A top doctor at the Harvard School of Public Health says the university is a cesspool of crackpot leftist activism that has “totally corrupted” the once-respected Ivy League school.
Omar Sultan Haque diagnosed the university in an interview with the City Journal’s Christopher Rufo. The conservative scribe has exposed one scandal after another there.
Haque’s grim assessment of a university for which he has toiled for nearly a quarter-century comes after last week’s damning report from Rufo. He revealed the university is still violating federal civil rights laws by discriminating against white men. Worse still, the university just lost all future federal funding, pursuant to a notice from Education Secretary Linda McMahon.
“Radical Left-wing Bias”
Haque is an epidemiologist at the school, with a medical degree from Harvard, a residency at Brown University, and two divinity degrees — one from Harvard, another from Yale.
Asked about his experience at the disgraced university and its “ideological landscape,” Haque confessed that he had “no dramatic cancellation, or intellectual persecution, or struggle session to report.”
But he quit teaching there last year “because of [the school’s] anti-truth-seeking culture, radical left-wing bias, racial and gender discrimination, and prevailing anti-intellectualism, which made continued participation a poor use of time,” he continued:
There are exceptions, but on the whole Harvard has strayed from its foundational mission of unbiased truth-seeking and has become ideologically driven, too often resembling a secular church or a partisan think tank. The university’s culture and practices prioritize ideological conformity over open inquiry and debate, suppressing dissenting viewpoints and compromising academic freedom. This shift undermines the core values of a secular university and poses a threat to the integrity of academia and broader society.
Nor did Haque spare Harvard’s mulish commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion — DEI. While the school has “changed the official name of its DEI office to use more nebulous euphemisms,” for all intents and purposes nothing has changed, he averred.
“DEI and ‘Diet DEI’ (a diluted form) have the same effects in practices, norms, and the larger culture of orthodoxy and taboo,” he said, but “Diet DEI is just more dishonest.”
While Harvard has scrapped “racially segregated graduations and required DEI loyalty oaths in one of its many schools,” the “larger culture of DEI is the problem,” he said:
Some tropes remain popular on campus that are legacies of left-wing racism, such as the idea that a person’s racial identity is central to one’s academic study; that people should be sorted into “oppressor” and “oppressed” groups by their immutable characteristics; that racism is specific to one race rather than a universal, sinful propensity in human nature; and that lowering academic or behavioral standards for certain racial groups is not happening (when advocates are confronted with evidence that it is happening, they argue that the practice is justified). These beliefs infect teaching, research, grading standards, hiring, promotions, campus debate, what is considered an acceptable topic for invited lectures, what projects get funded, and so on.
Still Discriminating
Haque verified Rufo’s brutal report last week that Harvard still discriminates against white men in admissions and hiring for faculty and administrators. Rufo obtained internal documents that Harvard’s DEI “machine” is always humming and systematically promoting minorities and women over white men.
Noting that applicants for admission or hiring are “sorted via a left-wing segregation filter,” Haque said a colleague at the law school “who served for years on the admissions committee flat-out admitted this to me recently.”
Thus, Harvard must “cover its tracks and hide admissions data and post-admissions performance metrics that predictably result from separate and unequal admissions standards,” he continued:
The eye-popping data on biases against Asians and whites in admissions have already been exposed [in the Supreme Court case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, SFFA]. A corporation with identical racist practices would have been sued out of existence decades ago; why the exception for a wealthy university? The data on faculty and staff hiring and promotions reveal even more obvious evidence of discrimination. Just examine whether people in the same positions are similarly accomplished. No need to call Sherlock Holmes.
With SFFA, I thought the discrimination would end. But after the ruling, I saw Harvard’s first essay prompt for applicants to the university: “Harvard has long recognized the importance of enrolling a diverse student body. How will the life experiences that shape who you are today enable you to contribute to Harvard?”
That question, he said, is a “sneaky, but technically legal, escape hatch” from the SCOTUS decision.
Faculty surveys show that Harvard is “more ideologically homogeneous” than even religious or conservative schools such as Hillsdale College, Haque said. Harvard is “too narrow-minded in scholarship, myopic, intolerant, and anti-intellectual”:
It favors progressive viewpoints to the detriment of open inquiry, especially on social, moral, and political topics in teaching and research. Courses, exams, research, trainings, grants, and campus life too often become predictable exercises in mouthing univariate explanations and dogmatic platitudes. Harvard’s institutional culture increasingly functions as a combined finishing school and seminary, not for a traditional religion, but for the progressive Left and the Democratic Party. It’s a totally corrupted institution.
Haque said Harvard mistakenly believes it can continue policies that blatantly trespass civil rights laws. Indeed, he said, the university will “sink the ship” to keep those policies.
He closed by calling Harvard the ideological personification of the late billionaire recluse, Howard Hughes:
Harvard is a non-sectarian university only in name. It has been captured and subverted: from syllabi to exams, from admissions to graduation, from hiring to promotion. Harvard remains in denial of its own radicalism. It sneers and looks down on most of America and on American values like color-blind equality, meritocracy, free speech, hard work, and individual responsibility. Today, Harvard resembles an aging billionaire secluded in his mansion, consumed by narrow moral obsessions, clutching his treasures, disconnected from a world he scorns.
Whites Need Not Apply
Last week, using internal documents, Rufo revealed that the university deliberately discriminated against white men when hiring for faculty and administrators.
Official policy is to “move white men to the back of the reading pile,” he wrote on X.
“The university counsels that committee chairs should ‘continually monitor’ the racial composition of the candidate list and, as they narrow it down, ‘attend to all women and minorities on the long list,’” Rufo wrote:
Harvard deliberately factors race into the hiring process. The university gives committee chairs privileged access to “self-identified demographic data, including gender, race, and ethnicity” and encourages chairs to “use this information to encourage diversity in the applicant pool, long list, and short list.” Harvard admits that some of its hiring programs have explicit “placement goals” for women and minorities — which, despite the university’s denial, function as a soft quota.
On May 5, Education Secretary Linda McMahon wrote to Harvard chief Alan Garber to say the university would not receive federal funding in the future. Harvard “continues to engage in ugly racism in its undergraduate and graduate schools,” she said.
McMahon told Garber that the university could spend its own money, notably its $53 billion endowment.
