This past Sunday’s New York Times opinion section featured a long op-ed by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker in defense of his university. A frequent internal critic of Harvard, Pinker acknowledged real problems at the school. Yet he also went after those supposedly afflicted by what he calls Harvard Derangement Syndrome, a disorder that causes critics to lose all perspective, seeing only evil where a mixture of good and bad exists.
Pinker’s piece is heartfelt, thoughtful — and off target. Harvard has rightly lost legitimacy in the eyes of a goodly portion of the American public. The school has betrayed its very motto and purpose — the search for truth, veritas. Harvard has become an effectively partisan institution, undeserving of public support.
This does not mean that important scientific research and valuable, apolitical instruction in introductory languages and basic sciences does not also take place at Harvard, as Pinker says. Nor does it prevent the occasional plucky conservative student from running the gauntlet of opposition and emerging the better for it. The existence of these goods may pose practical challenges to a complete cutoff of federal support. Yet none of that gainsays the fact that Harvard has sacrificed its legitimate claim on the public purse.
The New York Times has no proper call on public financial support, although it is in many ways an excellent paper filled with deeply reported stories, often on apolitical topics, and although its coverage of controversial political and cultural issues is informative even when biased. We wouldn’t expect the public to support a private news outlet that is effectively the voice of the Democratic Party. (NPR is the controversial exception that proves the rule.) Nor should the public be expected to support universities that have become de facto instruments of political and cultural partisanship.
Partisanship has taken over the academy to the point where it is next to impossible to receive beneficial training in science or languages without also being subjected to one-sided politicking in nontechnical subjects. Families rightly worry that the price of a scientific or mathematical education for their children is a four-year campaign to alienate their offspring from their parents’ values. Rather than being a saving grace, as Pinker would have it, nonpartisan courses like engineering or science are the bait that draws students into ideological manipulation.
Yes, it worked for decades. Half the country tolerated the academy’s egregious bias for the sake of science, medicine, languages, business, and, above all, the doors opened by a prestigious degree. Those days are over. After decades of frog boiling, the water finally got too hot too fast. Safe spaces and microaggressions seemed almost entertainingly funny at first. But when the woke tide burst the academy’s bounds and spilled into human relations offices, elementary school classrooms, and girls’ sports, a line was crossed. Anyone, anywhere — even your children — could get canceled. It was instantly understood that the country had become the campus. What was once a joke was now a very real threat.
Pinker is a cofounder of Harvard’s Council on Academic Freedom. That’s great. The council comes to the defense of professors who are canceled for being politically incorrect, and Pinker cites numerous such cancellations at Harvard. He also acknowledges that the significance of these cases goes beyond the individuals involved. After all, every public cancellation acts as a standing threat to everyone who’s witnessed it. Yet for all that, says Pinker, things are not so bad at Harvard, pointing to himself as proof. He’s taught many politically incorrect concepts over the years and has never once been canceled. In general, Pinker says, heterodox opinions are frequently voiced at Harvard, without kicking up a fuss. Conservatives, in other words, are exaggerating Harvard’s problems.
Actually, Pinker is underplaying the problems. The real difficulty is that conservative academics don’t get appointed to begin with. That is the most important source of Harvard’s illegitimacy. The founding American statement on academic freedom is the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure promulgated by the then newly founded American Association of University Professors (AAUP). The latter part of that declaration highlights the responsibilities that accompany academic freedom. This is the material that the contemporary professoriate has forgotten, betrayed, and even, at points, repudiated.
The 1915 declaration warns of trouble “if this profession should prove itself unwilling . . . to prevent the freedom which it claims in the name of science from being used as a shelter . . . for uncritical and intemperate partisanship.” Should the academy not police itself for partisanship, says the fledgling AAUP, “it is certain that the task will be performed by others—by others who lack essential qualifications for performing it,” and whose actions will be “deeply injurious to the internal order and the public standing of universities.” This is obviously a warning against government intervention, yet it also clearly cites irresponsible partisanship on the part of professors as the likely cause of such intervention.
The 1915 declaration goes on to warn faculty against indoctrinating students, emphasizing the importance of exposing students to both sides of the argument on “controverted issues.” The declaration continues, “It is manifestly desirable that such teachers have minds untrammeled by party loyalties, unexcited by party enthusiasms, and unbiased by personal political ambitions; and that universities should remain uninvolved in party antagonisms.” That doesn’t sound like Harvard to me. The problem is not merely a lack of partisan restraint on the part of Harvard’s faculty, but the sheer absence of professors most able to convey the conservative side of the argument on “controverted issues.”
How did Harvard’s faculty become so one-sided? An important part of the answer is that hard leftists on the faculty simply don’t believe in classical liberal notions such as impartiality, or the distinction between knowledge and politics. In other words, faculty leftists don’t accept the founding premises of academic freedom. These sorts of professors make no effort either to hire without regard to politics, or to seek out the finest representatives of contending points of view. On the contrary, faculty on the left have generally worked to reproduce themselves politically. As a result, very few conservatives remain on the faculty. Hard-left professors will cry “academic freedom” when their intellectual monopoly is put at risk by outside forces. Yet the truth is, they care nothing for academic freedom in its true and fuller meaning. They simply deploy the phrase as a cudgel to protect their political cartel.
Pinker’s relatively small Council on Academic Freedom is far better than that. They mean it when they speak of academic freedom. Yet it remains difficult for these professors to confront the reality that the left’s faculty monopoly has destroyed the very basis of academic freedom at Harvard. Pinker’s group is better at protecting those who already have appointments than at dismantling the ideological filter that’s corrupted the appointment system itself.
