It is true enough that the Harvard faculty is "liberal" in exactly the way The New York Times is "liberal," as
its Public Editor recently informed us: namely, on a range of social issues, it ranges towards the more tolerant and libertarian, and away from the fearful, moralizing, and authoritarian.
Put aside this pleasant, tolerant "liberalism"--whose only real opposition comes from the Taliban, foreign and homegrown--and the suggestion that Harvard is a "left-wing" institution is laughable.
*Who is the most recent "star" appointment to the Harvard faculty to garner national media attention? Historian
Niail "the U.S. really ought to kill more aggressively in Iraq" Ferguson. What was Harvard Government's main recruiting effort last year? To land conservative political theorist Thomas Pangle from the University of Toronto, heir to the Straussian throne (as it happens, he landed in Austin instead). A reporter from the Chronicle of Higher Ed called me recently for some background information on an impending announcement by Harvard Law School touting the hiring of two conservative legal scholars.
*Recently in the New York Times spotlight from Harvard is the apologist for torture and the Nazi doctrine of preventive war Michael Ignatieff--by the way, he directs a Center for Human Rights Policy at left-wing Harvard--who is so far to the right that even the rather conservative Ronald Steel justifiably concluded
a recent review of Mr. Ignatieff's book as follows: "In concocting a formula for a little evil lite to combat the true evildoers, Michael Ignatieff has not provided, as his subtitle states, a code of 'political ethics in an age of terror' but rather an elegantly packaged manual of national self-justification." But that, of course, is a longstanding Harvard tradition, going back to all the bright Harvard boys who ran the invasion and subsequent slaughter in Vietnam during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, and continuing right to the present with Samuel Huntington, political "scientist," whose blood-soaked career of apologetics for imperialist violence (and,
more recently, dire warnings about the Hispanic threat to America's way of life) led the National Academy of Sciences to balk at electing him to membership, usually a birthright for Harvard faculty. (It appears the real scientists noticed the difference between an empirical discipline and right-wing Lysenkoism.)
*The leftist economists from Harvard were purged more than a generation ago, and had to migrate to U Mass/Amherst, where they can no longer expect New York Times reporters to call them on a regular basis for their "expertise." ("Harvard," like "Yale" and "Princeton," and, to a lesser extent, "University of Chicago" and "Columbia," is an imprimatur of legitimacy in the New York Times, quite independent of whether the scholar in question is regarded by experts as a two-bit ass-kisser who belongs in the annals of legendary tenure mistakes, or is actually someone with a brain in his head.) Now the Harvard Economics Department supplies the Bush Administration with its chief apologist for its screwball economic policies, Gregory Mankiw, just as it supplied the Reagan Administration with its (Martin Feldstein).
*Harvard Law School has been home since the 1970s to the infantile,
anti-Marxist leftism of the Critical Legal Studies movement (the folks who brought us the powerful political program, "Don't laugh at jokes by the Cravath partners") and, more recently, that quintessentially bourgeois political event, identity politics. Neither have amounted to anything beyond the legal academy, and even there, the first is moribund, the second marginalized. Far more influential have been HLS faculty member, Mary Ann Glendon, leading spokeswoman for social conservativism in the Catholic tradition; that stalwart apologist for Republican legal mischief, Charles Fried; and, of course,
the "Professor of Torture," Alan Dershowitz (who also runs a side career as an extreme Zionist who might even make Ariel Sharon blush).
Many of the major figures in the largely right-wing law-and-economics movement are also based at Harvard Law School. Indeed, the "major" scholarly opus to emerge from HLS of late, Kaplow and Shavell's, Fairness versus Welfare (published, of course, by Harvard University Press), "argues" (this is only a very slight simplification) that fairness should never be a factor in social policy because sometimes doing what is fair would not be pareto optimal. (It will be a topic of future research by sociologists of economics to figure out how it is folks with high IQs could even think this is an argument.)
It would be wonderful, to be sure, if the nation's most prestigious institution of higher education were a real repository of critical thought. There are, to be sure, some genuine intellectuals of the left pursuing their work at Harvard, but the point is they are few and far between. Only in the reactionary public culture of the United States could one think that the dominance at Harvard of pleasant, tolerant liberalism, noted at the start, could mark Harvard as a "left-wing" institution. Alas, in no nation in the history of the world has it ever been the case that the centers of academic power were generally hospitable (except in isolated corners) to intellectual currents at odds with the needs of the real centers of political and economic power in that society. Harvard, in that respect, is no different, the myth of its leftism notwithstanding.
