It's time to forget about Harvard and build something better
Stop fixating on the sunk cost and ideological enemy indoctrination camp that is Harvard.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Harvard is in the news a lot.
Harvard is a foundational American institution. Founded in 1636, Harvard was the first college in the American colonies. It has produced some of the most brilliant, influential, and even notorious Americans across multiple centuries. Harvard was once a proud, dignified, and unanimous symbol of American excellence.
Today, Harvard is a cesspool of anti-Americanism. Tragically, Harvard is far from alone in moving into the depths of ideological barbarism. They are doing so in near perfect alignment with many other once-esteemed American academic, political, societal, and financial institutions.
Harvard is in the news most frequently today not for some semblance of academic achievement and excellence, but as a college that serves as a bastion and incubator for the evil ideologies of marxism and antisemitism.
Its academic roster is a mixed bag, at best. Continually degraded with decades of affirmative action policies, coupled with a more recent Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) ineptitude multiplier effect, it’s clear that Harvard no longer serves as an elite training center for the best and brightest, nor is it even a net positive for American society.
Its newly inaugurated president, Claudine Gay, is the perfect representative of Harvard’s decline and its preference for DEI over merit. She somehow became president of the university despite having almost zero notable accomplishments to her name, and a microscopic publishing footprint — she has never published a book and only has a handful of articles to her name — as a career academic. And despite her hypocrisy on speech and recently discovered rampant plagiarism, Harvard’s governing board voted unanimously to keep her job intact.
Social media predictably ignited into a fury, with many with both a vested and outside interest in Harvard expressing their outrage across the interwebs.
But now, with the decades of mask-off moments behind us, I find myself wondering why we are supposed to dedicate our energies to resuscitating Harvard’s image.
So what is to be done about Harvard?
Well, maybe we should start by not devoting so much time and energy to Harvard. It once stood for something important, but that doesn’t mean it should always hold on to that status symbol.
[Yes, here I am, paradoxically writing about Harvard, somewhat further legitimizing its existence, mission, and importance...]
Our hyper-focus on Harvard is helping to legitimize Harvard with the elite credentials that it no longer deserves.
For those of us who believe in the greatness of America’s foundational ideas, maybe it’s time to stop fixating on the sunk cost and ideological enemy indoctrination camp that is Harvard, and to start focusing on helping to build something that is better aligned with our values.
There is so much demand for a real, quality education in America today. And we already have a proof of concept.
Instead of attempting to fix the morally depraved Harvard (and most of its Ivy League comrades in arms), America needs more schools like Hillsdale College, which is fast racing up the academic rankings and becoming an elite American institution. Hillsdale now accepts under 20 percent of qualified applicants.
Clearly, there is lots of not-met demand for teaching in the Western tradition, and we are seeing pockets of demand pop up across the nation.
Florida is in the early stages of attempting to transform the once-failing New College of Florida into a reputable university that teaches in the classical tradition.
In Texas, there’s the upstart University of Austin, which last month announced that they are ready to start accepting applicants.
Hopefully at some point in the not so distant future, there will be plenty of similar places for higher education arriving in every state in America.
It might be best to cut Harvard loose, from both our wallets and our minds, and to build something better in its place.
Harvard is basically a $40B hedge fund pretending to be an institution of higher learning with a president that is an academic joke but checks more than 1 DEI box.
This is exactly what I have been saying. I have friends who have kids in public school here in WA State which is a training ground for communism and woke incorporated, etc. They think they can reform public schools as they keep using all sorts of their energy trying to change something that cannot be changed. Instead of trying to reform public schools, let them die on the vine and let's start our own schools. At least the energy spent would actually accomplish something. You cannot change stupid. We need to build our own school system outside of public education.