“What does it profit to gain the world but lose your soul?” Until October 7, 2023, Harvard University seemed to have the world by the tail. Across America and around the globe, high school honor students were preparing their applications to Harvard, praying their record and test scores would take them into that exclusive entering Class of ’28 in those Hallowed Halls.
Two years later, the University finds itself attacked by the dreaded Trump Administration for five counts of academic malpractice and with over two billion dollars of federal funds frozen. Donor contributions are being withheld, and parents are questioning whether they want to pay big bucks to send their children there, only for them to be turned into screaming anti-Semitic protestors calling for another Jewish genocide from the “River to the Sea”.
In 1636, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts chartered Harvard as a Christian educational institution, mainly to train ministers in the Faith. As the industrial revolution grew during the 1800s, the incoming president, Charles William Eliot, instituted a modern curriculum, secularizing the University and effectively banishing religious thought from its culture. Rational individualism became the new campus religion, free from binding ethical or moral restraints that dated back 3,400 years of Jewish and Christian monotheism.
The active, recently uncluttered minds roamed Harvard’s Halls looking for new meaning for their lives. They created fresh gods to follow with religious fervor. President Eliot introduced Harvard culture to transcendentalism. Following his presidency, which ended in 1909, Eliot promoted eugenics, which was not discredited in America until after World War II.
The most recent search for meaning at Harvard is centered around the concepts of “intersectionality”, which applies dimensions of identity in unique combinations of perceived “discrimination” and “privilege”. On October 7, the perceived discrimination against Palestinians justified murdering 1,200 Israeli privileged citizens. Under this obtuse new ideology, Harvard protestors could call for the final genocide of the Jews in Israel while being blindly unaware of the extermination of six million Jews during the Holocaust.
This same ideology is used to promote anti-Americanism throughout elite university campuses. Europeans searching for religious freedom were oppressors of the native American populations, making the United States a nation to be scorned. Some Founding Fathers were slave owners, making them privileged oppressors over black victims, despite the vast disparity in the mores of their times from present days. Their sins justified desecrating and tearing down the Founders’ statues and denouncing the validity of our nationhood.
Under Harvard’s search for universal meaning, “Merit” should be dismantled and replaced with “Equity”. Therefore, the American Capitalist System that created our unmatched prosperity, but with different personal outcomes, should be replaced with a fairer system. Quotas should be established to permit “exclusion” of any of the privileged who stand in the way of the “inclusion” of victims of past discrimination.
President Eliot was correct in 1869 when he introduced the sciences to the Harvard curriculum; however, Harvard erred by replacing Creator-endowed, self-evident Truths developed by mankind over three millennia with an idealistic system believing in the supremacy of insight for the revelation of the deepest truths, rather than logic and experience. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, writing about “Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning”, explained it differently than Harvard as follows:
“Religion and science are the two essential perspectives that allow us to see the universe in its three-dimensional depth. Science is the search for explanation. Religion is the search for meaning.”
In failing to provide its students with this broader perspective, Harvard’s leaders are presiding over the best and brightest of America’s young people, filled with unrest, bereft of significant meaning in their lives, and missing the joy of exploring new horizons.
The argument for this conclusion is found in the “2025 College Free Speech Rankings.” Harvard ranked last for the second straight year among the 257 colleges and universities and 58,807 students surveyed by the Foundations for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Harvard received depressingly low scores on “Administrative Support,” “Comfort Expressing Ideas,” and “Tolerance Difference,” which measures the ability to allow liberal or conservative speakers on campus.
Nuclear conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War was avoided by a shared understanding of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). If unresolved quickly, the conflict between Harvard and the U.S. Government will not end well for either Harvard or the American public. Harvard seems unwilling to heal itself despite its educational importance to the nation. The University’s positions conflict with American law and the bonds that hold our society together.
After furnishing our nation with eight U.S. presidents and 49 Supreme Court Judges, is Harvard now incapable of providing us with “A Man for Our Times” to end this stalemate?
TW3
May 1, 2025
John Whitmore Jenkins, Harvard Business School, Class of ‘63
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