Yes, unless they are forced by external forces to reform.
That’s not the assessment of a conservative curmudgeon or some extreme partisans exacting revenge on institutions filled with lefty lunatics.
That is what several Harvard professors and researchers who have watched a once-great institution become what it is today–practically totalitarian.
Omar Sultan Haque, M.D., Ph.D., a Harvard researcher, penned a cri de cœur on his Substack arguing that Harvard has betrayed its very reason for being: the search for truth.
The historic levels of grade inflation on campus also match levels of denial, insularity, truth-inflation, and ideological capture. For instance, a shorter version of this heterodox essay you are reading at this moment was rejected by the Harvard Crimson. The well meaning editor told me they “didn’t feel this particular piece was a good fit at this particular time”. I wondered, when exactly would be a good time? Faculty job applicants already have to do diversity/DEI loyalty oaths, and students can’t speak their mind in an academic institution.
Openness to dissenting voices and free inquiry are as rare at Harvard as is spotting the mythical dodo bird of the Ivy League in Harvard Yard: a student who is working class, conservative, religious, rural in origin, heterosexual, and believes their gender matches their biological sex.
Harvard’s motto is, famously, Veritas–Latin for “Truth.” Just like Pravda, come to think of it, and the modern Harvard is as dedicated to truth and the search for truth as Pravda was during the Soviet years.
In contrast, a partisan think tank is explicitly factional and partial in its aims. There are many think-tanks in America that have explicitly partisan aims and practices, such as the Center for American Progress (liberal), Claremont Institute (conservative), Cato Institute (libertarian), Guttmacher Institute (pro-abortion). Though intellectually oriented and often producing robust scholarship, these are not universities. Consistent with their ideologies, these institutes tend to only ask a small range of all possible intellectual questions, and their answers are more predictable than not. The Guttmacher Institute, for instance, rarely does a study on post-traumatic stress disorder and moral injury after abortions, and the Cato Institute rarely writes reports documenting the needs of the most vulnerable in society and how social safety nets could help.
Harvard, by these standards, is much more like a left wing progressive Institute, than it is a university. In its most passionate moral exhortations, Harvard resembles a secular ideological church. There are some quantitative pockets of flourishing, non-partisan academic life, but in general, Harvard does not live up to the values of a university, and is more like a think tank.
Delusions of Adequacy 