Last year, on a trip to Harvard Business School, my daughter and I met with the professor of an endowed chair in a major subject area, about which I had become informed over the past fifteen years. I wished to discuss with him how Harvard’s curriculum is addressing these issues for American corporations.
To my surprise, this chaired HBS professor had uneven knowledge of his subject, especially the historical background of the issues. This professor fails to grasp the cost/benefit/downside of the positions being taught to their graduate-level students who will be taking jobs in many of America’s major corporations. When I referenced a major research piece on his subject in the Wall Street Journal, he dismissed WSJ as a source of ‘disinformation’.
Ideology from across the Charles River has apparently also now infected the Business School. When I attended HBS, all views could be presented in the wide-open discussion of the Harvard Case Studies. Professors were masters of their subjects. What has changed?
Our universities have traditionally supplied students to meet the demand for graduates created within our nation’s economy and culture. Increasingly, our elite universities are creating new ideologies that require new demand to supply graduates with these skills throughout our society. New university departments and course studies enroll students to perpetuate their ideologies. Therefore, instead of being a supplier of what society demands to operate efficiently, our elite universities are creating demands for our society to implement with their new ideologically trained graduates. The normal supply/demand patterns of our economy have been reversed!
The most visible and politically controversial of these university-promoted ideologies has been Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). DEI was heavily implemented in university hiring, student acceptances, and staff positions. Non-profit organizations, governmental agencies, and major corporations soon established DEI departments that attracted recent university graduates. These were newly created overhead positions that became a drain on productivity. Productivity was also compromised because hiring on a DEI basis is the antithesis of choosing employees based on meritocracy. Grade inflation to accommodate DEI students further added to the nation’s loss of productivity.
Along with DEI ideology, universities created ‘Study ‘departments for Blacks, Women, Indigenous Peoples, and every associated victim group that could be identified, but for which their graduates found little useful employment in these subjects, with no useful application outside of an academic environment. In taking portions of our manpower from productive areas of our economy, this is another drain on our nation’s vitality.
Academia became an early supporter of the man-made global warming phobia, whose full implementation of NET ZERO 50 carbon emissions would have destabilized the Western economies. Continuation of that Biden Administration’s aggressive industrial policy would have transferred an unhealthy economic advantage and American world leadership to an adversarial Communist China. When billions of federal research grants became available, universities and their research professors became instant believers, as they lined up at the federal and other non-profit organization pay windows to pocket the free money.
In 2023, Harvard eagerly accepted $200 million from a Hong Kong billionaire to set up an institute on its campus to encourage NET ZERO 50 programs throughout American industry. In 2024, all Harvard departments and university branches joined in a week-long seminar that brought together activists from academia, government, and industry to promote the green agenda sponsored at Harvard with Chinese funding. Graduates indoctrinated at Harvard Business School would carry these messages and occupy positions in the corporate world to implement them universally. Graduates from the other Harvard schools and departments would carry them out into government and the like-minded non-profit organizations.
These are just two examples of our young people being overeducated, often with multiple graduate degrees, for careers that society will have little or no use for their services once their ideological fallacies and misinformation are exposed. Many of these young people will be burdened with the high educational repayment costs with no visible means of repayment. Many marriages will not occur, and many families will not be formed. Many lives will be unfulfilled. Underemployment will develop, and our nation’s productivity and prosperity will decline.
It is no wonder the current Generation Z of young adults, shaped by the digital age, climate anxiety, a shifting financial landscape, and COVID-19, are prone to anxiety and societal stress. Is anyone in Cambridge listening? When I was there last year, no one seemed to be!
TW3
October 23, 2025
John Whitmore Jenkins
