Harvard leftists oppose plan to hire conservative professors for viewpoint diversity

Back in April, the Harvard Crimson reported that the university has been soliciting donors for a $10 million endowment for dozens of new professorships to be filled by conservatives across various departments. The effort was said to be spearheaded by Harvard Provost John F. Manning, a conservative legal scholar.

Now, the Washington Times reports that the plan has been facing resistance from liberal professors and teachers, who comprise 69 percent of the faculty. Forty-seven percent faculty members said they were opposed to the plan and 31 percent supported it, according to a survey.

“The answer is not partisan quotas, but a credible commitment to intellectual openness and hiring excellent scholars across a genuinely broad range of perspectives,” claimed political scientist Daniel Schatz. 

“Even supposing that [silencing] takes place, how would the hiring of conservative faculty act as a countervailing force? Surely such hiring may inhibit viewpoint diversity rather than nurture it,” argued Harvard graduate Dominique Padurano, founder and president of college counseling company Crimson Coaching.

Conservative Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield counters that “I don’t think that the universities would have changed without [the Trump administration’s] intervention, and especially without depriving the universities of large sums of money.”

Harvard has a long history of left-wing bias for which the viewpoint diversity initiative would be compensating. The school maintained COVID-19 shot mandates as late as February 2024 before finally dropping them a month later.

In 2023, the Wall Street Journal published an article by Harvard social scientists Mahzarin Banaji and Frank Dobbin, which, while continuing to vouch for the stated purpose of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, acknowledges there is “no question that the way organizations deal with it is more likely to hurt than help.” They cited research by Dobbin and colleague Alexandra Kalev as showing the “typical DEI training doesn’t educate people about bias and may even do harm.” In a 2021 Economist article, Dobbin and Kalev wrote that “anti-bias training” can actually make trainees more conscious of alleged stereotypes that would not otherwise occur to them.

In 2024, biologist Carole Hooven detailed how she resigned from Harvard in January 2023 amid a deluge of hostility for publicly affirming that sex is binary and criticizing the culture of intolerance fostered by DEI policies. The director of her department’s Diversity & Inclusion Task Force publicly accused her of “transphobic and harmful remarks.” When Hooven respectfully responded in public, “Current and previous members of my department publicly accused me on social media of intentionally harming Laura, ‘punching down,’ and threatening the safety of the ‘community,’ particularly undergraduates,” she said. In June, a trio of academics urged Harvard to rehire her.

Indoctrination of children with left-wing ideology on sexuality and other agenda items has long been a major concern in American schools and libraries, from book shelves to drag events to classroom materials to even “transitioning” troubled children without parental input. Many schools have also displayed hostility to the rights and employment of individual teachers who refuse to go along with such agendas. Across the nation, controversy has also erupted in recent years over schools and libraries adopting books that expose sexual themes and activity to children, often in graphic detail and with pornographic imagery depicting specific sexual acts.

The toll of such an activist bent often extends well beyond politics. In 2024, insiders from the University of California-Los Angeles’ (UCLA’s) prestigious David Geffen School of Medicine warned that the school’s diversity fixation had led to a crisis in which more than half of students in various cohorts admitted since 2020 fail standardized tests for basic medical knowledge of subjects ranging from emergency medicine and family medicine to internal medicine and pediatrics.

In response, the Trump administration has issued executive orders to deny federal funds to educational entities that indoctrinate students through DEI programs, among other executive actions to combat so-called “woke ideology” in education.