Is Harvard Doomed?

The university is a big enough institution to know that being legally in the right is not an ironclad guarantee that you’re always going to win.

This week we’re thrilled to share a piece from FIRE special counsel for campus advocacy Robert Shibley. We’ve been friends since FIRE’s early days, way back in 2003, and I have to say he’s my favorite curmudgeon.

Here, Robert is examining a question that’s been on all our minds lately, whether we want it or not: Is Harvard doomed?

Personally, I think the future might be just a teeny tiny bit brighter for Harvard than does Robert. The process behind Trump’s attacks on the university is incredibly erratic and overarching, which is why the administration is getting slapped down so quickly by the courts. Still, Harvard has a lot of very deep legal vulnerabilities, and Robert’s analysis here is a useful slap in the face.

— Greg

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Last month, during the ongoing fight between the Trump Administration and Harvard University over student visas, research funding, anti-Semitism, and seemingly everything else under the sun, Vice President J.D. Vance weighed in on X, suggesting that universities should see Trump’s actions as a “necessary corrective.”

Ignoring legally required due process, as too many of the administration’s attacks on Harvard have done so far, has certainly not been “necessary.” But the underlying problems to which Vance points are real. They have done serious damage to knowledge production in America. And they’re poised to do even more, as they contain within them the seeds of destruction for Harvard — or any other university targeted by the federal government.

The reproducibility crisis in science

Vance pointed first to the “reproducibility crisis” in a number of research fields, in which influential research often can’t be replicated by others trying to repeat their experiments.

Twenty years ago, Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis published a scholarly article titled “Why Most Published Research Findings are False” that kicked off the modern debate. Nature’s Ed Yong discussed that and more in a readable 2012 article that concentrated on the replication crisis in psychology, following up for The Atlantic in 2018.

But it didn’t stop there.

By 2020, Vox was reporting that “[r]esearchers have discovered, over and over, that lots of findings in fields like psychology, sociology, medicine, and economics don’t hold up when other researchers try to replicate them,” pointing out that “a decade of talking about the replication crisis hasn’t translated into a scientific process that’s much less vulnerable to it.”

Why not? The bias towards publishing novel or headline-grabbing results, coupled with the lack of reward for replicating studies or publishing null results, is the most remarked-upon factor. It’s undoubtedly a big contributor, and as a systemic problem conveniently can’t be blamed on any one person. Unfortunately, that excuse doesn’t fly nearly as well when applied to an influential institution like Harvard, which could have acted to fix the problem by changing these broken incentives, setting an example that other schools would be highly likely to follow.

That didn’t happen.

Compounding this problem is that nearly every field suffers from an enforced political consensus on certain issues that are highly controversial and should be the subject of robust academic debate, but aren’t. The operation to silence those pursuing the COVID-19 “lab leak” hypothesis is just one of the most recent and blatant examples, but they crop up everywhere and are often so radioactive that the academics involved share them only in strictest confidence.

I personally have had private conversations with respected, mainstream liberal professors about genetics, economics, sociology, and transgender issues that they knew they could never have with their colleagues for fear of career and reputational damage. Were some of these professors at Harvard? Yes. Don’t believe me? Try this: if you have a good friend in academia, ask them “what’s a controversial issue in your field that you could never discuss with your colleagues?” They’ll have an answer.

Then, atop the “forbidden fruit” specific to each field, there is official institutional political pressure. Most obvious is how the huge value placed on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts affect what research is funded and papers published, and even what conclusions are acceptable.

Only days after one the Trump Administration’s first salvos against Harvard about race discrimination, journalist Aaron Sibarium revealed leaked documents showing the Harvard Law Review was making race-based decisions in a variety of ways. Half the editors are picked by a review committee whose “first priority” is the inclusion of underrepresented groups. Being submitted by a “woman of color” was reason to consider publishing an otherwise weak article. Even citations to members of underrepresented groups was a plus for getting an article published. You have to be far dumber than anyone on the Harvard Law Review is likely to be not to see how the incentives this creates warps the development of legal thought.

