Harvard and the Civic Contract

Privileges come with accountability to the public interest

In the last couple of weeks, the Trump administration and Harvard have come to blows once again. In the latest installment of this ongoing saga, Harvard decided to defy demands for information about foreign students. The administration responded by proclaiming that Harvard would be suspended from the student visa program.

Harvard sued, claiming that the institution has earned the opportunity to sponsor international students for U.S. student visas through its 70-year, unbroken Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification status. Further, Harvard argued that the crackdown from the Trump administration was “arbitrary and capricious” and in violation of the institution’s first amendment rights. A Boston federal court judge has for the time being blocked the government’s action.

The problem for the university is that sponsoring international students for visas is a privilege, not a right. This distinction is often made, sometimes inappropriately, but in this case, it fits perfectly because only institutions that have passed a private certification as “accredited” actually qualify.

This privilege granted through accreditation does not come without expectations. The Council for Higher Education and Accreditation lists a number of responsibilities that come with this status, and the very first one listed is that “accreditation is committed to the public interest, serving students, business and the public as well as higher education.”

Thus, it is not the case that Harvard or any other academic institution for that matter has a divine right to taxpayer money as well as federal government granted privileges. Rather, these benefits come with some expectation of fair dealing that is ultimately rooted in the nation’s interest. The Trump administration has in recent days taken aim at Columbia University’s accreditation status on these exact grounds.

Universities have lost a great deal of the public’s confidence in recent years. Over the last decade, largely bipartisan support for universities has cratered particularly among Republicans and Independents. According to Gallup, in 2015, 56% of Republicans and almost 50% of Independents had a “great deal/quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. By 2024, these figures fell to just 20% and 35%, respectively. Democrat support has fallen as well (i.e., from 68% to 56%), but still a majority of Democrats have high confidence in these institutions.

This is entirely the fault of educational institutions who have been completely unresponsive to the complaints of the broader public. In this same Gallup poll, 78% of those indicating they have “little” or “no” confidence in higher education cited the “political agendas” or the “wrong focus” of universities as the primary reasons for their distrust.

This almost certainly has to do with the deluge of stories over the last 10 years pertaining to university practices that prioritize the use of ideological litmus tests and racial and gender quotas above a campus culture rooted in academic freedom and meritocracy.

Unconvinced ideological bias has leaked into these institutions? Consider that 76% of qualified applicants for a position at UC Berkeley were excluded solely due to their responses in their “diversity statements.” In one dimension of the grading scale for the diversity statement, applicants received 1-2 out of 5 if they said they were open to all perspectives in the lab, but they failed to indicate that they would actively encourage diverse groups to participate.

Racial and gender quotas have also become ubiquitous. Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute last month discovered in a hiring guide for Harvard faculty searches that hiring managers were encouraged to “consider reading the applications of women and minorities first” – a practice which may violate civil rights law.

To be sure, many of these practices have not gone completely uncriticized by existing faculty. Harvard professor Steven Pinker in an op-ed in the New York Times strongly criticized the Trump administration’s actions but acknowledged that he and many of his colleagues have called out progressive excesses and their impact on free expression. In 2021, he and his colleagues founded an academic freedom council when biologist Carole Hooven was viciously attacked for daring to point out how biology defines male and female.

While Pinker certainly deserves credit for being among the small cadre of academics willing to call out issues within his home institution, nothing has significantly changed since 2021. In fact, some of Harvard’s own student body’s response to Hamas’s horrific attack on Israel on October 7^th, 2023, and its treatment of Jewish students are instructive in understanding just how far adrift these universities have continued to move.

The practices in question do have an impact, and they are in part a consequence of the ideological distribution of the professors on campus. A 2023 Harvard Crimson poll found that 77.1% of Harvard’s faculty of the arts and sciences identified as either “Liberal” or “Very Liberal” while just 2.9% identified as “Conservative” or “Very Conservative.”

Some may argue that conservatives simply select out of academia for temperamental reasons or due to their perceptions about how ideologically skewed academia is as a profession, further reinforcing these disparities. However, as professor of Criminology at the University of Cincinnati John Wright noted in a blog post for the Heterodox Academy, the sheer sizes of the disparities across disciplines indicate that much more is going on than just self-selection.

So, while many may criticize some of the specifics of the Trump administration’s crackdown, the fact is that none of this would have been necessary provided those academic institutions maintained the public’s trust by honoring their commitments to the entirety of the public interest, not just the niche interests of progressive faculty.

If America’s universities truly wish to reclaim the public trust, they must do more than simply paying lip service to “academic freedom.” They need transparent admissions and hiring practices, genuine engagement with dissenting viewpoints, and regular, public reporting on how they’re meeting their civic obligations. If the public is expected to provide billions of dollars to these institutions in the form of taxpayer dollars, then it is perfectly reasonable for the government to weigh in insofar as the universities flout their civic responsibilities.

Accreditation isn’t an entitlement. It’s a covenant with the broader society. Until higher-ed institutions honor that covenant, they cannot credibly claim the privileges and the enormous public subsidies that come with it.