The Day Harvard Told the Truth ?

Putting the Higher Back in Higher Education

Once upon a time there was a book called The Day America Told the Truth, and I was a young writer with a 6hr layover in Boston. I was writing for a Christian denominational magazine called CLCL (Changing Leaders, Changing Lives), and I got it in my head to hop on a train, wander around Harvard, and ask students and faculty questions about spiritual truth. After all, Harvard had the word Veritas on their crest, and had originally been founded in 1642 to train Christian ministers for a life of service. Their mission statement was: “ Everyone shall consider as the main end of his life and studies, to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life.” What I found, all those years ago, was a student body and faculty that had wandered very far from the Puritan theology of their ancestors. They were partially formed post-moderns, haunted by a Judeo-Christian worldview that they couldn’t quite shake off. They were Gen X, but the “X” was “chi” in greek and often used as a symbol for Christ. Even in their rebellion, He was their point of reference. My interviews eventually became an article called The Day Harvard Told the Truth.

Fast forward to Dec of 2023 and the congressional hearing where the president of Harvard , Claudine Gay, does not have the moral clarity to condemn calls for genocide on campus. She is subsequently backed by much of the Harvard community before finally stepping down in light of 50ish instances of plagiarism, which apparently is way worse than being soft on calls for genocide in academia. In any case, it is obvious that Harvard has moved a long way down the road of post-modernism. No longer haunted by the Judeo-Christian worldview, or the ghost of all those Puritan pastor presidents, Harvard is less about the quest for Veritas, and more of a factory for Falsitas. That is a fancy way of saying the Ivy League is of the poison variety, that Christ is no longer in the picture, and everyone has to save themselves. Once the destination of some of the sharpest minds in the country, it is now the darling of the dull DEI set. Depending on which brand of social-marxism they subscribe to, they boil all the complex issues of the world down to one very simplistic solution. No matter the question, you can only choose one answer: sexism, racism, zionism, colonialism, or environmental destruction. In this worldview there is no ultimate veritas to discover, only potencia to be wielded. Or as one AP headline put it: “Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism.” Did you know that plagiarism is now a right-wing weapon ? The Harvard student guidebook states that plagiarists “ will be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including requirements to withdraw from the College.” The powers that be tried to use terms like duplicate language to skirt around the issue, but everyone saw through the euphemism. The mainstream media ran interference for Gay, calling the holding of the president to the same standard as students an “attack” on her as a woman and a person of color. They had lots of back up. Shall we review the usual suspects ?

Ibram X Kendi blames “racists mobs” for Gay’s resignation, and says that the plagiarism issue wouldn’t have been a problem if she was white. I guess he missed the resignation of Liz Magill from UPenn. She didn't have to commit plagiarism. She was forced out over her genocide answer alone, and yes, she is white. Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the 1619 Project, which interprets all of American history in terms of racism, predictably sees this as another in a long line of racial injustices. The always-ready-to-protest Al Sharpton said Gay was being used as a “scapegoat” in a right-wing attack on DEI. He considers it “ an attack on every black woman in this country.” He and his crew chanted: “When DEI is under attack, what do we do ? We fight back!” in front of Bill Ackerman’s office. Ackerman is a vocal critic of both Gay and DEI, believing she is a “diversity hire,” and that a system of meritocracy needs to be re-established in education. His wife, Neri Oxman, is in a bit of plagiarism trouble herself. When you cast the first stone it is essential to make sure it isn’t shaped like a boomerang, even if you are a major donor. Marc Lamont Hill, who has called for Harvard to pay reparations for the sins of its past, insists that its next president “must be a black woman.” Gay herself seemed to agreed with the overall racist-sexist narrative, saying: “ I will deny demagogues the opportunity to further weaponize my presidency in their campaign to undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth.” It should be noted here that she remains a professor at the university, pulling in a $900,000 a year salary. And although she is “Someone who believes a daughter of Haitian immigrants has something to offer the nation’s oldest university,” giving the impression that she comes from humble beginnings, the reality is that she comes from a wealthy family who could afford to send their daughter to the elite Phillip’s Exeter Academy boarding school in America, and what she offered the university is what New York Times columnist Bret Stephens calls “ the social justice model of higher education.” Obviously not a DEI fan, he says of universities: “ their central purpose is to identify and nuture and liberate the best minds, not to engineer social utopias.” Jay Green, speaking on behalf of the Center for Educational Policy at the Heritage Foundation, echoes this sentiment: “ This is only the very first steps on a very long road to recovery or returning to higher education its true purpose, which is truth seeking.” As far as excellence, openness, independence, and truth goes, Greg Lukinoff of FIRE says: “The mass bureaucratization of universities has been disastrous for free speech and academic freedom on campus.” In very Orwellian fashion, diversity looks very uniform, equity may sound like it creates an equal playing field, but not really, and inclusion is exclusionary if you are “ white-adjacent,” like the Asian students who don’t make the Ivy League cut each year simply because there are too many of them who are too academically successful. DEI is essentially racism and sexism flowing in the opposite direction, which is understandable, but far below MLK’s dream of a society where people are judged by content of character not color of skin, and by skills, not sex. Sociologist Jonathan Haidt calls it “ common enemy identity politics” and sees it as an essential ingredient in the rise of anti-semitism on campuses. He advocates for what he calls “ common humanity identity politics” as a solution. This would be much closer to the philosophy of MLK and the original civil rights movement.

