Harvard University appears in The Bob Zadek Show chiefly as a point of reference — an alma mater, an employer, and a campus where questions about speech, ideology and the purpose of education are argued. The excerpts do not describe the university’s founding, endowment, governance or curriculum. They invoke it as evidence in broader libertarian arguments about the academy, the legal profession and the private sector.
Harvard as credential and as target
Bob Zadek introduces Ben Shapiro as a graduate of UCLA, which he entered at the age of 16, and of Harvard Law School, noting that at 17 Shapiro was the youngest nationally syndicated columnist in the United States Hollywood: Obama’s Ministry of Propaganda (2011). In a later episode Bob describes John McGinnis as a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, editor of the Harvard Law Review, and now a teacher of con law at Northwestern University, framing that background as the source of McGinnis’s insight into the academy and how it is populated Here Comes the Storm (2019). Bob tells McGinnis that much has been written about the fact that roughly 75% or 80% of the academy — informal calculations, he says — are registered Democrats or tend to be Democratic-leaning, and that teaching at the college level therefore gives students a biased view of American history, politics and economics.
Harvard also supplies the show’s economist. In a clip played on the program, Jeff Miron identifies himself as Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Economics at Harvard University and explains what it means to be a libertarian: respect for individual decisions and for people’s ability to decide for themselves what is in their own interest, and a huge suspicion of government’s ability to make people, the economy or society better by coercing individuals America’s Student Loan Problem (2012). Miron says the libertarian view does not align well with standard Republican or standard Democratic views, that libertarians are against drug prohibition, tolerant of gay marriage and against severe restrictions on abortion, and that liberals and conservatives are at some level the same in being authoritarians who want to impose their views on how people should run their lives.
The academy and the private sector
Matt Welch, editor-in-chief of Reason Magazine, tells Bob that commencement remarks at law schools — he cites addresses by Barack and Michelle Obama over the years, Michelle more so than Barack — tell graduating classes from Harvard, usually super high-charged, powered type of people, that they can do the whole corporate thing but that it is a more meaningful life not to sell out and to work for public service A Libertarian Plan (2010). Welch says he does not mean to single out Obama, calling John Sidney McCain III the biggest single peddler of this line of talk on American campuses over the last 15 years, and says it is understood from McCain, who has never worked in the private sector either, that involvement in the private muckety-muck is vaguely disreputable. Welch adds that the majority of people who work on Capitol Hill are lawyers, and that Washington is a town filled with lawyers, a concentration he calls a specific mindset and worldview.
Freshman pledges and student life bureaucracies
Harvey Silverglate describes an episode at Harvard in which freshmen were asked to sign a written pledge pledging themselves to diversity and multiculturalism — buzzwords he calls very controversial — and says that only because light was put on the matter did the Dean of Freshmen back down and cancel the program of asking students to sign Is Your Alma Mater a Soviet Gulag? (2011). Silverglate calls it a political pledge, like a loyalty oath to a certain political ideology. The surrounding discussion concerns what he describes as expanding student life bureaucracies: in the current economic downturn, he says, there has been a substantial decrease in the number of faculty members taken on but an equally substantial increase in the number of deans, assistant deans and assistant associate deans, mostly in the student life arena, because they have taken it upon themselves to train students into certain social, political and philosophical beliefs. Silverglate argues that university boards and trustees, who have ultimate authority but no idea what is going on, must visit campuses, talk to students and to people at FIRE, and insist on dismantling these bureaucracies.
Free speech at a private university
Joe Cohn explains that advocacy at private institutions of higher education, which are not government actors, rests not on constitutional protections but on contract law: if you apply to go to school at Harvard, a private institution, and Harvard promises you when you apply that you will have free speech rights, but does not live up to those promises, the courts have been willing to say the school breached its contract with you and enforce those rights in that way Joe Cohn on Title IX and Due Process on Campus (2022). Bob responds that he had wondered how one would bring a cause of action against a private institution that can basically do what it wants, and calls the breach-of-contract theory brilliant, giving a perfect tool where the adverse party is a private college rather than a state-owned university. Cohn also notes a trend on college campuses over the last six or seven years of more campaigns for censorship led by fellow students, and says that historically students themselves had been the leaders in fighting for free speech.
Harvard as a benchmark
Two guests use Harvard as a measure of something else. C. Bradley Thompson tells Bob that he read a horrible book on the Declaration of Independence by a Harvard professor that so deeply offended him that he decided he had to write his own book on the Declaration, which broadened into America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It C. Bradley Thompson on America’s Revolutionary Mind (2019). Bob closes that interview by noting that Thompson directs the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism and that Thompson told him the Institute’s admission rate is lower than Harvard’s, as it should be. In the earlier episode, Bob’s own framing of capitalism invokes the image of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the idea that to harness free markets is to destroy them — a monologue Welch agrees with but that belongs to Bob A Libertarian Plan (2010).
Across episodes: the excerpts show no development
Harvard is touched on in six episodes spanning 2010 to 2022 — A Libertarian Plan (2010), Hollywood: Obama’s Ministry of Propaganda (2011), Is Your Alma Mater a Soviet Gulag? (2011), America’s Student Loan Problem (2012), Here Comes the Storm (2019), C. Bradley Thompson on America’s Revolutionary Mind (2019), and Joe Cohn on Title IX and Due Process on Campus (2022) — but the excerpts show no development of a single argument about the university across them. Each appearance serves a different episode’s theme: public service rhetoric, campus speech, student loans, the political composition of the academy, the Declaration, and Title IX due process. No guest responds to another’s claim about Harvard, and no position advanced in one episode is revisited or revised in a later one.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state when Harvard was founded, where it is located, how it is governed, or what it teaches; they name no president, no school within the university other than the Law School, and no tuition figure. They do not report what any Harvard policy provides, what the freshman pledge said, or how the Dean of Freshmen’s decision was received. They do not say what became of the breach-of-contract theory Cohn describes or identify which courts adopted it. The excerpts also break off mid-conversation in several episodes, so whatever followed those points is not available here.
Guests and episodes
1 appearances by 1 guests, 2023–2023.
- Alan Dershowitz (Civil liberties attorney and Harvard Law professor) — Confronting the ‘Cancelists’ with Alan Dershowitz (2023) — Alan Dershowitz on Cancel Culture and Neutral Principles.