By Dustin Howard
Harvard is in the news again, and for all the wrong reasons. On Friday, Harvard Law Professor Mark Tushnet came dangerously close to comparing Christian conservatives to Nazis in a blog post. Specifically, he said this of those who he proclaims “lost” the culture war: “Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown. (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.)”
The comparison speaks volumes about the tolerance of opposing views and the regard held for those who hold a traditional worldview.
Harvard is moving so far left so fast, that even supporters of Hillary Clinton are facing the sort of hostility Harvard conservatives have coped with for years, according to RedAlertPolitics . “At Harvard, admitting that #ImWithHer is nearly tantamount to boasting ‘Make America Great Again,’” said Sam Koppleman, a 20-year old government student who supports Hillary.”
Throw in 2014’s story of a Harvard Extension club’s abortive plans to hold a satanic “black mass” on campus, and you have to ask, how can they keep this up?
Harvard has long been thought of as the gold standard in American education. They currently retain some of that cachet, but as these things continue to happen, what parent will invest in the grim outlook in the Harvard prestige futures market?
At what point does the place become such a circus, that Americans decide that other institutions have comparable prestige, and considerably more sanity?
Harvard is already a populist whipping boy, and the subject of derision as the place where elites are taught to fundamentally misinterpret their surroundings before being pipelined to Washington, where such thinking is endemic.
I myself am enrolled in Harvard’s Extension program, and was attracted to the pursuit of an education that would stimulate my intellect and advance my career. Harvard has long dined out on this sort of cachet, but with every news story that documents their cognitive dissonance of claiming to stand for “Veritas” and at the same time attacking it, they hasten their own decline.
The University of Missouri, while never enjoying the level of esteem as Harvard, suffered a 20 percent enrollment decline, and bears witness to what can happen when you allow the leftists to turn your institution into an asylum. Veritas matters.
Dustin Howard is a contributing editor at Americans for Limited Government and is a student at Harvard Extension School.
