Harvard and Elitism in a Populist Age

Yes, it’s probably true, in an abstract sense, that Youngstown State matters more than Harvard. It certainly educates more undergraduates. And that public university in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley, “a rust belt of dead factories near the Pennsylvania border,” educates many more students of color and Pell Grant–eligible students, precisely the kinds of undergraduates who benefit most from a college degree.

But, like it or not, in terms of news media coverage, Harvard is the only game that counts.

A decade ago, a survey of 628 U.S.-born founders of tech firms found that only 8 percent graduated from an Ivy League institution. Altogether, 81 percent did not graduate from a top-tier private or public institution. But trying to persuade a budding entrepreneur not to go to Harvard is an uphill battle.

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Even though Harvard is in no sense representative of American higher education—in terms of finances, breadth of resources, selectivity, curricular range or student body composition—the university, nevertheless, receives outsize attention. The reasons aren’t a secret. These include the campus’s historical significance as the nation’s first college, its reputation and its breathtakingly large endowment.

Much as Cadillac was once regarded as the automobile industry’s “standard of excellence,” the very word “Harvard” has symbolic value as the supposed exemplar of academic distinction. In addition, Harvard has played a standard-setting role in educational policy and curricula, from the four-year bachelor’s degree to electives to general education requirements.

Equally important, coverage of Harvard highlights broader trends, challenges and debates in higher education, making it a focal point for discussions about the sector’s societal role and future direction. It’s no accident that Harvard has found itself at the center of debates about issues such as affirmative action, free speech on campus and the value of a liberal arts education.

Example 1: Derek Bok’s Attacking the Elites

Bok, Harvard’s longest-serving president and higher education’s last still-standing 1960s and early-1970s giant, has just published a book—his 20th, by my count—explaining “why Americans love to hate Harvard” and what elite universities like his should do about this.

Criticisms of Harvard and its peer institutions come from the left as well as the right. These range from the charge that elite universities perpetuate economic and social inequalities by primarily admitting students from affluent backgrounds to the insistence that they could do much more to increase racial and socioeconomic diversity. There is also the conservative critique that these institutions have a liberal ideological bias both in terms of the faculty’s political leanings and the content of the curriculum and that they have cultivated a culture of political correctness and an environment that stifles free speech and conservative viewpoints.

Some criticisms transcend ideological lines, such as concerns over a lack of transparency in admissions, the improper influence of wealth and donor preferences, and questions about whether these institutions are doing enough to address global challenges and contribute to societal equity.

Bok calls on the elites to push back, especially against the baseless claims that they “admit more students from families in the top 1 percent of incomes than they do from the bottom 50 percent” or that they have become hedge funds with a university attached.

He also argues that these universities need to correct flaws that are impossible to defend. To that end, they should eliminate admissions policies that favor legacies, the wealthy and connected—including early-decision programs—and even preferences for faculty, staff and athletes.

The elite campuses should also do much more to ensure that their students graduate with a deeper grounding in civics, ethics, moral reasoning and global understanding.

While skeptical of the charge that college students are being indoctrinated by liberal or radical professors, he does feel strongly that the elites should do more to promote viewpoint diversity. Steps in that direction would include hiring “conservatives as visiting professors or lecturers while also encouraging conservative students with ability to consider embarking on an academic career.” The elite campuses should also “initiate a discussion in their faculties to determine how to avoid teaching in ways that could be reasonably described as indoctrination.”

Much of his book might be read as an apologia—not an apology or expression of regret for past acts or decisions but rather a vigorous defense and justification for past actions and policies. Among the hot topics he discusses are admissions policies in a time of extreme inequality, managing student protests and demands for divestment and reparations, addressing the political and ideological skew at elite universities, and improving the quality of the education these institutions offer and navigating the swamp of intercollegiate athletics.

Regarding admissions, he offers an unequivocal defense of selective admission process designed to craft an entering class. While acknowledging that existing practices advantage applicants from more affluent families and expressing some doubts about the value of standardized admissions tests (unless used judiciously) and calling for institutions to do more to recruit and admit more low-income students, he argues forcefully that the admissions offices are those best equipped to measure applicants’ talents and accomplishments and to create a well-rounded class of entering students. At the same time, he vehemently rejects the more radical proposals that would establish an admissions lottery or quotas for low-income students as likely to dilute the quality and breadth of the student body.

