Harvard College’s mission statement reads: “Harvard strives to create knowledge, to open the minds of students to that knowledge, and to enable students to take best advantage of their educational opportunities. To these ends, the College encourages students to respect ideas and their free expression, and to rejoice in discovery and in critical thought. …” Many colleges’ mission statements read similarly.
Yet in the spring of 2014, colleges displayed an unambiguous trend of silencing speakers with controversial viewpoints. At Rutgers University, students protested the announcement of Condoleezza Rice as commencement speaker; referencing Rice’s involvement in the torture of detainees, they equated her invitation to acceptance of “a world that justifies torture and debases humanity.” In light of the protests, Rice declined to speak.
Students at Smith College opposed the selection of Christine Lagarde as commencement speaker because of her leadership in what they deemed a corrupt institution oppressive to women around the world. She, like Rice, withdrew. Robert Birgeneau, the former chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, withdrew as Haverford College commencement speaker due to protests about his handling of a clash between police and Occupy protestors in 2011.
In his commencement speech at Harvard last year, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg responded to these recent commencement speaker withdrawals. He challenged Harvard to adhere more closely to its lofty ideals of free expression and debate. On top of the recent silencing of commencement speakers based on their political views, Bloomberg blasted the lack of political diversity among college faculty.
While he agreed with Harvard’s mission statement, Bloomberg argued that tolerance for other people’s ideas and the freedom to express your own “form a sacred trust that holds the basis of our democratic society. … [But] that trust is perpetually vulnerable to the tyrannical tendencies of monarchs, mobs, and majorities. And lately we’ve seen those tendencies manifest themselves too often, both on college campuses and in our society.”
As retired Harvard professor Ruth Wisse said, Bloomberg’s speech “was good only because it was so rare.” Indeed, Harvard is an effective representative of the problems surrounding politics on other college campuses. Its lack of political diversity might appear to devalue the education that students of minority political persuasions receive, but the real losers come from the political majority. When students enter college with overwhelmingly similar political leanings and learn from an ideologically homogenous faculty, they graduate without fulfilling Harvard College’s mission statement; they do not develop into critical thinkers with respect for viewpoints other than their own.
The Ayes Have It
Among Harvard faculty and students, conservative political groups are remarkably rare. Harvard’s faculty, administration, and students sway heavily to the left.
In the 2012 presidential election, 96 percent of all Ivy League faculty and staff donations supported Obama. A similar disparity characterized the 2004 and 2008 election cycles. Harvard College students demonstrate slightly more diversity, but even among them, liberals comprise an overwhelming majority. This year’s Harvard Crimson freshman survey revealed that Harvard’s Class of 2018, like its faculty, was “decidedly liberal.”
In the survey, only 13.1 percent of incoming freshmen identified as somewhat conservative, and 2.6 percent very conservative. 23.6 percent called themselves moderates. Meanwhile, 60.7 percent of students identified themselves as liberal. These results closely mirror those for the Class of 2017. As Jim McGlone ’15, the former president of Harvard Right to Life, told the HPR, the lopsided breakdown in political opinion on campus creates an environment in which “it’s sort of assumed that everyone’s on the same page.”
With All Due Respect
Since Harvard College leans solidly to the left, conservative viewpoints often face an unwelcoming environment. During the 2008 election cycle, Wisse told the Crimson that “it is not healthy when one side assumes the other is barbaric and writes it off and never listens to it at all.” She later noted that despite her initial reluctance to share her political views in the classroom, she later realized that “students don’t mind if you present your views in class, as long as you present them as your views. What they do mind very much is when the professor assumes that this is not a political view but that this is politically correct.”
This disguise of views as facts dominates Harvard’s academic climate. Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield estimated that of the 40 or so members of the Government department, three might be non-liberal; of those, he is the most vocal. Some liberal professors create “honest classes” that make students of varying persuasions equally uncomfortable, but as Mansfield asks, “how can you study politics with a faculty that is so one-sided as that?” He has raised the same issue in the past; six years ago, Mansfield told the Crimson that “the weaknesses in the argument of liberalism are not addressed or not even known. It seems the University fails to appreciate there are two parties in this country.” In other words, liberal professors reassert the views of a liberal student body.
