I’ll go with Harvard, source of so much of the rot in universities and in culture generally.
Harvard doesn’t figure in many lists of “party schools” in America. The Cambridge, Mass., weather doesn’t facilitate the kind of sun-drenched Bacchanalia associated with some of the nation’s academically relaxed institutions, and the Ivy League university seems to demand minimum scholastic standards before students advance to weekends of bongs and booze.
But according to a new report in the Journal, there is one respect in which Harvard is the top “party” school. It is the favorite academic institution of the Chinese Communist Party.
The story says the Chinese leadership regards Harvard as the best training ground for the many thousands of midcareer bureaucrats it sends for executive education and postgraduate studies at U.S. campuses. Alumni include a former vice-president and the country’s top U.S. trade-relations negotiator. Sons and daughters of prominent communist leaders have also studied there.
Readers of a certain mindset will smile inwardly when they hear that the college at the pinnacle of America’s higher education is also the place where the elite of America’s principal geopolitical adversary go to learn how to turn their country into the dominant superpower. Revolutionary Marxists committed to the ultimate destruction of Western civilization and American-led capitalism? At Harvard? Of course. Where else would they go?
I jest—a little. Harvard’s faculty—in economics, the hard sciences, medicine and mathematics especially—still comprises some of the greatest minds on the planet; the research conducted there remains world-beating, and even in some undergraduate humanities programs I am told it is still possible to get a proper education with a minimum of mandatory indoctrination about decolonization, intergenerational racial equity, exploitative capital or gender studies. Harvard’s status as a magnet for the world’s best and brightest is still beneficial for the U.S. While those communist princelings will mostly go back home and figure out how to destroy us, many of the finest international students attracted to U.S. universities will stay and contribute greatly to American prosperity and welfare.
But the knowledge that America’s actual and potential enemies are among the biggest fans of Harvard and other elite U.S. colleges crystallizes many Americans’ conviction that our higher-education system has badly lost its way. It reminds us how central that system’s moral decline has been to the collapse in the American public’s trust in their leadership over the past decade or so.
Readers of this column know that I am not an enthusiast for many of President Trump’s policies or methods. Economic self-harm through tariffs, strategic self-harm by undermining alliances, and a blithe disregard for governing norms undermines much of what makes America great.
But on higher education, I say bring it on. Mr. Trump is right to have identified the system as having corrupted our sense of national cohesion and purpose and right again to target Harvard as the symbolic and substantive summit of that system.
There’s much to dislike in his methodology here too—punishing Harvard by cutting off valuable scientific research funding is a dubious tactic. But I’m also sympathetic to the idea that structural reform is an omelette and some of these institutions are the necessary eggs.
The rot in many American universities is so deep and so extensive that a four-year presidency will be nowhere near enough to begin to reverse it through suasion, incentives and dialogue. Ben Sasse argued on these pages last week that the best outcome would be if these threats induced wider change. As Voltaire’s Candide noted, the British used to think it was useful to shoot an admiral from time to time, to encourage the others.
The charge sheet has the university dead to rights. Through its admissions process it has actively discriminated against many of the most gifted Americans based on their skin color. Through its hiring practices and teaching it has created an oppressively intolerant monocultural intellectual microclimate. Through its massive inflation of administrative bureaucracy it has enforced and policed these rigidities at great cost, paid for by steep tuition hikes as its $53 billion endowment has made it a hedge fund with a university attached. And through its aggressive pursuit of international students it has built a little elite globalist community of highly privileged like-minded students and academics.
It isn’t alone. Last week we were treated to the spectacle of the president of the graduating class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology using a graduation event to denounce Israel’s “genocide” of Palestinians. To their credit, MIT’s leaders later barred the student from attending the full commencement ceremony. But this is the face of America’s academic institutions—privileged, extremist little Maoists spouting ahistorical drivel and bigoted cant to people who thought they were attending a celebration and got a Nuremberg rally.
Discouraging capable students from coming to the U.S. will hurt us, as will depriving valuable academic research of federal funds. But if these actions finally force universities to implement real changes to fix their rot, make them less of a party school for foreign apparatchiks and a playground for radical anti-American ideology, and return them to their status as centers of American excellence, it will be worth it.