“After God had carried us safe to New England and we had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God’s worship, and settled the civil government: One of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning, and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust. And as we were thinking and consulting how to effect this work, it pleased God to stir up the heart of one Mr. Harvard…”
— "New England’s First Fruits" (anonymous pamphlet)
Harvard was founded upon the Puritan principle that ignorance is a tool of that “Old Deluder,” Satan, and that God’s truth must be taught to those who would preside over both the civil and ecclesiastical realms. Hence the motto Veritas, truth.
On Harvard’s grounds thoughts and principles were formed in the minds of the likes of John Adams, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Dr. Joseph Warren (never heard of him? Google that name and see how instrumental he was in launching the Revolution as our first spy master, and how he gave up his life at the battle of Bunker Hill). Upon Cambridge’s common, in front of Harvard, George Washington took command of the Continental Army. He stayed in Harvard’s Wadsworth House before taking up quarters in what is now called the Longfellow House. General Putnam planned the battle of Bunker Hill in Harvard’s Apthorp House, now part of the Adams House. In the school year 1775–1776, the Continental Army took over the Harvard campus, and the students and studies were relocated to Concord for that year. Youth, as always, can be a bit rowdy, and so Harvard President Samuel Langdon thanked the town for being such a forbearing host in this manner.: “We hope the scholars while here have not dishonored themselves and the society by any incivilities or indecencies of behavior, or that you will readily forgive any errors which may be attributed to the inadvertence of youth.”
In 1861, the 20th Massachusetts Regiment was formed, called the Harvard Regiment because all of the officers, and many of the enlisted, were Harvard men. They fought, bled, and died at Ball’s Bluff, the Seven Days, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Petersburg, and finally at Appomattox. They suffered 409 casualties, of which 260 were KIA and 149 died of infection and disease. They were known as the “Bloody 20th,” having more casualties than any other Massachusetts regiment and ranking 5th in the entire Union Army. Their colonel, Paul Joseph Revere, grandson of the man who made the famous ride, was mortally wounded on the 2nd day of the Battle of Gettysburg.
How about today? Harvard’s prized “diversity” is literally just skin deep, defying Martin Luther King Jr’s dream of judging “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” It is not the true diversity of thought and outlook. Conservatives, called such because they seek to preserve what the Founders established and for which the Union fought, are as scarce on the faculty as Jews were when Harvard discriminated against them in the 1920s and 30s.
Harvey Mansfield, one of the few Conservative faculty and now emeritus (I am halfway through his superb translation of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America) warned them in the March 4, 2025 Harvard Crimson that the failure to “expand the range of its moral and political opinion” has left Harvard unable to distinguish between speech from someone who simply disagrees with you from so-called “speech” from people who disrupt, turn violent, and support “…Hamas, a band of rapists and murderers.” “Speech you don’t like,” he said, “may come from an opponent or from an enemy. An opponent favors free speech and stays within the regime of free speech, an enemy does not.”
Perhaps the most famous trial lawyer from Harvard, and who is also emeritus there, is Alan Dershowitz. I, and many others, admire him for his “shoe is on the other foot” test of integrity. His book, The Case Against Impeaching Trump, was originally supposed to be titled The Case Against Impeaching Clinton, because he thought she would win (he voted for her) and the Republicans would try it. His principle is that impeachment should not be over politics or policy. He then defended Trump in the well of the Senate, holding up his well-worn volume of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (my kinda guy!)
Now he is ostracized, vilified, and the subject of the most outrageous slander (not to mention antisemitism) for his defense not only of Trump, but of Epstein. Have we forgotten that even the worst among us are entitled to competent counsel, to secure the rights of all of us? There was once a Harvard lawyer who understood that many years ago, and risked his own reputation and even safety to uphold that principle — see And Justice for All, Even Redcoats.
Oh, Harvard, come home to your America, and the history you helped shape. We will leave the light on for you!
From the end of Yankee from Olympus, by Catherine Drinker Bowen:
Eight infantrymen raised their rifles and fired… a volley for each wound…
Ball’s Bluff… Antietam… Fredericksburg.
A soldier, standing a little apart, raised his bugle and blew taps.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
Captain and Brevet Colonel
20th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, Civil War
Justice, Supreme Court of the United States
March 1841 – March 1935
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