How conservatives are reacting to news that Harvard could start a conservative think tank

Yahoo

2 days ago

News that Harvard University is considering starting a conservative think tank is being met with skepticism and derision by conservatives who see the idea as a public relations ploy as the school seeks to retain federal funding threatened by the Trump administration.
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Harvard leadership had been in touch with potential donors for a center that could be similar to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, home to conservative luminaries like Condoleezza Rice, Niall Ferguson, Thomas Sowell and Victor Davis Hanson.
According to the Journal, a Harvard spokesman said the center would be nonpartisan and 'promote and support viewpoint diversity.' The cost of creating the center was estimated at between $500 million and $1 billion.
The report comes as Harvard President Alan Garber seeks to stand up to the Trump administration while acknowledging that the nation's oldest university has lacked ideological diversity in the past and is weighing how to best correct that.
A Harvard task force said in a report issued in 2018 that the school needed to make changes to be more inclusive with regard to religious and political beliefs. Danielle Allen, co-chair of that task force, later wrote for The Washington Post that those aspects of the report had been largely overlooked, and that 'We have been focused so much on academic freedom and free speech that we have neglected to set standards for a culture of mutual respect.'
The Trump administration wants Harvard to have more conservatives on its campus, both faculty and students. It has frozen funding, threatened the school's tax-exempt status and accreditation, and wants to stop international students from enrolling.
Harvard sued the administration in April, claiming its constitutional rights were being violated. 'No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue," Garber has said.
In recent weeks, Trump has said that a deal with Harvard was imminent, but nothing has emerged, and someone 'familiar with the administration's views' told the Journal that the creation of a conservative thinktank would be seen as 'window-dressing' and not satisfy Trump's concerns. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said Tuesday that a deal is 'getting close' — as is the court hearing, which is scheduled for July 21.
But the Journal, citing unnamed sources, said that negotiations were hindered by 'repeated snags.'
'Decision-making around admissions and faculty have been points of tension, with Harvard resistant to ceding authority on which types of students it admits, the faculty it hires and what professors teach, according to people briefed on the discussions.'
University of Pennsylvania professor Jennifer M. Morton, writing for The New York Times, argued that seeking out professors and students with conservative views would backfire, saying they would be less likely to engage in open-minded intellectual pursuit.
'Students admitted to help restore ideological balance would likely feel a responsibility to defend certain views, regardless of the force of opposing arguments they might encounter,' Morton wrote.
For professors, she added, 'the pressure to maintain those views would be even greater' because 'your salary, health insurance and career prospects would all depend upon the inflexibility of your ideology.'
Responding to Morton's essay on social media, Princeton professor Robert P. George said that a course correction wouldn't require hiring professors because they are conservatives, but simply acknowledging and ending bias against conservatives in the hiring process.
'I don't see how any contemporary academic can, with a straight face, deny that these two species of bias are largely responsible for the stunning — nearly unbelievable — ideological imbalances on college and university campuses," George wrote.
An oft-cited poll by the student-run Harvard Crimson found that only about 3% of faculty considered themselves conservative or very conservative while about 77% said they were liberal or very liberal.
On 'The Big Money Show on Fox,' Brian Brenberg, a Harvard alumnus, called the idea of a conservative think tank a bone thrown to conservatives.
'When you need something like this, what it tells you is the problem people have accused you of is true. You should never need a center like this, because the definition of scholarship is looking at issues from every single side.'
On X, Matthew E. Kahn, an economics professor at the University of California and a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution, called the idea 'promising' but said the Harvard Kennedy School should have done this decades ago.
And Hoover's Niall Ferguson said that such a venture 'would have no credibility whatsoever' because of the circumstances under which it was created.