Before someone starts checking my writing for plagiarism, I want to go on record and say I steal all my best stuff from Jesus and His close associates. I’m more of a pracademic than an academic, and spent forty years teaching at a Bible College, which according to the warnings of my secular professors when I took the job was “academic suicide.” Not very prestigious, and definitely not a six figure salary. The kind of place Harvard began as, not ended up as. With all due respect to scholars much smarter than myself, looking to the left and right for truth can only get you so far. We need to look up. On the original Harvard shield it said: “ For Christ and Church.” The three books on which VE RI TAS is written originally stood for the Old and New Testaments, plus the truth still to be written while waiting for the Second Coming. Even the orientation of the books themselves had meaning. Two were oriented up, signifying the quest for knowledge, but one was oriented downwards, signifying revelation. God was in the mix. Was there racism and sexism present in the history of Harvard ? Definitely. And I am not advocating a return to those things. But there was something else present that had a positive and tempering influence on society. It was faith in Truth personified, with a capitol J, as in Jesus, as in: “ I am the way, the truth, and the life.” (Jn 14:6) If there was not an ultimate source of Truth, Claudine Gay and the DEI she has championed would make sense. When we abandon all external reference points for truth, anything above the self or the moment (ie. context), then all intellectual claims become mere contests of will. Whoever asserts their reality longest and loudest wins. We get stuck in the oppressor-oppressed/enternal-conflict paradigm. Whether or not the president of Harvard lifted some phrasing and published it in some obscure academic journal matters little to me. But since universities are upstream from culture, whether of not the future leaders of the country believe there actually is objective truth and a right and wrong way to live, matters very much. Otherwise we end up where we are now, summarized nicely in this American Football song:

I’ve been so lost for so long/Every street’s a dead end/ Every sign points behind me/ If you need me, don’t/ You can’t trust a man/Who can’t find his way home/ My impaired intuition/Is telling me to just give in…

As much as I love midwest-emo, we can’t just give in and become nihilistic. The chaos we are currently seeing in culture is what happens when we get so lost for so long. Leaving conjecture about FBI involvement and sheer quantity aside, the only qualitative difference between the BLM riots and the Jan 6 rebellion was the address of what was being trashed. It is what happens when the moral compass of both left and right swings so far south that it is in banana-republic territory. Beyond buildings and bodies, what also gets destroyed in these clashes is civility. Civility is the ability to sit down and seek a higher perspective. Once that disappears, all sides see their violence as “mostly peaceful,” while the other side are “nazis” who endanger democracy. They both say they want justice, but any pursuit of justice without Jesus become just us, and we have a pretty poor track record of telling the truth to ourselves, let alone others. We are all plagiarists, rioters, and rebels at heart, and prone to confirmation-bias. Jelly Roll is right. It turns out we need saving not just from our enemies, but from ourselves. So what I am advocating is putting the higher back in higher education (insert college dope-smoking joke here). All “ologies” are branches of theology. If you can’t handle theo, and have to call God the Universe, fine. As long as we admit there is an objective, universal Truth out there somewhere to be discovered and aligned with, at least we are pointed in the same direction. Surely there are some common core-value we can all agree on. In The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt quotes Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: “ There is a moral dualism that sees good and evil as instincts within us between which we must choose. But there is also what I call a pathological dualism that sees humanity as radically divided into the unimpeachably good and the irredeemably bad. You are either one or the other.” Pathological dualism creates a kind of Hatfields vs McCoys cycle of accusation and retaliation. Nobody wins. There is something incredibly healthy about recognizing, as Solzhenitsyn did, that “ the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart— and through all human hearts.” This allows us to see our own faults and give others grace with theirs. It doesn’t mean we can’t disagree (even strongly), but our heart attitude should always be there but for the grace of God go I. Jesus was full of both “grace and truth ” (Jn 1:14) and “grace and truth came” through Him to us (Jn 1:17). He is not only our example in this kind of balance, He can empower us to live it as well.

Jesus is called “Teacher” forty five times in the New Testament. He said to his students: “ You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am” (Jn 13:13) He knew a thing or two about education. To quote Indian Bishop Lalachan Abraham: “ Christ taught the highest truths that were ever taught. He promoted the purest ideals that were ever presented. He gave the greatest wisdom that men every heard. His lessons, if followed, will make people holy. His spiritual insights, if applied, will make for a happy and healthier person on the inside and a better person to be around on the outside. Jesus taught us everything we need to know to live a good life. There is no teacher in the history of the world that has come close to Jesus in power, purity, practicality, and purpose. His example was the greatest example. His impact was the greatest impact. Jesus was not just a teacher, He was the Teacher.” Sometimes thing come full circle. Perhaps Harvard needs to get back to where it started. The Universe has a name. Maybe Jesus is calling higher eduction back to something higher, and that higher thing is Himself.