Harvard University has announced that it will stop using its institutional voice to weigh in on “matters that do not directly affect the university’s core function.”

We’d love to applaud this as a return to sanity, but the move looks purely cynical.

Look: There’s no earthly reason a university should ever comment as a school on contentious social issues. 

Harvard has one mission: to educate. 

And between its insane DEI policies and the wider transformation of American universities into four-year spa/babysitting combos for rich kids and aspiring rich kids, it has quite enough trouble doing that already. 

Also, even on the rare occasions when Harvard lands on the right side of history — like 2022 remarks from then-prez Lawrence Bacow condemning Putin’s invasion of Ukraine — we have to ask: What’s the point, beyond useless moral grandstanding?

More importantly, the timing of this sudden switch is beyond telling.

Why only do it after ousted president Claudine Gay’s shameful equivocations around the terrorist atrocities of Oct. 7?

And after huge chunks of the school’s faculty and students borrowed the cloak of institutional legitimacy as they proudly backed the genocidaires of Hamas?

Don’t forget that during the George Floyd riots of 2020, Harvard similarly went mealy-mouthed in another clear case of right vs wrong (i.e. leftist protestors torching and looting while pretending to fight for equality). 

And on and on and on. 

No, the latest move (welcome as it is) doesn’t signal a renewed commitment to actual education and a shrugging off of partisan pieties.

It’s damage control, pure and simple. 

The world’s most prestigious university massively hurt its brand by backing genocidal terrorists, got badly slapped for it, saw its president revealed as an utter phony and one of its most famous alumni take up arms against it. 

Real principle still remains in short supply in the grove of Academe.