Harvard Explores New Center for Conservative Scholarship Amid Trump Attacks

The Wall Street Journal

By Douglas Belkin, Juliet Chung, Emily Glazer, Natalie Andrews

July 10, 2025

Harvard leaders have discussed creating a program that people briefed on the talks described as a center for conservative scholarship, possibly modeled on Stanford’s Hoover Institution, as the school fights the Trump administration’s accusations that it is too liberal.

The idea has circulated at the university for several years but gained steam after pro-Palestinian protests began disrupting campus in late 2023. Harvard has discussed the effort with potential donors, people familiar with the matter said. The cost of creating such a center could run somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion, a person familiar with Harvard’s thinking estimated.

A spokesman for Harvard said an initiative under discussion “will ensure exposure to the broadest ranges of perspectives on issues, and will not be partisan, but rather will model the use of evidence-based, rigorous logic and a willingness to engage with opposing views.” He added that the school has been accelerating efforts to set up the initiative, which would “promote and support viewpoint diversity.”

A 2024 survey by Harvard found that only one-third of the college’s graduating class felt comfortable discussing controversial topics, and a 2023 survey by the student newspaper found that just 3% of faculty at Harvard College identified as politically conservative.

Harvard President Alan Garber helped promote an “intellectual vitality” program to reinvigorate debate on campus and ensure students engage in discussions free of self-censorship.

Garber faces a delicate challenge in squaring off against President Trump: Any changes the university makes that could be perceived as bowing to the president would face blowback by large groups of faculty, alumni and students, but Trump has many levers to pull to inflict damage on the school.

Harvard has been battling the Trump administration for months over the school’s federal funding and autonomy, after the government accused it of tolerating antisemitism and promoting what the White House views as discriminatory diversity, equity and inclusion practices. The administration has pulled or frozen billions of dollars in federal funding, threatened the school’s tax-exempt status and targeted its ability to enroll international students.

Harvard has sued. A court hearing is scheduled for later this month.

The broader negotiations between the Trump administration and Harvard have hit repeated snags, delaying any settlement, people familiar with the matter said. Harvard is reviewing a new proposal from the administration after the White House deemed an earlier offer from the school a nonstarter, one of the people said.

Decision-making around admissions and faculty have been points of tension, with Harvard resistant to ceding authority on which types of students it admits, the faculty it hires and what professors teach, according to people briefed on the discussions. 

The Trump administration would view the creation of a new institute as window-dressing and wouldn’t see it as a meaningful part of their negotiations, said a person familiar with the administration’s views.

“We’re negotiating hard, I think we’re getting close to having it happen, it’s not wrapped up as fast as I wanted it to, but we’re getting there,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said at a Tuesday cabinet meeting while discussing the status of the administration’s continuing talks with Harvard and Columbia University, whose board has been discussing terms of a possible deal.

The idea of creating a center that would encourage a range of viewpoints has been considered at Harvard for years. 

Before he stepped down from running Harvard Business School in 2020, then-Dean Nitin Nohria discussed creating such an institute with several prospective donors, said people familiar with his efforts. Harvard Provost John Manning is helping to lead the current effort and has discussed the idea with some donors who could help fund the effort.

Some members of the Harvard Corporation, Harvard’s governing body, view the center idea as not unreasonable and as one that could foster a diversity of viewpoints while maintaining Harvard’s independence, said a person familiar with their thinking.

During his campaign, Trump vowed to rein in progressive ideas on elite college campuses, which he said amounted to a “Marxist assault on our American heritage and Western civilization itself.”

Central to changing campus culture is controlling who is hired and what they teach. Harvard President Garber has said the school won’t cede that authority. An institute would open the possibility of hiring new faculty focused on classically liberal ideas which, on many of today’s campuses, are often read as conservative. Those ideas, in turn, could reinvigorate debate, which even Harvard administrators say has atrophied.

The Hoover Institution, which resides on Stanford’s campus and champions free markets and small government, dates back decades. Academic institutes elsewhere devoted to civics, American history and Western civilization began popping up, mostly at public universities in red states, about a decade ago.

They are generally nonpartisan and champion classic liberalism rooted in the study of Western civilization. In some instances, Republican legislatures doled out money to schools to create programs as a counterweight to what they saw as liberal faculty.

Arizona State University launched its School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership in 2016. Founding director Paul Carrese said there are now more than a dozen centers on public university campuses and several more at private schools.

At the University of Florida’s Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education, University of North Carolina’s School of Civic Life and Leadership and Yale University’s Center for Civic Thought, students read classic texts, apply lessons to current problems and hash out differences in small group discussions.

“This is a national reform movement,” Carrese said. 

Write to Douglas Belkin at Doug.Belkin@wsj.com, Juliet Chung at Juliet.Chung@wsj.com, Emily Glazer at Emily.Glazer@wsj.com and Natalie Andrews at natalie.andrews@wsj.com

Read More