The Trump administration has recently cut off Harvard University’s science funding, citing antisemitism, racially discriminatory admissions, and hiring practices. Harvard’s defense? Yes, we are antisemitic. Yes, we discriminate based on race. We have turned the humanities and social science departments into indoctrination centers. But we are still doing good, hard science. Don’t cut our science funding!

Sadly, the evidence shows Harvard has also wrecked the hard sciences.

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Let’s first consider the medical sciences. Harvard University President Alan Garber and Harvard professor of psychology Steven Pinker, the latter in a 4,000-word New York Times op-ed, cited Harvard’s work on a cure for Alzheimer’s disease as one of Harvard’s main achievements. But Science journalist Charles Piller, in his book Doctored, showed that Harvard researchers, leaders of the so-called “Amyloid Mafia” (scientists who believe that amyloid plaques are the leading cause of Alzheimer’s disease), have prevented all other hypotheses from being tested, thereby delaying finding a cure for Alzheimer’s disease.

Garber also cited a Breakthrough Prize awarded to a Harvard scientist for his work on GLP-1-based drugs used to treat obesity and diabetes, such as Ozempic and Wegovy, as evidence of Harvard’s recent medical contributions. Yet, as Gary Taubes has pointed out, Harvard bears some responsibility for the obesity and diabetes epidemic. Taubes showed that Harvard nutritionists pushed food companies to replace fats with sugar, and we’ve gotten, well, fat.

Finally, consider Harvard’s damage to physics, the hardest of the hard sciences. The 1979 Physics Nobel Prize winner, Sheldon Glashow, the greatest physicist ever on the Harvard faculty, left Harvard in 2000 for Boston University because Harvard insisted on hiring string theorists rather than scientists who believe theory should be firmly grounded in experiment. As University of Toronto physicist Lee Smolin has shown in his book The Trouble with Physics, string theory, backed by Harvard’s prestige, has gobbled up all Federal funding for quantum gravity research, preventing other approaches from being investigated.

A SENSIBLE LOOK AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT CUTS

Since Harvard, with its prestige, has diverted Federal science funding down useless ratholes, we may have to go back to the pre-WWII method of funding science: wealthy patrons. I persuaded the IT billionaire Peter Thiel to fund an experimental test of the non-string theory of quantum gravity proposed by physics Nobel Prize winners Richard Feynman and Steven Weinberg, and improved by me. The experiment, just published in a peer-reviewed journal, shows the alternative is true. But don’t believe any scientific claims until the experiment is replicated. We’ll see if my experiment is replicated. Harvard doesn’t believe in replication. I do.

Over the past few decades, Harvard has acted as if its motto were not “Veritas,” meaning truth, but rather “Veritas Delenda Est” — “Truth Must Be Erased.” On Harvard’s older buildings, one can still see Harvard’s original motto: “Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae,” meaning “Truth for Christ and the Church.”  In dropping “Christ and the Church,” Harvard also dropped “Truth.”

Frank J. Tipler is Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University. He is the author of The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford University Press [with John D. Barrow, FRS]), The Physics of Immortality (Doubleday), and The Physics of Christianity (Doubleday).