This isn’t unique to law school. Harvard itself provided one of the most famous examples of what we now call DEI-type ideology trumping inquiry nearly 20 years ago, when it forced Larry Summers out as president for the crime of suggesting “that there might be different levels of aptitude for science between men and women at the highest cognitive levels,” as Greg put it back in 2006.

The unmistakable message to the Harvard community was that it doesn’t matter who you are: ask questions or come to conclusions that are politically inconvenient, and you are gone.

We then ask Harvard scholars, mired in this environment, to take our taxpayers’ billions and give us the right answers on politically radioactive issues like climate change, vaccines, transgenderism, terrorism, COVID, and autism. Have Harvard researchers done a lot of good since 2005? Yes. We can also be certain that they would have made more progress if they didn’t have to do it while tiptoeing across a minefield.

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Harvard had the tools, policies, and knowledge it needed to avoid creating this situation. Using it would have meant taking its promises of academic freedom and free inquiry seriously, and applying them with the same diligence its scholars presumably apply to their studies. It would not have been easy, but it was nevertheless necessary. Instead, Harvard placed safeguarding the search for truth — embodied in its famous motto, “Veritas” — a distant second to the search for the right politics. When this happens, diseases go uncured, policy problems go unsolved, and people’s lives are rendered less safe, prosperous, and healthy.

Does this mean the government was right to cancel grants already awarded to Harvard researchers? No. Agreements have to mean something, and the feds made those grants with full knowledge of the environment that prevailed in Cambridge. But it does supply those same grantmakers with an entirely legitimate reason to send future research grants somewhere else.

Harvard is taking some steps to use its own resources to cushion the blow. But the real problem will come when professors and researchers who wish to apply for federal grants decide they can engage in their work with far less hassle if they just do it somewhere other than Harvard. If they can do the very same work without these roadblocks at a place like Caltech, Vanderbilt, or even (shudder) a Big Ten school, why not? How does Harvard prevent this brain drain in the face of an intransigent federal government?

Vance also raised the issue that the bureaucracy in place at many universities inhibits the turning of basic research into commercially viable products. This problem was recognized as serious enough that in 1980, when Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act to allow universities to retain ownership of patented inventions, it also required them to attempt to commercialize those inventions. Gripes about how well “technology transfer” has worked are nothing new.

For a demonstration of the perennial nature of these problems, consider that this “Dispelling Common Myths” document about it from a consortium of universities was issued in 2000 and only needed to be “revised” in 2022.

The extent to which this is because the research is simply not amenable to commercialization will always be a matter for debate, however. As any good libertarian will tell you, if it’s obvious you could make money on the research, there’s a high chance businesses will do it themselves.

Race discrimination

Vance is also right that colleges engage in the grossest kind of unlawful race discrimination. Many colleges, Harvard included, have long engaged in race- and sex-based hiring and admissions practices that violate the law. The landmark case striking down racial preferences in college admissions is literally Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which the Trump administration did not hesitate to point out in a recent anti-Harvard proclamation.

College employment is no different. Across the country, stories of rejecting or disfavoring white, Asian, or male candidates simply because they were white, Asian, or male are legion. Engaging in an ad-hoc system of racial preferences hasn’t been legal for generations, but it’s nevertheless routine. One common method is for faculty search committees to make sure that the majority of finalists for any given position are not a white male. (So, for example, if there are four finalists being brought in, only one is allowed to be a white man, regardless of the applicant pool.)

Practices like this persisted because for decades, universities faced no prospect of consequences for violating civil rights law so long as the “right” people were disadvantaged. Suing was a death sentence for your career. Even courts would find every excuse not to see discrimination against the “majority,” under precedent literally overturned by the Supreme Court last week, and government agencies had zero inclination to investigate such discrimination. Racial preferences were fully institutionalized.

But that didn’t actually make it legal, and it means Harvard (and, to be fair, nearly every other college) is sitting on a mountain of “blackmail” material should the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or other civil rights investigators begin combing through hiring and employment records in earnest.

From a legal perspective, the Trump administration has arguably been doing Harvard a favor by ignoring due process to an extent impossible for courts to ignore. If the feds start following the rules, Harvard is in real trouble, because the remedy prescribed in the civil rights laws is, ultimately, to end all federal funding to the institution if the government and college cannot reach an agreement. Harvard could then sue, but any case could take years to resolve, causing more hugely disruptive uncertainty. How many more billion-dollar sales of equity stakes will be required for Harvard to make it work?

