David,
My name is Jhon Sánchez, and I always read your columns. I find them interesting and measured. You often bring a perspective to an issue that I hadn’t considered. You’re probably my favorite opinion writer in English. However, regarding your column, “Go Ahead, Sean Duffy. Let Your Daughter Go to Harvard,” I thought it was shortsighted.
Before I started writing this letter, I went to watch the actual clip you mentioned, in which Sean Duffy, the Secretary of Transportation, didn’t want his daughter, Paloma, to go to Harvard. Harvard might corrupt the conservative values Paloma grew up with. In your column, you recalled having a similar conversation with your father, and you criticized liberal universities for the censorship they have exercised against conservative students.
Let me tell you something: I believe the clip is scripted—not only scripted, but badly scripted and offensively snobbish.
I say it is badly scripted because I can’t believe that parents having this conversation would never talk about the alternatives. If not Harvard, then where? No other university is ever mentioned in the clip. So I kept thinking about it and asked Ai what the most important conservative universities in the United States are. Liberty University and Pepperdine University were among the answers. Liberty was ranked as the most conservative college.
But are they serious? Are Duffy and his wife really going to turn down an offer of admission to Harvard, one of the best universities in the world, to send their daughter to Liberty University, ranked 395–434 among national universities? Are you kidding me? Say that with a straight face to the millions of highly qualified students around the world who aspire to be admitted to Harvard.
But, as I mentioned before, it was badly scripted for another reason. Wouldn’t you first talk about what she wants to study?
“Okay, darling, what do you want to study? What are your aspirations?”
Well, if Paloma wants to be a preacher, maybe Harvard Divinity School is not for her. Not because it is bad—on the contrary, it is a top school—but because perhaps it is not the right place for the kind of pastoral training she is looking for. The same thing applies to other fields. That is where the conversation should start. Duffy is an intelligent man, but judging from that clip, we know he is a poor actor.
And think about how offensive this clip is to the millions of students who don’t have the resources to pay for a college education. Think of the millions carrying student debt. The conversation many families are having right now is not, “Education is going to corrupt your mind.” It is, “We need you to work instead,” or, “Why go to school if you’re not going to get a job anyway?”
And after what happened to Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, I can imagine families saying, “Dear, I don’t want you to go to Columbia. You’re Palestinian.” Or, “I don’t want you to study in the United States. You’re Black, an immigrant, undocumented, Latino—you name it.”
How do you think a Palestinian student in Gaza would feel watching that video or reading your column? According to UNESCO, 22 of Gaza’s 38 university campuses have been completely destroyed, and 95 percent have been affected by the war. Is Paloma going to tell an Afghan girl who is prevented from getting an education at all about how she turned down Harvard?
For God’s sake, think of 100 babies born in a low-income country. After facing the risks of HIV/AIDS, famine, lack of antibiotics, or war, after walking long distances to school just to learn to read and write, only a fraction of them will ever make it to college. In countries like Chad or Mali, perhaps only one or two will make it all the way to graduation. Meanwhile, Paloma won the lottery, and her parents are worried about whether they should cash the ticket. Poor Paloma.
What they are reinforcing here is a fear that already exists among people with less education: that sending their children to college is dangerous because learning itself is dangerous, a corruption of the mind. Stay in church, praise God, and pay your tithes. The Tree of Knowledge in Eden—sound familiar?
I grew up in Colombia, and when I decided to go to university, my mother’s pastor was against it. To him, it was a waste of time. Why study? Wait for the Second Coming.
Here in the United States, I have seen something similar in immigrant families, where a child’s aspirations for higher education can come into conflict with the parents’ expectations and traditional values. I remember a documentary from the 2000s about that tension between a Dominican daughter who wanted to go to college and her parents. And when I attended community college around the same time, many classmates told me that their families didn’t want them to go to college.
Today, many young adults either don’t see the point of going to college or have grown distrustful of universities, science, and expertise in general. And I’m not saying that college is the key to a happy and successful life. It isn’t. What concerns me is something larger: the growing suspicion that education itself has little value, or worse, that the institutions devoted to knowledge cannot be trusted. What kind of generation are we going to have if we discourage young people from investigating, studying, questioning, and inventing?
I’ve known young people, mostly men, who grew up in environments that encouraged education and had every opportunity to go to college. I thought they would, but many didn’t. They are not just good people; they are intelligent. What troubles me is not that they didn’t go to college, but where some of them turned instead: to conspiracy theories, MAGA politics, and figures like the Tate brothers.
Of course, young men may take away the following message from Duffy’s little performance: Harvard is a waste of time. Harvard doesn’t tell the truth. The science coming out of Harvard is wrong. Expertise itself becomes suspicious. Follow that road far enough, and eventually even the earth can become flat.
That’s the kind of thinking Duffy is feeding into.
But let’s ask some more interesting questions.
Why are none of the explicitly conservative universities among the top 10 universities in the United States? All of them are secular. Even Notre Dame and Georgetown, high-ranking universities with religious spines, are generally more moderate in their intellectual traditions. Why? Is there something about intellectual openness itself that helps make a great university?
Another interesting exercise would be to examine how liberal students are welcomed at conservative universities. What is life like for a transgender student at Liberty University—assuming an openly transgender student can comfortably be there in the first place? Do evangelical universities have LGBTQ+ student groups? Are abortion-rights activists and intellectuals allowed to speak on their campuses? How many have actually been invited to give a talk? How freely can students express anti-religious views, communist ideas, or support for revolutionary movements in their student newspapers without fear of censorship or punishment?
And what exactly is a “conservative university”? What is it trying to conserve?
Certainly, Al-Zahra University, a women’s university in Iran, could be described as conservative. But I doubt the Duffys would want to send their daughter there. And what about Renmin University of China, rooted in the intellectual tradition of Marxism and the Communist Party? It is certainly not “conservative” by American standards, but presumably exposing students to capitalist ideas in the classroom can threaten the ideology they are trying to preserve. Once the purpose of a university becomes protecting students from intellectual contamination, left-wing and right-wing ideological institutions begin to resemble each other.
And is Harvard really a “liberal university” in the simplistic way we are using that term?
Without even mentioning the number of Harvard graduates in politics, the arts, technology, or writing columns, as you do, for one of the most important newspapers in the world, let me tell you something: Harvard leads all universities with 41 alumni currently serving as Fortune 500 CEOs. Apparently, all that liberal indoctrination hasn’t been particularly bad for capitalism. So what exactly do we mean when we call Harvard “liberal”?
And finally, what kind of monster do the Duffys imagine Harvard could turn Paloma into? A person willing to meet—just meet and listen to—a communist, a feminist, a transgender person, an atheist? Apparently, the only “normal” people they want in her life are clones of herself.
Harvard is not a horror movie plagued by zombies, witches, and vampires. Its students are real people, just like the people who exist outside the Duffy family drama. We are real people. We exist and will continue to exist even if the Duffys don’t want their daughter exposed to us.
In your column, you defended freedom of speech and expressed concern about restrictions on conservative speech at liberal universities. I’m very sympathetic to that concern. But the message the Duffys are sending strikes me as precisely the opposite of freedom of speech.
Education should teach us not merely to tolerate opposing ideas, but to listen to them, understand them, question them, and decide for ourselves. Instead, the message becomes: We cannot listen to anything that might corrupt our thoughts.
That is not intellectual freedom.
Best,