Harvard Professor Steven Pinker wrote the 4,000 word column “Harvard Derangement Syndrome” that the New York Times published on May 23. The Hoover Institution’s Peter Berkowitz was a member of the Harvard faculty once upon a time. He offers a biting counterpoint in the RealClearPolitics column ”
Steven Pinker’s damning defense of Harvard.” Berkowitz writes in his conclusion (please read the whole thing, links omitted below):
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Determined to see Harvard as open and pluralistic, Pinker asserts that the faculty contains “dozens of prominent conservatives, like the legal scholar Adrian Vermeule and the economist Greg Mankiw.” If, however, there were, say, five dozen conservative faculty members on campus, that would amount to less than 3% of the university’s 2,400 faculty members, and it would underscore that Harvard is a one-party operation.
Harvard Law School Professor Jack Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general in the George W. Bush administration, suggests the situation is much worse than Pinker realizes. “I have been at the university for 21 years,” he told me, “and have no idea who the dozens of prominent conservatives are.”
Goldsmith’s HLS colleague, Professor Vermeule, one of Pinker’s two examples of conservatives on campus, went further in a reply to Pinker on “X”: “With all due respect, out of these two (2) examples of ‘conservative’ faculty, one supported Harris in 2024. The other doesn’t call himself a ‘conservative,’ because he thinks there is little left to conserve.” In an email exchange, Vermeule – the one who doesn’t call himself a conservative – elaborated: “Now that Harvey Mansfield has retired, it’s extremely difficult to name any ‘prominent conservatives’ at Harvard, let alone ‘dozens.’ Although I suppose there may be a few natural scientists flying under the radar.”
Pinker briefly defends Harvard’s undergraduate curriculum. He reports that the university’s introduction to economics remains very popular and is routinely taught by conservatives or neoliberals, most courses are mainstream, and typical woke classes are small boutique offerings. He overlooks, however, the progressive orthodoxy that permeates the mainstream classes. And he disregards Harvard’s impoverishment of its undergraduate curriculum – similar to other elite universities – in areas that constitute liberal education’s core: American political ideas and institutions; constitutional, diplomatic, economic, religious, and military history; the great books of Western civilization; and serious study – rooted in knowledge of language, culture, and history – of other peoples and nations.
While Pinker is correct that the right would do well to rein in its invective, his Harvard-is-not-as-bad-as-it-seems rhetoric could use some fine tuning as well. His lengthy New York Times assessment corroborates the suspicion that for those concerned about the plight of liberal education, Harvard is at least as bad as it seems.