Parallel fears impact student political minorities. Mansfield stated that conservative students seek him out because he is conservative. Underlying this preference is a profound discomfort with some liberal professors who fail to create open environments for political discussion. This imbalance threatens to transform a student into what Wisse called an “intellectual actor rather than an intellectual thinker”: students worried about their grades might tailor their spoken and written expression to the political opinions of their professors.
Student political minorities face difficulties in their interactions with the administration and other students, as well. McGlone discussed several instances in which his organization needed to interact with the Office of Student Life or other members of Harvard’s administration. He left these interactions with the impression “that [the Office of Student Life] didn’t really have an appreciation for where we were coming from.” In one of these instances, other students on campus disrespected Harvard Right to Life enough to vandalize its posters in a clearly targeted way. Whether or not one believes that the administration ought to involve itself in situations like this, the vandalism illustrates blatant disrespect of one side of an issue that, though uncontested at Harvard, sparks debate beyond the school’s iron gates.
Some liberals at Harvard—whether faculty, administration officials, or students—simply present some issues as settled. As someone with a non-liberal viewpoint, McGlone said, “You want to speak up, but there’s an auditorium of people who aren’t taking you seriously” because they believe that the window for debate has closed. Yet, he added, people should subject their political views to constant investigation; many students’ cold reception to other views shows that they instead take their own opinions’ correctness for granted. Mansfield even told the HPR that many people at Harvard behave as if “the other side doesn’t exist or isn’t worth considering, even as a matter of politeness or curiosity.”
The Real Edge
As a result of this political environment, the experiences of students in the political minority differ vastly from those among the liberal majority. Despite their previously discussed disadvantages, political minorities enjoy the real edge.
For example, the objectives of right-leaning student groups differ from those of left-leaning groups. While right-leaning groups focus on “shedding new light on an issue,” McGlone speculated that liberal groups work more on “mobilizing people enough to go out and make a difference.” Former president of the Harvard College Democrats Daniel Ki ’15 added, “I think there’s an assumption because Harvard is generally thought of as a liberal campus that people don’t need to be politically involved.” Political minorities, on the other hand, are “more skeptical, more on their guard, more wary, more seeking than other students,” as Mansfield explained.
More importantly, political minorities at Harvard benefit from an education closer to that idealized in Harvard College’s mission statement. McGlone reported that political minorities “on campus are forced to be open-minded. … Liberal students don’t have that feeling as much.”
At the heart of politics at Harvard lies a cold reality: the lack of intellectual diversity harms both political minorities and majorities. On the one hand, it discourages members of political minorities from voicing their opinions during their college years. On the other hand, the current status quo also deprives political majorities of much of the education in critical thought that colleges like Harvard promise. The implications of this educational shortcoming are evident in Washington, D.C.; as Bloomberg stated, “In politics, as it is on far too many college campuses, people don’t listen to facts that run counter to their ideology; they fear them.”
Even though the lack of political diversity on college campuses hurts all students, few people question it. Non-liberals might remain silent because, as Mansfield put it, “The atmosphere is not hostile but it’s stifling … You’re not being suppressed; you’re just being ignored.” In his commencement speech, Bloomberg took the matter a step farther by calling the lack of political diversity on college campuses across the country “a modern form of McCarthyism.”
Wisse articulated that Bloomberg’s words “should’ve been self-evident.” Democracy requires teaching and re-teaching, learning and re-learning. She told the HPR that students “have never fought back really. They’ve never thought that the university could be theirs to redefine, to demand what they know can be done better.”
In a 2008 interview with the Crimson, Wisse asked, “Where is the backbone of that part of the student body that knows where its responsibilities lie and does not rise to the occasion?” Since the lack of political diversity at Harvard and the other colleges that Bloomberg mentioned in his speech hurts both political majorities and political minorities, Wisse’s demand should resonate with every student, regardless of ideology.
This article has been updated from an earlier version (2/24/15).
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Joseph Choe