In Defense of Harvard

It's got its flaws, but it's ultimately a great institution, argues Steven Pinker

Photo by Emily Karakis on Unsplash

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Steve Pinker has a great piece in The New York Times titled “Harvard Derangement Syndrome.” It responds to the growing wave of political attacks on Harvard University, which portray the institution as ideologically captured, morally bankrupt, and even dangerous. Pinker, a longtime professor at Harvard, acknowledges that the university is far from perfect. But he also makes a compelling case that the attacks ignore the bigger picture: that Harvard, for all its flaws, remains one of the world’s most valuable engines of knowledge and human progress.

Below are some excerpts from Pinker’s essay, but I highly recommend reading the whole piece.

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According to its critics, Harvard is a “national disgrace,” a “woke madrasa,” a “Maoist indoctrination camp,” a “ship of fools,” a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment,” a “cesspool of extremist riots” and an “Islamist outpost” in which the “dominant view on campus” is “destroy the Jews, and you’ve destroyed the root of Western civilization”…

[S]ome of the enmity against Harvard has been earned. My colleagues and I have worried for years about the erosion of academic freedom here, exemplified by some notorious persecutions…

But a woke madrasa? This is black-and-white splitting, in need of behavior therapy... As troubled as I am by assaults on academic freedom at Harvard, the last-place finish does not pass the smell test.

I’ll start with myself. During my decades at the university I’ve taught many controversial ideas, including the reality of sex differences, the heritability of intelligence and the evolutionary roots of violence (while inviting my students to disagree, as long as they provide reasons). I claim no courage: The result has been zero protests, several university honors and warm relations with every chair, dean and president.

Most of my colleagues, too, follow the data and report what their findings indicate or show, however politically incorrect. A few examples: Race has some biological reality. Marriage reduces crime. So does hot-spot policing. Racism has been in decline. Phonics is essential to reading instruction. Trigger warnings can do more harm than good. Africans were active in the slave trade. Educational attainment is partly in the genes. Cracking down on drugs has benefits, and legalizing them has harms. Markets can make people fairer and more generous. For all the headlines, day-to-day life at Harvard consists of publishing ideas without fear or favor.

Pinker doesn’t shy away from acknowledging that some of the criticisms aimed at Harvard have merit.

A poll of my colleagues on the academic freedom council turned up many examples in which they felt political narrowness had skewed research in their specialties. In climate policy, it led to a focus on demonizing fossil fuel companies rather than acknowledging the universal desire for abundant energy; in pediatrics, taking all adolescents’ reported gender dysphoria at face value; in public health, advocating maximalist government interventions rather than cost-benefit analyses; in history, emphasizing the harms of colonialism but not of communism or Islamism; in social science, attributing all group disparities to racism but never to culture; and in women’s studies, permitting the study of sexism and stereotypes but not sexual selection, sexology or hormones…

[But although] Harvard indisputably would profit from more political and intellectual diversity, it is still far from a “radical left institution.”

What’s the path forward?

[U]niversity leaders should be prepared to affirm the paramount goal of a university - discovering and transmitting knowledge - and the principles necessary to pursue it. Universities have a mandate and the expertise to pursue knowledge, not social justice. Intellectual freedom is not a privilege of professors but the only way that fallible humans gain knowledge. Disagreements should be negotiated with analysis and argument, not recriminations of bigotry and victimhood. Protests may be used to generate common knowledge of a grievance, but not to shut people up or coerce the university into doing what the protesters want…

And if you’re still skeptical that universities are worth supporting, consider these questions: Do you think that the number of children who die every year from cancer is just about right? Are you content with your current chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease? Do you feel our current understanding of which government policies are effective and which ones are wasteful is perfect? Are you happy with the way the climate is going, given our current energy technology?

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Steve

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