He devotes many pages to explaining why he resisted student demands for divestment from companies operating in South Africa. He still has grave doubts about using the endowment as a weapon to further policy goals and believes that a more appropriate way to influence public policy is through research and professorial arguments publicly expressed. He fears that in today’s contentious political environment, the use of investments to promote preferred policies will only provoke retaliation from hostile politicians while having little effect on corporate behavior.

In terms of reparations for slavery, he regards affirmative action in recruitment, admissions and hiring and the promotion of research as appropriate forms of restitution. He’s pretty critical of the “sweeping assertions” made in a 2022 faculty report that asserted Harvard’s moral culpability for the private actions taken by faculty and trustees.

Some of his arguments are sure to raise hackles from critics. To take one example, near the book’s beginning, he offers a full-throated “justification for a system of higher education marked by such great inequality”: that there are “a few individuals, both students and adults, [who] have exceptional ability to produce lasting and important additions to knowledge or to make other significant contributions to society in later life.” He does acknowledge, however, that “the proposition that elite universities can know enough to choose the students most likely to lead is more problematic.”

Bok also doubles down on an argument that he has made in several earlier books: that perhaps the best way for elite institutions to improve the quality of the education they offer is to have a dedicated full-time teaching faculty. But he also favors other steps, including expanded voluntary pedagogical training, widely disseminating information about promising pedagogies and providing individual professors with extra time, funds and technical assistance to try new methods.

As for big-time intercollegiate athletics, he regards that as a financially unsustainable juggernaut that universities can no longer control and that can’t be reformed one rule at a time or by the actions of an individual campus. He favors making college athletics lower key, by dialing back on recruiting, raising academic standards for admitted athletes, making athletic schedules more compatible with the academic calendar, reducing the number of teams and reconstituting some as club sports.

Bok has thoughtful suggestions about how administrators at elite institutions can do a better job of balancing free speech and a welcoming, inclusive and supportive campus culture. The biggest problems facing elite institutions, in his view, include:

• The tendency of every segment of the university to organize and demand a say in any question that could affect their interests.
• The insatiable need to raise money, which inevitably requires compromises and concessions.
• The propensity of the legislatures, regulatory agencies and courts to regulate subjects long considered academic matters that could be resolved by the universities themselves.

The effect of these three trends is to distort or even paralyze institutional decision-making.

Whether or not you agree with Bok’s prescriptions, I think we can all share his conclusion: The failure of the elites to restore the trust and confidence of the public will have disastrous long-term consequences for the nation’s premier research universities and the nation they serve. The situation facing elite universities—from government—“is far more precarious than their leaders seem to recognize.”

Example 2: Aden Barton’s Harvard

Students at Harvard, we are told, are focused on themselves, on getting what they want out of college (the consulting gig, a good time) and, for the most part, they are not deeply and intellectually engaged.

That’s the conclusion of Aden Barton, a Harvard senior with a concentration in economics and a member of The Harvard Crimson’s editorial board. Barton, a frequent contributor to Harvard Magazine, is the author of many of the most provocative glimpses into the institution’s student body.

Just peruse some of his articles’ titles and you’ll see that he’s a heterodox thinker: “The Cost of Easy A’s,” “Average GPA, 1889–2022,” “How Harvard Careerism Killed the Classroom,” “From Harvard Yard to Wall Street” and “Want to Make the Most of Harvard? Be Yourself and Make Rich Friends.”

In an essay entitled “Increasing Financial Aid Is Not the Best Way to Make Harvard More Diverse,” he spotlights an institutional failure to target outreach to talented, high-achieving, low-income students at nonelite high schools and community colleges or through summer programs aimed at these prospective students.

His articles describe a campus culture of pre-professionalism and risk aversion. Among his findings:

• “As of 2022, more than 40 percent of working seniors go into either consulting or finance. That number jumps to 58 percent when you add in the technology sector.”
• “Only one-fifth of students come from the bottom 60 percent of the income spectrum.”
• “Instead of being a way to ‘chill’ or ‘get away from the academic stressors,’ as Dingman says clubs used to be, student organizations, such as Harvard College Consulting Group and Harvard Financial Analysts Club, increasingly function as pre-professional outlets.”
• He reports that grade inflation has been accompanied by grade compression, with most undergraduate grades now clustered between 3.8 and 4.0. He found that the percentage of Harvard freshmen who have received mental health counseling nearly tripled over the past decade.