Ideological monoculture

Vance also raised, as conservatives often do, higher education’s ideological monoculture. Professors are wildly more likely to be on the left than can be explained by anything but political prejudice, and administrators even more so.

Whatever the reason for this, the end result is that when universities or their departments are inclined to take extreme and exclusionary positions on controversial issues, there is nobody on campus to make the other side of the argument. Campus leaders are so out of practice with dealing with dissenting views that they have forgotten that to be convincing to those not already on your side, you need to be able to make objectively reasonable arguments. More than that, you need the credibility to be believed.

That’s why elite institutions like Harvard flopped so badly with clumsy, tone-deaf responses to situations like the Israel-Hamas conflict. Faced with a conflict where the usual, left-leaning campus monoculture was split, Ivy League presidents like Harvard’s Claudine Gay simply couldn’t explain to anyone’s satisfaction why this was the one time they wouldn’t take a controversial side. And at hearings before a Congress that was hostile towards them going in, they self-destructed.

Public universities obviously depend on state appropriations of taxpayer money, but even private colleges like Harvard require the support of our civil society in myriad ways. That means they need to maintain a baseline level of support. To borrow from the late Ed Koch, how’re they doing?

A couple of days after Vance’s post, President Trump suggested taking billions more from Harvard and giving it to trade schools. Try arguing against this and not sounding either pompous or clueless. You might say: “Sure, trade schools could use the money, but look at all the well-meaning, public-spirited, high-integrity researchers at Harvard who need those billions to cure yet another form of cancer, like the cure that saved your mom.”

This is a good argument, and might even be true. Harvard is undoubtedly loaded with people who care about the problems of ordinary Americans and want to improve their lives through their research. But the argument that Harvard therefore needs your money lacks any rhetorical force because the message seemingly coming from Harvard and the Ivies for decades has predominantly been “drop dead.” (The book “Harvard Hates America” helped launch its 25-year-old author into Congress just two years later — and it came out in 1978!)

Harvard’s position as the standard-bearer for higher ed, and therefore for its unpopularity, obviously doesn’t justify the government’s circumvention of the legal process. But the university is also a big enough institution to know that being legally in the right is not an ironclad guarantee that you’re always going to win. Harvard, instead, spent decades burning through the public goodwill that had long made the kind of federal action being taken by the Trump administration unthinkable. And with its years-long and ultimately failed crusade against its fraternities, sororities, and elite “final clubs,” it even managed to alienate many of the elites who might otherwise have its back.

Institutions don’t usually go this far out of their way to make enemies. We at FIRE may joke that “we will drive this free speech bus into the wall” if necessary, but we also put plenty of effort into convincing people of the rightness of our cause in the hopes that the aforementioned wall won’t materialize. Harvard failed to do this, even while remaining so entwined with the federal government through funding and regulations that there are undoubtedly dozens of as-yet-undiscovered methods the government can use to squeeze it into submission. For example, on June 11 The New York Times reported that the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control may be investigating “whether Harvard University violated federal sanctions by collaborating on a health insurance conference in China that may have included officials blacklisted by the U.S. government.” (The conference included representatives from the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, which is accused of “systemic human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other minorities.”)

The target on Harvard’s backside is just too big. It could win every case it brings in court and still end up the loser.

So, is Harvard doomed?

Harvard is 140 years older than the United States and, at least as of 2023, its endowment was larger than the GDP of more than half of the countries on Earth. Barring some catastrophe, there will still be a Harvard long after everyone reading this is dead. But if both Harvard and the Trump administration continue on this present course, and especially if we were to see a J.D. Vance administration continue these efforts in 2029, it could well be facing a doom of a different kind: that of being a better-than-average, but not top-10, research university, as its grants and scholars go elsewhere, its endowment taxed away, or its assets sold to fund a genteel but real decline.

When it comes to a place with as much power and prestige as Harvard, “doom” is most likely a relative term. But unless things start going Harvard’s way — or some kind of accommodation is reached — the doom of Harvard as we know it may be closer than anybody thinks.

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

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