Is Harvard Objectively Un-American?

The fact that the tyrannical rulers of our leading adversary want to send their elites to Harvard for technical education should be a clue of what's wrong with our elite universities

Harvard would no doubt strenuously object to the charge that they are “un-American,” yelling “McCarthyism!” and other voodoo curses. But let this headline from the Wall Street Journal slowly sink in for a moment:

And by “party school,” the Chinese don’t have Saturday night keggers in mind.

The full feature story goes on to explain:

Harvard enjoys a sterling reputation among Chinese officials thanks to its record in training highflying bureaucrats who went on to take senior government roles and, in some cases, join the party’s elite Politburo. Some observers dubbed Harvard a de facto “party school,” as the party’s own training academies for promising bureaucrats are known.

“If we were to rank the Chinese Communist Party’s ‘overseas party schools,’ the one deserving top spot has to be Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in the U.S.,” said a 2014 commentary published by Shanghai Observer, an online platform run by the city’s main party newspaper.

Li Yuanchao, a former Politburo member and China’s vice president from 2013 to 2018, attended a mid-career training program at Harvard Kennedy School in 2002. He was the party boss of the central city of Nanjing at the time, and his first class at the school focused on crisis management, he recalled in a speech when visiting Harvard in 2009.

Understand the full significance of this: Chinese Communists have no fear that Harvard will teach their students anything that might undermine Communist dogma or authoritarian practice back at home. Or you could put it this way: China likes to send its best and brightest to Harvard to learn how to become more effective Communists.

Can it really be that Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government (KSG) teaches nothing about the fundamental principles of liberty and individual rights (especially free speech) at the heart of America’s constitutional order, which would be subversive to any Chinese student? Are there any courses that even expose students—any students, not just foreign students—to, say, the Federalist Papers?

It is hard to tell from the KSG’s website. Although it does have a complete course list and faculty descriptions, it does not provide either the syllabus or reading list for any specific course, but I don’t see any likely candidates. To the contrary, what you see from the course offerings are two main things: lots of technical instruction on advanced econometrics, finance, advanced managerial theory, and other quantitative skills, and a lot of courses clearly anchored in contemporary progressive fetishes, such as—wait for it!—climate change (eight courses on the issue); social justice; a three-course sequence on inequality and social policy, because you can’t possibly understand inequality from just one course, even at Harvard, and fifty courses related to gender. KSG’s curriculum includes a total of 35 courses related to “racism & bias.”

I can only spot maybe three KSG faculty who aren’t conventional liberals or deep leftists, and no real conservatives to speak of. I can’t see a single course where someone might read the Federalist Papers, or any kind of serious exposure to the thought of the founding era. Instead, you can take “DPI-348: Progressive Alternatives: Institutional Reconstruction Now,” by noted radical Roberto Mangabeira Unger. The course description reads, in part:

An exploration of the past and future agenda of progressives, whether self-described as liberals or as leftists. What should they propose, now that they no longer believe in the usefulness of governmental direction of the economy or in the sufficiency of redistributive social programs? A basic concern is the relation of programmatic thought to the understanding of change and constraint.

But nowhere in the curriculum will you find any explicit reference to consideration of conservative policy ideas. Brief aside: it’s long story, but a couple years ago I was on a Zoom event with KSG’s Pippa Norris, who teaches a KSG course on “Democratic Backsliding.” Gee—I’ll bet you can guess who this course beats up on. She was arguing against any explicit program to hire conservative faculty at Harvard or anywhere else, although she said she welcomed conservative faculty. I decided to throw down with this question: “When Harvey Mansfield retires [as he now has], will Harvard try to hire anyone like him?” Her answer: “Maybe.”

I’ll take that as a “No” until proven wrong.

One last bit: I’ve explained to some faculty at name-brand schools of policy or government the philosophy of the curriculum at Pepperdine, and a couple of faculty have said, “I wish we could include some content like that here. We don’t know how to do it.”

If you have 20 minutes, I explain some of this in the video below, which references the problem with places like Harvard, Syracuse, UCLA, and other places Chinese Communists like to send their students for advanced education.