Harvard faces backlash against push to hire conservative faculty
by Sean Salai · The Washington TimesHarvard University is facing backlash from academics and racial activists for soliciting $10 million gifts to hire conservative faculty for “viewpoint diversity,” according to recent reports.
President Alan M. Garber and Provost John F. Manning announced in April that they would raise several hundred million dollars to fund 20 to 30 new professorships across the Ivy League school’s existing departments.
The student-run Harvard Crimson reported last month that 47% of faculty it surveyed opposed the plan, and just 31% agreed with it. Roughly 69% of the same faculty self-identified as “somewhat” or “very” liberal, up from 63% of participants in the same survey last year.
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Campus reports and outside analysts have widely interpreted the campaign as a response to the Trump administration, which has probed the elite school for liberal bias and cut $2.2 billion of federal funding to the university in April 2025.
The university did not respond to an email seeking comment.
The Harvard Salient, an undergraduate conservative journal, noted last month that the Massachusetts school has also stopped sponsoring race-based graduation ceremonies and renamed its diversity, equity and inclusion office as “Community and Campus Life.”
Harvey Mansfield, a Harvard professor emeritus of government, has long lobbied for what he calls “affirmative action for conservatives” at the school.
He said during a Sept. 17 talk to conservative-leaning attorneys at Harvard Law School that “a certain coercion needs to be put to the faculty until this happens.”
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“I don’t think that the universities would have changed without his intervention, and especially without depriving the universities of large sums of money,” Mr. Mansfield said of President Trump, according to a Sept. 25 article in the Salient.
The professor, a right-leaning lightning rod at the campus for years, said Harvard’s Department of African and African American Studies does not employ a single Black conservative.
Some former Harvard instructors and alumni interviewed by The Washington Times acknowledged the school’s ideological imbalance, but pushed back on the administration’s plan to designate conservative professorships.
“The answer is not partisan quotas, but a credible commitment to intellectual openness and hiring excellent scholars across a genuinely broad range of perspectives,” said Daniel Schatz, a political scientist and former Harvard visiting scholar.
Dominique Padurano, founder and president of the college counseling company Crimson Coaching, graduated from Harvard in 1993. She noted it was “a community of liberals” and socialist professors at the time, but said an atmosphere of open debate prevented silencing “conservative voices.”
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“Even supposing that [silencing] takes place, how would the hiring of conservative faculty act as a countervailing force? Surely such hiring may inhibit viewpoint diversity rather than nurture it,” said Ms. Padurano, an adjunct professor of historical studies at the SUNY Empire State University.
Some racism scholars not only disagree with a push to endow conservative professorships but also dispute that Harvard should be called liberal.
“I find it a bit hollow when you consider the attacks that many Black students, faculty and staff at Harvard encounter to think that it is a bastion of progressive politics,” said Tyrone Howard, a UCLA education professor specializing in racial equity.
“The racial logics of Harvard are still real, and efforts to hire more conservative viewpoints would only contribute to the longstanding issues that have harmed people of color,” he said.
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Kwasi Konadu, a former African history professor at Colgate University, noted that just 463 out of more than 1,400 faculty members responded to the Crimson’s annual survey last month and only 292 completed it in full.
“These are liberal-minded people grading themselves,” Mr. Konadu said.
Omekongo Dibinga, a professor of intercultural communications affiliated with American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, called the university’s push for donations a “hypocritical DEI hire process for conservative professors.”
“This is all about Trump,” Mr. Dibinga said. “Harvard could have done this years ago. It would have been wrong then, too.”
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Harvard is not the first school to pursue conservative professors.
Peter Wood, president of the conservative National Association of Scholars, noted that the University of Colorado at Boulder hired its first visiting scholar in conservative thought and policy in 2013.
“The Colorado program surely does give students some access to ideas they would otherwise encounter only through the interpretations of those who reject those ideas,” said Mr. Wood, a former associate provost at Boston University. “I expect the situation at Harvard will be much the same.
However, he questioned how Harvard would identify and hire credible conservatives.
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A White House official expressed continued dissatisfaction with Harvard’s response to reports of unchecked antisemitism on campus.
“Harvard has rejected numerous offers from the administration to resolve their antisemitism issues,” the official said Thursday.
“Unless Harvard decides to come to the table, the Administration will continue pursuing all available legal avenues to enforce federal civil rights laws and protect all students on Harvard’s campus,” the official said,
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