Subject: UCP: Right Wing on the Charles -- Harvard
From: kowan@ai.mit.edu (Rich Cowan)
Date: Fri, 21 Oct 94 19:35:11 EDT

[Excerpted from _Guide to Uncovering the Right on Campus_, edited by
Dalya Massachi and Rich Cowan.  ISBN 0-945210-03-05. This article may
be photocopied or distributed electronically at no charge provided
that the article and this notice are included in their entirety.
Copyright 1994 University Conversion Project.

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Right Wing on the Charles:  Harvard's Revolving Door

by John Trumpbour

        Upon receiving a medal for distinguished public service
from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in the mid 1980s,
former attorney general Edwin Meese declared, "The Reagan
Administration has the highest percentage of Harvard
graduates among its Cabinet and subcabinet appointments of
any Administration in U.S. history - substantially exceeding
the percentage in the Administration of John F. Kennedy."
        With the defeat of George Herbert Walker Bush in 1992, some
of the foreign president's staff are now receiving a well
deserved rest at the Kremlin on the Charles.  "The revolving
door at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government
(KSG) is turning again - this time to... the Right," explains
the Boston Globe (February 10, 1993).  The KSG's Institute of
Politics, commonly regarded as "a kind of Betty Ford center
for drying-out politicians," according to its director
Charles Royer, has appointed as fellows Republicans Lynn
Martin, the former Secretary of Labor, Patricia Saiki, the
former head of the U.S. Small Business Association, and
Mickey Edwards, the eight-term congressman from Oklahoma who
encountered crushing defeat after unceremoniously bouncing
386 checks at the House Bank.  A more permanent Harvard
fixture is Roger B. Porter, Bush's chief advisor on domestic
policy, who just reclaimed his KSG professorship.
        Meanwhile, President Clinton has given high appointments to
such Harvard faculty and administrators as Graham Allison, a
former consultant to Caspar Weinberger, Robert Reich, John
Shattuck, Joseph Nye, Mary Jo Bane, David Ellwood, Lawrence
Summers, Lawrence Katz, David Cutler, Ashton Carter, and on
and on.  The revolving-door system helps insure that little
changes either in Washington or at the university, and the
bipartisan consensus approving the main contours of the
welfare-warfare state remains intact.
        One of the more intriguing developments of the past year
has been the increasing belligerence of the right-wing
faculty at Harvard.  Convinced that academe has been overrun
by what former Secretary of Education William Bennett calls
"academic totalitarians... whose principal talk is to raise
revolutionary consciousness," these so-called conservatives
have been well-dieseled with funding from the John M. Olin
Foundation and regularly received with delirious applause by
the right-wing student press, the Harvard Salient and
Peninsula.  Customarily delivering his wisdoms with a
smirking visage, Professor Harvey Mansfield of the Department
of Government proclaimed in Harvard Magazine (Jan/Feb. 1993)
that the increasing enrollment of black students in the 1970s
led to flaccid academic standards, and notable grade
inflation, and in a Fall 1993 interview with the Harvard
Crimson, that "gays... undermine civilization."  When
representatives of those groups have sought to challenge such
statements, they have been dismissed as exhibitors of PC
arrogance and, in the more conciliatory language of the
Salient (8 Nov., 1993) told "to transcend their liberal
prejudice and petty outrage."
        According to the foundation's latest annual report,
Mansfield received over $242,000 in Olin Foundation grants in
1992.  His colleague Samuel P. Huntington runs Harvard's John
M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, which has been
lavished with nearly $1.4 million of Olin funds from 1989-
1993.  In an article entitled "the clash of civilizations"
for the Summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs, Huntington
calls for a new post-cold war paradigm for national security
that anticipates increasing cultural war between the rational
West and the irrational hordes from the East.  His
intellectual project aspires to be Harvard's most enduring
contribution to the construction of a new world order.
[Jack Trumpbour is a PhD Candidate in History at Harvard and
the editor of How Harvard Rules (South End Press, 1989)]