Teaching moment for Harvard
Four reforms would demonstrate it’s bigger than Trump
Jeffrey Denny
I t’s too easy to dog Harvard.
We expect clodpole Donald Trump, his Reichsregierung, and proudly ignorant MAGA illiterati to attack higher education, academic freedom and knowledge.
Americans generally tend to skunk-eye wealthy, privileged elites when they’re not named Trump or Musk. And they love to topple the ivory tower. Harvard is an obvious target.
It doesn’t help that Harvard charges $400,000 for a BA and rejects 97% of applicants, even the best and brightest high school seniors in America. Many because they failed to graduate from elite, exclusive $70,000/year private schools with Harvard-connected college counselors. And their parents aren’t high-donor legacies with family alumni dating back to robber barons and centuries before, or pull every high-powered personal, professional, and social string to beat the odds.
Of course, since Harvard accepts only 2,000 frosh a year, not all qualified students can get in. Even valedictorians at top prep schools who earned 5.0 GPAs and perfect ACT scores, captained the lacrosse team, and resolved the climate crisis don’t even try.
Some even have to settle for — gasp! — exclusive “Little Ivy” New England private colleges that still cost around $400,000 and reject 90% of applicants. Or even — pass the smelling salts — top state universities as backup schools.
As the famous Harvard Class of ‘40 alum, President John F. Kennedy, said, “Life is unfair.”
Harvard should remember this, and — while fighting back — take Trump’s diktats to cancel federal grants, foreign students, and tax breaks as a teaching moment for reflection and reform.
First, don’t cry too hard for Harvard. With its $64 billion in wealth, powerful alumni, billionaire donors, vast land holdings, and other assets, it’ll survive.
Let’s also untwist our knickers and face political reality: Trump is merely going after another longstanding right-wing target — think William F. Buckley’s 1951 “God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom’” — although Buckley is rolling in his Connecticut grave over Trump’s gleeful destruction of conservatism, America, and basic human decency.
And Trump has plenty of company. As 22-year Harvard professor and longtime critic Steven Pinker writes in his Sunday New York Times essay, “Harvard Derangement Syndrome,” “[T]he invective now being aimed at Harvard has become unhinged.”
Pinker noted that even before Trump’s drunk-uncle tantruming, critics called Harvard a “national disgrace,” a “woke madrasa,” a “Maoist indoctrination camp,” a “ship of fools,” a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment,” a “cesspool of extremist riots” and an “Islamist outpost” in which the “dominant view on campus” is “destroy the Jews, and you’ve destroyed the root of Western civilization.”
Harvard certainly has woke problems, as Pinker notes.
The latest is coddling hate speech by a generation infamous for hating whatever they decide is hate speech. Surely, students smart enough for Harvard must know that chanting “From the river to the sea” and “Long live the intifada” are calls for Jewish genocide.
(Strangely, we’ve seen little to zero similar student uprising against Trump’s attack on their institution.)
Pinker, a liberal, also complains that Harvard is hardly DEI when it comes to political ideology — only 3–6% of the arts and sciences faculty identified as “conservative” or “very conservative.” This belies Harvard’s mission statement pledging, “exposure to new ideas, new ways of understanding, and new ways of knowing [so] students embark on a journey of intellectual transformation.”
And of course, Harvard’s economic and demographic DEI is a running joke. While boasting of its financial aid programs, a May 2023 article, “Need-Blind: Why Harvard Hardly Accepts Low-Income Students,” Harvard Crimson noted that 67% of undergrads came from the top 20% of incomes, while only 4.5% came from the bottom 20%.
“At a school that swears up and down that it cares deeply about diversity, there are almost 15 times as many rich undergraduates as poor ones,” the article observed.
It goes without saying: Harvard makes the rich even richer, fueling the proverbial Matthew Effect, or late-stage capitalism, widening wealth inequality, which causes progressive Harvard students to bite the hand that privileges them. Harvard is, after all, a corporation.
What can Harvard do to acknowledge and address its crisis and show the leadership we expect from our top college?
Consider these reforms:
End legacy and donor preferences
Johns Hopkins, Amherst College, and Wesleyan University ended legacy admissions. So did Ivy-level University of Virginia by state law. Many others — mostly state public colleges — are joining in.
Also, cancel donor admission-buying.
“‘Please Admit’: Rampant donor preferences alleged in college financial aid lawsuit” in USA Today last December details emails and internal records at several colleges, including Ivies Cornell and Penn, that “paint a picture of a system fraught with inequities and looser standards for applicants with rich parents.”
The evidence “marks a new phase in a legal battle over allegations that, for years, 17 of the country’s top schools violated antitrust laws by conspiring to reduce financial aid for less affluent students.”
How about this: If Harvard donors, as liberals, care about equality in education and opportunity, they should split their giving among historically black and other superb but less wealthy colleges, where a little will go a much longer way.
Rethink admissions
Cut or slow the pipeline between Ivy-connected prep school college counselors and tap the internet, social media, and AI to reach more public high schools, counselors, and star students in poorer areas around the country — even Red states — especially the first generation to attend college.
They’ll be hungrier, won’t take Ivy privilege for granted, and likely will benefit the most. They’re out there. Bonus: They probably won’t seize campus buildings and disrupt the studies of students who also take college seriously (or their parents will kick their butts or take them out).
Close the wealth gap
In college admissions tests and essays, take points off if the student received costly ($250/hour) coaching, took the tests multiple times (up to $100 a pop), or got professional help with writing and CVs. If truly Harvard-qualified, they shouldn’t need or get that leg up.
Also, look askance at recommendation letters from powerful parental connections. There’s a whole game behind that.
For extracurricular activities, consider wage jobs that working-class applicants need to take to help their families or save for college, not just the pursuit of athletics, music, theater, or community leadership afforded to the idle class.
Harvard should read and heed a study from a nonprofit it sponsors, that “Children from families in the top 1% are twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago) as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores.”
Boot disruptive students
Sorry, free speech and assembly — like all rights — aren’t free. They demand responsibility and accountability. If students can punish professors for teaching thoughts they don’t like, colleges can punish students for breaking the rules. Talk about restorative justice!
Students should take a page from MLK’s civil rights protests — they were civil, which made them more powerful.
Students are adults, the same age as their peers who serve in uniform. Coddling reinforces entitlement. And doesn’t make for great citizens and citizen-leaders, as Harvard’s mission pledges to create.
Finally, college is not an entitlement; it’s a privilege, one that fewer than 40% of Americans have enjoyed. Harvard should teach that, with a slice of humble pie. And, as a leader, set an example for all elite higher education.
Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer.
