ZadekpediaHarvard appears in these episodes chiefly as a reference point — the elite university invoked to illustrate claims about the academy, about elite opinion, and about the legal status of private institutions.
Harvard as a symbol of elite opinion
In a discussion of libertarianism and the private sector, Matt Welch cites commencement addresses at Harvard as an example of the message that graduates should choose public service over corporate work. Welch says such speakers tell the graduating class, described as high-powered people, that it is a more meaningful life not to sell out, and he names Barack and Michelle Obama as having given such addresses, adding that he does not mean to single out Obama and that John Sidney McCain III has been the biggest single peddler of this line of talk on American campuses over the last 15 years A Libertarian Plan (2010). Welch’s broader argument is that people who have never worked in the private sector treat private enterprise as vaguely disreputable.
Harvard also figures in Bob Zadek’s framing of the academy’s political composition. Introducing John McGinnis, Zadek notes that McGinnis is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, was editor of the Harvard Law Review, and now teaches con law at Northwestern University. Zadek then raises the claim that roughly 75% or 80% of the academy, by informal calculations, are registered Democrats or Democratic-leaning, and argues that teaching at the college level gives students a biased view of American history, politics and economics Here Comes the Storm (2019). The figure is Zadek’s, offered as an informal calculation, not a finding the guest supplies.
Student life, training and the diversity pledge
Harvey Silverglate describes an expansion of student life bureaucracies — deans, assistant deans and assistant associate deans — during an economic downturn in which faculty hiring decreased. He says these administrators have taken it upon themselves to train students into certain social, political and philosophical beliefs, and that this should be the subject of education rather than training Is Your Alma Mater a Soviet Gulag? (2011). Silverglate then gives Harvard as a specific instance: a few weeks earlier, freshmen were asked to sign a written pledge pledging themselves to diversity and multiculturalism, which he calls buzzwords and a political pledge, likening it to a loyalty oath to a certain political ideology. He says that only because light was put on the program did the Dean of Freshmen back down and cancel it.
Private status and the enforcement of speech rights
Joe Cohn distinguishes public from private institutions of higher education. At public institutions, he says, the university and its employees are government actors, so expelling someone for protected speech or punishing them without due process under another charge is government action implicating civil liberties Do you know your rights? (2022). At private institutions, which are not government actors, Cohn says courts have for years protected concepts like academic freedom and free speech not on constitutional grounds but through contract law. He gives Harvard as the example: if Harvard promises applicants free speech rights and does not live up to those promises, courts have been willing to say the university breached its contract and enforce the rights that way. Bob Zadek responds that this breach-of-contract theory struck him as brilliant, giving a tool where the adverse party is a private college rather than a state-owned one.
Cohn also notes a trend on college campuses over roughly six or seven years of campaigns for censorship led by fellow students, appealing to administrators to silence adversaries — a shift from students historically leading fights for free speech.
Harvard as a foil and a benchmark
Two further mentions treat Harvard as a standard against which other institutions are measured. Ben Shapiro is introduced as a graduate of UCLA, which he entered at the age of 16, and of Harvard Law School; the introduction is Bob Zadek’s, and the surrounding discussion concerns Shapiro’s book on television and left-wing influence, not Harvard Hollywood: Obama’s Ministry of Propaganda (2011). In a closing exchange, Bob Zadek notes that C. Bradley 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 C. Bradley Thompson on America’s Revolutionary Mind (2019). Thompson’s own account of his motivation concerns reading a book on the Declaration of Independence by a Harvard professor that offended him so deeply he decided to write his own book on the subject.
Across episodes
The 2010 episode uses Harvard commencement rhetoric as an example of anti-market sentiment; the 2011 episodes use Harvard for a freshman diversity pledge and as a biographical credential; the 2019 episodes use it for faculty politics and as a benchmark; the 2022 episode uses it as the example of a private institution whose speech promises are enforceable in contract. Each treatment is self-contained, and no speaker responds to an earlier one.
Guests and episodes
1 appearances by 1 guests, 2023–2023. Guests A–Z by first name.
- Alan Dershowitz (Civil liberties attorney and Harvard Law professor) — Confronting the ‘Cancelists’ with Alan Dershowitz (2023) — Alan Dershowitz on Cancel Culture and Neutral Principles.