The Harvard Crimson has a grammar-challenged headline asking, “Who Does Harvard Owe?” The editors rebuff all those who believe that Harvard owes something to America. Or for that matter, to “Congress,” the media, its alumni, and others on the question of how the university should be governed.
The Crimson’s answer boils down to ‘shove off, you interlopers.’ In its view, Harvard University belongs to its faculty and its students. Well, perhaps not all of the faculty. The faculty members the Crimson has in mind are those “exemplars of moral clarity [who] are often found in our classrooms.” They are the ones “in the front lines of the struggle for intellectual freedom.” And they can be contrasted to the weak-kneed Harvard administrators who “waffled” when the university came under criticism.
The moral exemplars on the faculty, however, do not stand alone: “Students, too, should play an increased role in shaping the decisions of our University.” That’s because they are affected by policies and must “navigate the uneven terrain between Harvard’s values and its operational priorities.”
At this point, it is probably unnecessary to cite examples of behavior among Harvard faculty members and students that vitiate any idea that they are to be seen as fonts of moral clarity. In the hours immediately following the October 7, 2023 atrocities committed by agents of Hamas against Israeli civilians, a significant number of Harvard students—representing 35 student groups—publicly demonstrated in support of Hamas. Harvard faculty and students could find no grounds to criticize these demonstrators and, in many cases, praised them. In the weeks and months that followed, the demonstrations continued and directed threats, intimidation, and occasional violence at Jews on campus.
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One thread of the criticism that Harvard has endured since then has been its lackadaisical response to campus anti-Semitism. But there are spools upon spools of other thread. The scarcity of faculty members who entertain any thoughts outside the progressive-left campus orthodoxies is another issue. The suppression of ideas as well as the speech of the few dissenters from those orthodoxies is yet another. The imposition of the DEI as an ideology governing student admissions and faculty recruitment are two more. Harvard’s relentless recruitment of international students at the expense of Americans, to the point where more than a quarter of the enrolled students come from abroad, has attracted critical attention as well.
I could go on, but don’t want to take this space to catalog Harvard’s missteps, which are many and egregious. The real point is that until outsiders took notice of these matters, Harvard was perfectly content to continue spooling out and weaving all these threads together into a grand tapestry of contempt for American society.
Whom Does Harvard Owe? It owes the country that has made its freedom and prosperity possible. It owes the millions of taxpayers who fund its research and pay for its facilities. It owes the alumni who have secured its reputation and, in many cases, elevated its endowment. It owes the U.S. government fealty to the laws of the land. It owes the American people fair-minded treatment of members of minority groups, including Jews. It owes the Truth, which it claims to uphold in its famous motto.
The Harvard Crimson calls the university’s critics “its enemies,” and says those enemies have made it “a juicy political target.” It treats the criticisms as “attacks” that warrant nothing but “creative defiance.” The Crimson calls for defending Harvard’s “autonomy,” which it presents as a set of “values” that cannot be impugned.
But the truth is that Crimson’s editorial board is lost in the wilderness of its own conceit. Harvard, as it is today, is no moral exemplar. It is increasingly a bastion of arrogant disdain and disregard for the country’s laws, which have fostered its rise for 388 years. That country rightly demands that the university set itself right. The Crimson’s editorial is another measure of how lost the university is and how far it must go to recover its once worthy reputation.
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Image: “Harvard University – Eliot House” by Roger W on Flickr
As it was established as a subdivision of what became the Commonwealth, and is explicitly recognized in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, I would argue that Harvard owes the Commonwealth of Massachusetts….