At the American Compass Gala in Washington, Tuesday night, Vice President JD Vance delivered a scathing critique of elite academia that cut straight to the heart of what’s wrong with American higher education. In a room filled with conservative thought leaders and policy minds, Vance did what few Republican politicians have the guts to do—he called out the intellectual rot inside places like Harvard for what it is: ideological groupthink masquerading as enlightenment.
“I don’t know what the voting in the 2024 election of Harvard’s faculty was,” Vance began. “My guess is that at least 90% and probably 95% voted for Kamala Harris. Right? ‘Very brilliant’ Kamala Harris, of course.” I love that he threw a little shade at Kamala, but the point he was making was deadly serious. Vance compared the political conformity of Harvard’s faculty to elections in authoritarian regimes. “If you ask yourself in a foreign election, if 80% of people voted for one candidate, you would say, ‘Oh that’s kind of weird.’ Right? That’s like not a super healthy democracy. If you said, ‘Oh, 95% of people voted for one party's candidate,’ you would say, ‘That's North Korea,’ or, ‘That's totalitarian.’”
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He’s not wrong. There’s no intellectual diversity on college campuses today. They are little more than a cult of leftist orthodoxy. There is no meaningful dissent, no diversity of thought, and certainly no room for conservative or even moderate viewpoints. As Vance noted, this isn’t just a political problem—it’s a scientific and institutional one.
“It is impossible in a true place of free exchange for that to happen,” Vance explained. “I think the ideological diversity at these universities has to get much better. And I think that if that got better—if you actually had a place where people were open to debating these things and weren't terrified they were gonna lose their job for saying something that was a little bit outside the Overton window—then I think the science would get better, the reproducibility would get better.”
He’s absolutely right. When dissent is punished and conformity is rewarded, the result isn’t truth—it’s propaganda. And that’s exactly what so many of these universities have become: propaganda mills for the left. The institutions that were once the pride of American education are now bloated credential factories that produce ideologues, not scholars.
“The quality of the institution would be so much better,” Vance continued. “And that’s what I want because we need high-quality universities. Right now, the problem is we don’t have them.”
There it is. We’ve been saying this for a while now, and here we have the vice president of the United States saying it: Harvard and other colleges and universities are no longer “high-quality” institutions. They’re broken—hollowed out by decades of wokeness, obsessed with identity politics, and utterly incapable of fulfilling their most basic mission.
Vance didn’t offer platitudes or half-measures. He named the problem. And in doing so, he made it clear that the conservative movement is no longer content to play defense when it comes to the culture war in academia.
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