The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, last month quietly updated the demographic information it releases about its staff. The newspaper deserves some credit for its transparency about these dimensions of diversity, or the lack of it, which goes beyond what many other news organizations release. The actual data, however, is staggering. Here is a breakdown of political views of Crimson editors for the years:
In 2022, the most recent year for which data was released (in November of 2023), 77.7 percent of the Crimson editors described themselves as "progressive," "leftist," or "liberal," and only 1.8 percent described themselves as conservative. That's even worse, in terms of conservative representation, than in 2020 or 2021. The number of student Crimson editors describing themselves as politically moderate has also diminished sharply.
Relatedly, here are the 2022 numbers on religion among the Crimson editors:
All this may help to explain some of the anti-Israel hate coming from the Crimson, whose editorial board in 2022 endorsed a boycott of Israel. Some of the Crimson's current and former editors are also leaders of the anti-Israel groups that have been conducting disruptive protests on the Harvard campus. Other polling shows that the more conservative you are, the more you support Israel in the war against the Hamas terrorist group, and the more liberal you are, the less you support Israel (which is ironic, because Hamas is hardly "liberal" on issues such as women's rights or gay rights, but that's not the only way in which Jew-hatred or any other hatred is irrational).
The faculty, with a few notable exceptions, has roughly the same ideological tilt as the students. No wonder they are rallying around Claudine Gay.
Harvard can launch all the Intellectual Vitality Committees and Councils on Academic Freedom and Civil Discourse Initiatives they want, but until these Crimson graphs and the ones measuring overall student and faculty views start trending in different directions, it's going to be an uphill battle. When it came to Black and Hispanic presence on campus, Harvard fought a costly and losing legal battle to defend affirmative action in admissions against a lawsuit, arguing for what it said were "the educational benefits that flow from a student body that is diverse across many dimensions." I actually agree about the educational benefits of diversity "across many dimensions," which is part of why I find the Crimson ideological diversity pie chart troubling. It ends up being self-perpetuating, because the far left tends to value racial and economic diversity far more than it values religious or ideological diversity. It's too bad, because over the years some Crimson editors have contributed to America in significant ways on the center-right side of the political spectrum, including, for example, Grover Norquist and Senator Cotton.
Sometimes you hear, in response, well, conservative or religious students don't want to go to Harvard or work on the Crimson. That is what they used to say about other sorts of minorities before Harvard set out to recruit them.
