Harvard Researcher: the University Is “Totally Corrupted”

City Journal

By Christopher F. Rufo, Ryan Thorpe

May 20, 2025

Omar Sultan Haque has spent 23 years at Harvard University. He is furious about what has happened within the school.

While the media have framed the recent fight between Harvard and President Donald Trump in partisan terms, Haque believes that the problem goes much deeper than political score-settling. As he rose through the ranks—from graduate student to postdoctoral fellow to medical researcher to faculty member at Harvard Medical School—Haque watched the university gradually abandon the pursuit of truth and replace it with left-wing racialism.

Rather than stay silent, Haque has spoken out. Last year, he wrote an essay about his experience and has continued to criticize the university throughout the recent campus turmoil. As Haque sees it, Harvard cannot be reformed from within. It’s an unconscious patient and requires CPR to survive.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

City Journal: Give us a sense of the ideological landscape and your experience at Harvard.

Omar Sultan Haque: Unlike many others at Harvard, I have no dramatic cancellation, or intellectual persecution, or struggle session to report. I stopped teaching at Harvard last year primarily because of its anti-truth-seeking culture, radical left-wing bias, racial and gender discrimination, and prevailing anti-intellectualism, which made continued participation a poor use of time. There are exceptions, but on the whole Harvard has strayed from its foundational mission of unbiased truth-seeking and has become ideologically driven, too often resembling a secular church or a partisan think tank. The university’s culture and practices prioritize ideological conformity over open inquiry and debate, suppressing dissenting viewpoints and compromising academic freedom. This shift undermines the core values of a secular university and poses a threat to the integrity of academia and broader society.

CJ: How have DEI initiatives affected day-to-day life at Harvard?

Haque: The university may have changed the official name of its DEI office to use more nebulous euphemisms, but DEI and “Diet DEI” (a diluted form) have the same effects in practices, norms, and the larger culture of orthodoxy and taboo. Diet DEI is just more dishonest. The university has made some progress by eliminating racially segregated graduations and required DEI loyalty oaths in one of its many schools—mandatory diversity statements when applying for a job—but the larger culture of DEI is the problem. Some tropes remain popular on campus that are legacies of left-wing racism, such as the idea that a person’s racial identity is central to one’s academic study; that people should be sorted into “oppressor” and “oppressed” groups by their immutable characteristics; that racism is specific to one race rather than a universal, sinful propensity in human nature; and that lowering academic or behavioral standards for certain racial groups is not happening (when advocates are confronted with evidence that it is happening, they argue that the practice is justified). These beliefs infect teaching, research, grading standards, hiring, promotions, campus debate, what is considered an acceptable topic for invited lectures, what projects get funded, and so on.

CJ: In your observation, has Harvard continued to engage in discriminatory admissions and hiring?

Haque: Yes, of course! There is endless evidence at Harvard, in student admissions and faculty and staff hiring, that people are, in effect, sorted via a left-wing segregation filter: competing primarily against others of the same race and sometimes gender. One colleague at Harvard Law School who served for years on the admissions committee flat-out admitted this to me recently. That is why Harvard tries to cover its tracks and hide admissions data and post-admissions performance metrics that predictably result from separate and unequal admissions standards. The eye-popping data on biases against Asians and whites in admissions have already been exposed [in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard]. A corporation with identical racist practices would have been sued out of existence decades ago; why the exception for a wealthy university? The data on faculty and staff hiring and promotions reveal even more obvious evidence of discrimination. Just examine whether people in the same positions are similarly accomplished. No need to call Sherlock Holmes.

With SFFA, I thought the discrimination would end. But after the ruling, I saw Harvard’s first essay prompt for applicants to the university: “Harvard has long recognized the importance of enrolling a diverse student body. How will the life experiences that shape who you are today enable you to contribute to Harvard?”

So, Harvard has this sneaky, but technically legal, escape hatch from the Supreme Court ruling. Admissions officers can ask about “life experience” (wink, wink), and use that to sort applicants by race and assess them accordingly. They don’t ask about patriotism or spirituality, only diversity. The university’s recalcitrance and denial, its commitment to DEI, and its rationalization of racial discrimination has been truly shocking.

CJ: What is your sense of the political makeup of Harvard’s students, faculty, and administrators?

Haque: Per surveys, Harvard has become much more ideologically homogeneous than conservative and religious schools like Hillsdale.  As a result, Harvard is too narrow-minded in scholarship, myopic, intolerant, and anti-intellectual. It favors progressive viewpoints to the detriment of open inquiry, especially on social, moral, and political topics in teaching and research. Courses, exams, research, trainings, grants, and campus life too often become predictable exercises in mouthing univariate explanations and dogmatic platitudes. Harvard’s institutional culture increasingly functions as a combined finishing school and seminary, not for a traditional religion, but for the progressive Left and the Democratic Party. It’s a totally corrupted institution.

CJ: What is your sense of how Harvard’s administration is responding to its ongoing fight with the Trump administration? Do you believe that Harvard deserves federal funding?

Haque: I think the Trump administration overstepped by making illegal requests in addition to legitimate ones, and may have undermined the prospects of long-term change. Yet, Harvard should follow the Civil Rights Act; defying it will not end well. President Alan Garber is incorrect that the government can’t enforce laws regarding whom the universities can admit and hire. (Editor’s note: in a public statement, Garber said that “No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”) Yes, the government can: racial discrimination is illegal, and no one should be admitted, hired, or promoted based on race, gender, or sexual orientation. Harvard appears to me to be willing to sink the ship to keep its racist policies and practices going, because those ideals are so central to the self-concept of the median wealthy liberal.

CJ: Do you still consider Harvard a university in the proper sense of the word?

Haque: Outside of fields where people use equations, Harvard is a non-sectarian university only in name. It has been captured and subverted: from syllabi to exams, from admissions to graduation, from hiring to promotion. Harvard remains in denial of its own radicalism. It sneers and looks down on most of America and on American values like color-blind equality, meritocracy, free speech, hard work, and individual responsibility. Today, Harvard resembles an aging billionaire secluded in his mansion, consumed by narrow moral obsessions, clutching his treasures, disconnected from a world he scorns. He fades into sanctimonious irrelevance, even as the world moves on to create alternative, courageous, and truly American educational institutions—better ones—unapologetically committed to the pursuit of truth, wherever it leads.

Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution. Ryan Thorpe is an investigative reporter at the Manhattan Institute.

Harvard Researcher: the University Is “Totally Corrupted”