The Sins of Harvard

How America's oldest university betrayed its 501(c)(3) status

Harvard: Revoking our tax status as a non-partisan educational institution is illegal.

Also Harvard: Our university has openly and actively purged conservative faculty and students for decades.

University illiberalism has been boiling for decades, but exploded days ago when President Trump posted on Truth Social, “We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status. It’s what they deserve!” In response, Harvard University President Alan Garber said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that revocation is “highly illegal” and “destructive” to the university.

Garber is half correct: it will be destructive to the ideological indoctrination camp that his University has become. However, it is clear that Harvard’s loss of 501(c)(3) status is long overdue. The scandal is that previous Presidents and IRS officials allowed this rigged game to continue.

Federal law governing non-profits forbids a non-profit organization from engaging in political activity. The text of IRS Code §501(c)(3) explicitly defines such bodies as “Corporations organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes...” Exclusive is the key word. You cannot offer some eduction and some indoctrination. It’s education ONLY. So, what seems to be the illegal activity here is the decades-long shell game of laundering partisan dollars through the university coffers to employ thousands of progressive activists on the staff and faculty, while systematically denying teaching, research, and learning opportunities to anyone in any field who isn’t loyal to the partisan ideology of current University administrators.

The economic issue is twofold. On its face, the university gets to operate without any taxes on the product it sells. The corporate body pays no corporate tax on its profits. Other companies, even booksellers, are taxed, but these sacred schools are not. However the larger windfall is that donations to Harvard are deductible from the income base of donors. When Harvard chose the path of partisanship, it risked both sides of the donation coin - the external incentive to give and the internal ability to profit.

For years, Harvard and other once-great American colleges proudly advertised their DEI efforts in the doublespeak lingo of improving diversity on campus. In practice, that meant racial discrimination most bluntly. The University of California’s own data trumpets the fact that the percentage of admitted students categorized as white by the admissions officers was successfully cut by more than half from 41% in 1994 to 18% today. What is that if not blatant racial discrimination? And this occurred after voters passed Proposition 209 (also known as the California Civil Rights Initiative) in 1996 which amended the state Constitution to prohibit the University of California from using race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in admissions. Yet the practice continues, brazenly, which to borrow a phrase is “highly illegal.”

As for Harvard, the subtle practice of ideological discrimination in faculty hiring went into the top gear of Soviet-style thought police in 2019. In 2019, Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) began requiring faculty applicants to submit Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DIB) statements as part of the hiring process. Various colleges and departments made “diversity statements” an essential aspect of hiring professors in the previous decades, optional in some cases, required by specific departments in others. 2019 is when it became a wider mandate at Harvard: when temptation became sin and the university made the purging of conservatives explicit.

What’s so bad about a diversity statement? For one, just ask ChatGPT “What is the difference between equity and equality?” (Answer: the pursuit of equity denies the possibility that true individual equality of rights can or even should exist). For two, Harvard faculty were generally uncomfortable, seeing the DIB mandate as grossly discriminatory. Poke around and you soon learn the euphemisms of diversity and equity are understood by insiders as code for partisan control. In cases after case nationwide, the majority of job applicants were screened out of consideration before hiring committees reviewed single CV.

The irony is that Harvard’s implicit bias against conservatives had been effective for decades, so much that the Harvard Crimson reported that in 2022, just 1% of the faculty identified as conservative compared to 80% liberal. One scary thought is that by the 2020s, campus administrators wanted DIB statement not just for purging conservatives, but for moderates and impure liberals. The bias had gotten so extreme that any unorthodox thinker was considered unacceptable, even the biologists and poets, the mere surgeons, the narrow botanists. Welcome to the crucible, Arthur Miller!

Ultimately, Harvard's FAS announced (less than a year ago) in June 2024 that it would no longer mandate DIB statements for all faculty applicants, but it would require two new “service” statements from finalists. Parse that sentence for a moment. Are diversity statements banned? No, in fact, just not required. Any academic department within Harvard can still require one. And certainly, hiring is still done with a screening statement, but the label is now subtle.

Besides, the school will say the policy was in past. No harm done. But that’s incorrect: grave harm was done to a generation of young scholars denied a fair shot at a Harvard professorship. And let’s at least admit that Harvard was not operating in a 501(c)(3) manner during the past six years. So perhaps those tax returns and donations should be amended?

More damaging for Harvard’s non-profit status is the refusal admit diversity statements were wrong in any way. Dean of Faculty Affairs and Planning Nina Zipser announced via email only that the DIB requirement was “too narrow” and potentially confusing for international candidates. Aha. Big Brother surely wouldn’t want to confuse anyone.

The bottom line is that Harvard chose to become a partisan place. It achieved the results it wanted. Its courses are demonstrably biased politically. Many of its faculty serve as paid and unpaid consultants, advocates, and activists for left-leaning politicians, candidates, and causes. The skew is plain, with no plan whatsoever for remediation and balance. And from 2019-2024, the method of partisan, ideological screening for its workforce was explicit. The only fair remedy for taxpayers is to end the charade. If a future Harvard wishes to re-apply for 501(c)(3) status, we wish them well. We hope they cut out the cancer. Maybe after a 5-year hiatus, the once-great school in Boston will merit restoration as a genuinely and exclusively educational institution.

ADDENDUM: a reader in the comments makes the good point that many educational non-profits are ideological, particularly think tanks - which is a good take. The comparison fails in this sense: all of these nonprofits must submit charters and live up them. Ideological research organizations submit charters to educate the general public narrowly, whereas universities make qualitatively different commitments as degree-granting institutions that are accredited as colleges for general and expressly non-ideological education. They are expressly non-partisan and viewpoint neutral at the top as well as open & viewpoint diverse within. Harvard is in violation of its own charter and IRS filings. That’s the difference.