I was one of a few conservative professors at Harvard heres where the school went wrong

Harvard is in a fix.  The nation’s top university is under siege from the Trump administration for the heavily partisan diversity it has practiced for decades.Republicans have long been aware of the hostility that American universities show for them, but President Trump has led a policy reaction that could have occurred long ago.

His siege on Harvard is a squeeze by a much stronger government that holds the money against a weaker university that wants and needs its funding.  Harvard makes its case for government money by emphasizing the scientific cancer research it performs.This, they imply, is service to both parties that keeps Harvard independent while still deserving of support.Yet earlier Harvard, had gone so far as to renounce its independence.

In 2023, it appointed a president, Claudine Gay, who immediately declared that the old idea of an Ivory Tower was obsolete.Harvard would now act as a “part of society.” What is the difference?The Ivory Tower was an image, medieval like the university itself, of an institution made of a valuable material and grounded in society but towering above it. In this view, any university in America depends on America for its survival but does its best to rise above its politics.

Politics is argument, for example about welfare policies.As an Ivory Tower, the university tries to define the bigger, more abstract question of what is welfare. Policies are about society; abstract definitions come from the Ivory Tower.In abandoning the Ivory Tower Harvard was denying its independence.

How well that worked was shown in Rep.Elise Stefanik’s later trouncing of Claudine Gay.

The unfortunate Harvard president was humiliated and forced to resign.Here, society showed Harvard the harm and indignity that come when a university forgoes its independent devotion to the pursuit of truth and becomes a “part of society.”Harvard had long since lost its independence by allowing one party on the left to dominate all its parts and e...