The Crimson to Harvard Conservatives: Enjoy the Sidelines

Harvard’s dearth of conservative faculty is the fault of conservatives, at least according to TheCrimson. This week, TheCrimson Editorial Board declared, in response to Harvard’s effort to create viewpoint diversity by endowing professorships to conservatives, that, in fact, Harvard has no problem with viewpoint diversity in the first place. The Board instead argued that Harvard’s 9-to-1 ratio of liberal to conservative faculty is really the fault of conservatives’ own choices. When Harvard effectively fires professors for acknowledging men aren’t women, that’s really just conservatives’ fault for not choosing to be liberal.

The Board opens by warning against the danger of Harvard hiring enough conservatives to accurately represent America. It is about time someone took a stand against the idea that Harvard should represent Americans, because a fringe group has been pushing that view for years; they’re called the Harvard Crimson. In 2018, TheCrimson Editorial Board complained that Harvard’s professors “do not reflect America,” ideologically. By 2022,TheCrimson had seen the light, replacing its view that Harvard should accurately represent Americans’ opinions with the good liberal view that it should instead seek to accurately represent Americans’ skin colors. Of course, no one actually thinks Americans’ politics will be reflected at Harvard in the foreseeable future. Only seven percent of current faculty is conservative, meaning Harvard would have to hire over a thousand new professors to endanger the liberal majority. But most of the faculty don’t even want to hire one: a majority opposed any effort to bring viewpoint diversity to Harvard.