Harvard's Right Has a Problem, and It Isn't Wokeness

Harvard’s conservatives are struggling.

Per The Crimson’s annual faculty survey, just nine percent of faculty respondents identified as somewhat or very conservative, and just over 10 percent of the class of 2025 identified as conservative or very conservative in The Crimson’s spring survey.

The national picture is similar. Despite the increasing popularity of national groups like Turning Point USA, nationwide surveys generally find that over 10 percent of faculty are conservative, and around 20 percent of college students identify as conservative. Those numbers raise an uncomfortable question about why conservative organizations on campus keep failing.

Many prominent national conservative figures have come to see higher education as an ideological enemy to be vanquished through Gramscian conflict. Activist Chris Rufo has built a career through attacking DEI initiatives at universities, while Vice President JD Vance once declared universities “very hostile institutions” entirely corrupted by left-wing ideology. They pin the decrepit state of the conservative movement on college campuses almost entirely on the discrimination and social ostracization caused by DEI and wokeness.

Indeed, there is something to be said for left-identitarian excesses in higher education, and on Harvard’s campus in particular. Left-wing cancel culture, through ideological litmus tests in hiring and promotion as well as public shaming campaigns against dissenters, created an academic environment hardly conducive to free expression and open inquiry. But it would be a mistake to assert that the left is solely to blame for the failures of the conservative project in higher education.

Take The Harvard Salient, for example. The magazine was originally founded in the early 1980s with a “moderate to conservative” point of view. The students who revived it in 2021 said they would solicit opinions from the political spectrum.

Only, the magazine was suspended by its own board of directors in October after it published material the board deemed “reprehensible, abusive, and demeaning.”

The Salient had earlier run an article by David F.X. Army '28 that included the line "Germany belongs to the Germans, France to the French, Britain to the British, America to the Americans," language that closely echoed a slogan used by Adolf Hitler in a 1939 address — a resemblance the magazine later said was unintentional.

But a Crimson investigation found that the magazine’s problems were not, in fact, confined to a single article: an unpublished issue included an appeal for mass executions, Salient writers repeatedly invoked racial slurs in an internal chat, and earlier drafts of Army’s piece featured swastikas and a Nazi slogan. Whoops.

Perhaps more importantly, the Salient’s board of directors — which includes some of the most notorious liberals of all time, such as professor Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 — wrote that what the Salient had published was “wholly inimical to the conservative principles for which the magazine stands.”

Another prominent conservative organization on campus, the John Adams Society, has also been the subject of recent controversy. According to a Crimson investigation, the conservative debating society, which in 2024 changed its motto from “Harvard’s premier undergraduate debate organization for political and moral philosophy” to the “premier organization for the reinvention of man at Harvard Square,” appeared to be systematically excluding women from its ranks, functionally becoming a single-sex organization in violation of College policy.

The left does not own this.

Both organizations have failed to contribute to a dynamic or constructive conservative movement on campus because they failed to draw a line to the right.

The Salient got shut down by its own board because it was taken over by leadership who were more interested in using Nazi rhetoric than persuading the campus of the virtues of the conservative perspective.

The John Adams Society seems to be actively discriminating against students on the basis of sex, leaving some right-leaning women on campus feeling “intellectually homeless.”

Both our campus and our country suffer from a lack of a meaningful, thriving right-of-center political coalition. But if conservatives diagnose that absence as the product of left-wing discrimination, their only response will be to fight the left. That is the theory now animating figures like Rufo and the Trump administration's Department of Education as they try to extort Harvard into a more ideologically friendly position.

It is also the wrong theory.

Nothing about Harvard's DEl bureaucracy compelled the Salient's editors to flirt with Nazi rhetoric. No progressive cabal forced the John Adams Society to quietly, effectively exclude women. These failures came from within — from an inability to police illiberalism, bad judgment, and self-sabotage in their own ranks.

You cannot bludgeon a healthy conservative movement into existence from Washington.

If conservatives want to be taken seriously on campus again, they will have to do the harder thing: draw lines, enforce standards, and rebuild a culture capable of persuasion rather than provocation. No amount of outside pressure can substitute for that.

Benjamin Isaac ’27, an Associate Editorial Editor, is a Government and Economics concentrator in Quincy House.