Jonathan Turley chides the Harvard faculty members now loudly complaining about the Trump administration’s actions for having been “entirely silent for years as departments purged their ranks of conservatives to create one of the most perfectly sealed-off echo chambers in all of higher education.” When I taught as a lecturer at Harvard in the mid- to late 1990s, I got to see some of that purging at work. From what I saw of the nearly nonexistent number of conservatives on the tenure track, the fix against them was in from the start. When Harvard’s Department of Government voted on tenure for one of them, the university betrayed its own rules and regulations to deny the candidate’s promotion.
Pinker denies that Harvard is a leftist indoctrination camp — that’s Harvard Derangement Syndrome at work, he says. Well, I taught in Harvard’s Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, a selective and popular interdisciplinary major in social and political theory and the social sciences. One of my jobs was to co-teach the large great books course required of all majors, so I had plenty of opportunity to see other faculty at work. Virtually the entire departmental faculty co-taught that course. The year I entered, leftists on the faculty had reworked the reading list, bringing in authors such as Jurgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, and a large assortment of radical feminists. The choice between neo-Marxism and postmodernism became something close to the dominant theme of the course. The faculty — a mixture of junior faculty on the tenure track, lecturers, and grad students — were very far to the left. Many held President Clinton in contempt (from the left). At least a plurality, and probably a majority, were socialists of one sort or other. Similarly, at least a plurality, and likely a majority, were effectively proselytizing for their leftist political views in class.
Indoctrination camp? Not very far off the mark. Sure, the students were wonderful. And I liked many of my faculty colleagues. There was real learning going on and evidence of genuine thoughtfulness — although most of it remained cabined within the approved ideological boundaries. In other words, it was entirely contrary to the spirit and the letter of the 1915 AAUP declaration on academic freedom.
Is this the sort of thing the public ought to be called on to subsidize? Almost everything we now call “woke” I encountered during my years at Social Studies — without proper balance or challenge. We were teaching America’s future leaders. Our program’s graduates helped give the new ideology its dominant position in the culture — without adequate vetting or challenge. Never in our program did the other side get a proper hearing. That, itself, is a kind of proselytism.
Let’s return for a moment to that founding 1915 AAUP declaration on academic freedom. Something else about it is both important and forgotten. The declaration makes the point that both public and private institutions are obligated to uphold academic freedom, except in cases where they explicitly acknowledge a preexisting institutional religious or ideological commitment.
According to the AAUP declaration, in other words, private institutions are in no way exempted from the requirement of nonpartisanship. Here is the reason. Any right to push a particular ideological perspective, says the declaration, “is waived by the appeal to the general public for contributions and for moral support in the maintenance, not of a propaganda, but of a non-partisan institution of learning.” That is, once a private university appeals to the general public for financial contributions, the public’s diversity of political perspective obligates that university to maintain a position of nonpartisanship. How much more so does this apply in our era, when private universities not only solicit private contributions but take billions of dollars in public money?
Pinker cites some questionable statistics to claim that Harvard’s courses are less biased than generally supposed. The problem with his stats is that they mix apolitical courses like engineering and computer science with more politicized courses in the humanities and the social sciences. Not every course can be politicized. The point is, most of what can be politicized has been politicized — and in only one direction. Pinker concedes that about a third of Harvard’s general education courses have “a discernible leftward tilt.” That is a lot, and it doesn’t even count the tilt not openly acknowledged in the course description. Maybe a big part of the reason why tech types are so lefty nowadays is that the courses they take to supplement their apolitical technical training all lean one way.
At another point, Pinker lauds Harvard for having centralized its enforcement of disruptive protests, thus preventing what he calls “faculty nullification” of student discipline. This contains a telling concession. Faculty cannot be trusted to discipline disruptive leftist protesters because the faculty themselves are illiberal leftists with low regard for the rules of civil discourse. Are we to trust a faculty that cannot be relied upon to discipline shout-downs or antisemitic harassment with appointing new professors based strictly on expertise, not politics? The question answers itself.
If Pinker’s relatively small Academic Freedom Council alone were in charge of selecting new faculty, I might believe that a change could come from strictly internal forces. Yet trusting the much larger left-dominated faculty that has purged conservatives and consolidated its monopoly for decades is folly. Pinker can float his suggestions for achieving intellectual diversity. The faculty will ignore them.
True, the government may well make a mess of things if it intervenes to control faculty appointments. Yet asking the public to stay its hand on the grounds of an academic freedom whose principles of nonpartisanship were long ago abandoned by Harvard’s faculty is a nonstarter. I’ve already proposed a possible compromise solution to Harvard’s battle with Trump. I think it’s the best way of bringing in new faculty that can be found under the current imperfect circumstances.
Harvey Mansfield, Harvard’s longtime standout conservative professor, recently told an interviewer that Harvard “totally lacks . . . viewpoint diversity” and has effectively forged “an informal alliance with the Democratic Party.” I find that a more accurate assessment than Pinker’s. And again, Mansfield’s portrayal of Harvard’s reality stands in complete opposition to the original conception of academic freedom. If Mansfield is right, then Pinker’s well-intentioned group notwithstanding, there is no true academic freedom at Harvard, and there hasn’t been for some time, only a polite fiction.
The idea that the left’s iron grip over Harvard’s faculty will be surrendered in the absence of outside pressure is a pipe dream. Federal intervention is a bad idea that is nonetheless necessitated by the determination of Harvard’s faculty to flout the principles of liberal education and academic freedom alike.
It was all predicted in 1915 and has come to pass precisely because Harvard’s faculty — with honorable exceptions like Pinker — has actively rejected the foundation upon which its academic freedom rests. Harvard has tarnished its good name, and the public must act accordingly. Whether every jot and tittle of the administration’s actions on Harvard is well advised is another question. Be that as it may, the hammer must come down on Harvard. I’m glad the Trump administration is wielding it.