When Conservative Scholarship Belongs at Harvard

Harvard’s faculty doesn’t vote like America. So what?

At a recent panel discussion, Harvard faculty members considered whether the University had succeeded at promoting open inquiry. It seemingly became the core split of the event, with Economics professor Jason Furman ’92 arguing there was still room to improve. Furman claimed that his analysis of Expository Writing syllabi suggested that courses at Harvard did represent a range of viewpoints on given issues, yet the issues themselves tended to reflect liberal concerns.

This reflects that according to the Crimson’s 2026 survey of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, just about 7 percent of faculty respondents consider themselves conservative. In apparent response, Harvard has put forward the “Initiative to Advance Free Inquiry,” seeking to endow $10 million professorships dedicated to “viewpoint diversity.” Harvard itself has declined to frame it as a partisan balancing, but we believe it’s worth speaking against the worst case scenario.

Harvard should not hire conservatives merely to make its faculty more politically representative. But it should remove every barrier that might unfairly keep qualified conservative scholars from coming here.

We see two plausible explanations for conservatives’ scarcity among Harvard’s ranks. Conservatives may be underrepresented among scholars vying for jobs to begin with, leaving Harvard with a small pool to hire from. Or, qualified conservative scholars might avoid Harvard because they perceive its culture as politically hostile.

Academics, unsurprisingly, are not a representative sample of the country. Different political groups enter doctoral programs and pursue academic careers at different rates. A recent review of research on faculty political backgrounds found that the humanities and certain social sciences tend to lean further left than business and engineering.

So when measuring the skew of the FAS — a liberal arts faculty — it should hardly surprise us that the liberal arts turn out to be liberal.

The sorting accords with German sociologist Max Weber’s observation that even selecting a subject for study reflects judgments about which parts of the world merit attention. When scholars possess different values, they may naturally gravitate toward different questions and fields.

If a pipeline of preferences explains Harvard’s ideological imbalance, there is no injustice for the University to remedy.

More pressing than the University’s partisan head count is the growing political control of liberal-leaning faculty at other universities. Republican state governments are looking to control curricula, weaken tenure protections, and restrict what can be taught by professors.

Only the second explanation — that Harvard itself deters qualified conservative scholars — requires Harvard to change how it treats prospective faculty. We believe this possibility is serious enough to demand action.

It’s not unlikely that the University’s reputation has shaped the institution in the eyes of any conservative talent. Years of reports detailing student and faculty self-censorship, as well as low “free speech rankings,” have solidified a perception of Harvard as rigid and hostile to dissenting thought.

In this case, Harvard needlessly worsens academia’s ideological balance. Hence, Harvard should eliminate its reputation of hostility to conservatism.

There does exist unique intellectual goods to having conservative professors. We don’t think such goods are in such dire need that it’s worth undermining merit-based hiring to grant conservatives a preference. Pedagogically, Harvard students will be more than fine being taught by qualified professors of any political stripe.

But since said benefits exist, Harvard should help facilitate additional faculty hirings without lowering its scholarly standards or setting quotas. It can do so by identifying concrete academic needs within its departments whose topics are likely to be studied by conservatives — say, family structures in Economics.

To make itself more open to such intellectual heterodoxy, Harvard could also give it a physical home: an institute for pluralism, modeled on Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. This would offer a non-partisan center that accommodates the intellectual dimensions of conservatism.

Conservative scholars, for their part, have a role to play as well. They should not pass up Harvard for campuses where their views can go unchallenged. However uncomfortable it may be to encounter resistance as a minority opinion, such campuses are precisely where those opinions contribute the most.

Harvard cannot guarantee conservative scholars will choose to come here. It can build a culture they would call home.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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