“… Though Harvard indisputably would profit from more political and intellectual diversity, it is still far from a “radical left institution.” If The Crimson survey is any guide, a sizable majority of faculty across Harvard locate themselves to the right of “very liberal,” and they include dozens of prominent conservatives, like the legal scholar
Adrian Vermeule and the economist
Greg Mankiw. For years the most popular undergraduate courses have been the introduction to mainstream economics taught by a succession of conservatives and neoliberals, and the resolutely apolitical introductions to probability, computer science and life sciences.
Of course, Harvard also has plenty of offerings like Queer Ethnography and Decolonizing the Gaze, but they tend to be boutique courses with small enrollments. One of my students has developed an artificial-intelligence-based “Woke-o-Meter” that assesses course descriptions for Marxist, postmodernist and critical social justice themes (signaled by terms like “heteronormativity,” “intersectionality,” “systemic racism,” “late-stage capitalism” and “deconstruction”). He estimates that they make up at most 3 percent of the 5,000 courses in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ 2025-26 course catalog and 6 percent of its larger General Education courses (though about a third of these had a discernible leftward tilt). More typical are offerings like Cellular Basis of Neuronal Function, Beginning German (Intensive) and The Fall of the Roman Empire.
And if Harvard is teaching its students to “
despise the free-market system,” we’re not doing a very good job. The most popular undergraduate concentrations are economics and computer science, and
half of our graduates march from their commencement ceremony straight into jobs in finance, consulting and technology.
How to achieve an optimal diversity of viewpoints in a university is a difficult problem and an obsession of our council. Of course, not every viewpoint should be represented. The universe of ideas is infinite, and many of them are not worthy of serious attention, such as astrology, flat earthism, and Holocaust denial. The demand of the Trump administration to audit Harvard’s programs for diversity and jawbone a “critical mass” of government-approved contrarians into the noncompliant ones would be poisonous both to the university and to democracy. The biology department could be forced to hire creationists, the medical school vaccine skeptics and the history department denialists of the 2020 election. Harvard had no choice but to reject the ultimatum, becoming an
unlikely folk hero in the process.
Still, universities cannot continue to ignore the problem. Though obsessed with implicit racism and sexism, they have been insensitive to the most powerful cognitive distorter of all, the “
myside bias” that makes all of us credulous about the cherished beliefs of ourselves or our political or cultural coalitions. Universities should set the expectation that faculty members leave their politics at the classroom door, and affirm the
rationalist virtues of epistemic humility and active open-mindedness. To these ends, a bit of D.E.I. for conservatives would not hurt. As the economist Joan Robinson put it, “Ideology is like breath: You never smell your own.”…”
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