One of his recent articles, “AWOL From Academics,” reports that the school’s undergraduates “devote nearly as much time collectively to extracurriculars, athletics and employment as to their classes.” Grade inflation is partly to blame: “Rising grades permit mediocre work to be scored highly, and students have reacted by scaling back academic effort,” with “one casualty of these easy A’s” a sharp decline in “the amount of reading students do.”

The other major contributor to a declining academic work ethic is student reliance on extracurriculars to brand themselves. He quotes Amanda Claybaugh, dean of undergraduate education: “Students feel the need to distinguish themselves outside the classroom because they are essentially indistinguishable inside the classroom.”

In another essay, “How Harvard Students Got So Stressed,” Barton argues that the “erstwhile pillars of college—self-discovery, exploration and growth—have given way to an anxious stasis in which students languish in their own fear of failure.” Many of his classmates are uninterested in learning or intrinsic fulfillment; their goal is to continue accumulating prestige and setting themselves up for career success. His conclusion:

Example 3: Sahil Handa’s ‘Harvard’s Big Mistake: It Keeps Telling Its Students They’re Special’

A former Harvard undergraduate, London-born Sahil Handa concentrated in social studies and philosophy and has subsequently worked for a number of start-ups. At his orientation, he was “welcomed as a member of the elite.” He says the message was “Look around at your fellow class members. Look at the future politicians, athletes, artists and activists. These are the people who are going to help you shape the world’s future. These are the gifted students who are joining you on this transformational journey.”

But he knew better. He’d been rejected by Cambridge and believed he’d been admitted because he had decent grades, wrote well and fit one of the admissions office boxes: “brown British humanities student who likes acting, dancing and drawing.”

It is his sense that “Harvard vaguely gestures toward greatness but doesn’t truly encourage it.” With words that echo William Deresiewicz’s, he writes, “To the extent that Harvard transforms its students, it transforms them into sheep-like, credential-obsessed robots.”

What he wishes the faculty would do is the one thing that is wholly within their power: ensure that “the classroom is a place of lively debate and free inquiry.” They should say emphatically,

But the reality is otherwise. As he explains, “the self-image that was imprinted on my Harvard class when we arrived has helped overwhelm many of my peers with anxiety.” He says,

Handa describes Harvard as “a massive helicopter parent—and, worse, it’s the annoying helicopter parent who can’t stop talking about how great the children are.” The students then absorb an elite self-image. The institution shouldn’t imply that the students are more talented than anyone else. Rather, it “should be maniacal in its insistence upon open inquiry, decide on a few specific experiences to make compulsory—an experience of vertigo, perhaps.”

One theme that runs through the Bok book and the Barton and Handa essays is disappointment. Disappointment that the institution that has shaped their identities isn’t what it purports to be. Sure, it prepares students for professional success. It certainly exposes undergraduates to diverse, smart, ambitious classmates. But it could do much more to nurture intellectual curiosity, ethics, global awareness, intellectuality, self-awareness and a commitment to service. More than that, it needs to engage undergraduates in robust and thoughtful debate.

To do that, it’s not enough to bring in outside speakers to provide a variety of perspectives or to create forums for dialogue or to sponsor more opportunities for students to engage with administrators and faculty. Sadly, the students rarely show up either in person or online.

Many faculty (and others) have this false sense that there’s this intellectual community trapped and chomping at the bit to dig deep … and quite frankly, I don’t see it. Sure, at an institution like MIT, students are all in on building solar cars, making cool apps and so on, and at Harvard, no doubt, someone is writing the next Rent or The Simpsons or solving huge medical mysteries. But this longed-for “community of scholarship” is a bit of misdirection or wishful thinking.

The best solution, applicable at every college and university that I’m familiar with, is to cultivate spaces—learning communities, research cohorts, magnet programs and maker spaces—where diverse students work together in a mutual process of discovery and experimentation. Leverage students’ passions, build on their obsessions. That’s the best and perhaps the only way to truly engage them and transform their lives.