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Student president of Harvard's Institute of Politics calls for the end of non-partisanship after Trump victory

By newseditors // 2024-11-13

The president of Harvard University’s Institute of Politics has declared that the lesson of the blowout 2024 election is not a need for greater inclusivity and balance at the school but, you guessed it, the express abandonment of nonpartisanship going forward. While many would argue that the school left neutrality behind years ago, Pratyush Mallick is calling in an op-ed for The Harvard Crimson for an official change. It would align the Institute with the building “resistance” and reject not just nonpartisanship, but neutrality in its programs and grants. (Article republished from JonathanTurley.org) After the election, I wrote that people hoping for a moment of introspection after the Trump victory will likely be disappointed, and “the rage in the media and academia will only likely increase.” That has unfortunately proven to be the case. The meltdown after the presidential election appears to be building rather than subsiding with attacks from the left on male, female, and minority voters as racists, misogynists, or despotic dupes. The call for partisanship at Harvard is not unique. Before the election, I criticized Wesleyan University President Michael Roth for urging universities to abandon neutrality and work openly for the election of Kamala Harris. Immediately after the election, Roth doubled down and promised to join the “resistance” against Trump’s “authoritarian” regime. A few weeks before the election, I participated in a debate at Harvard Law School over the lack of free speech protections and intellectual diversity at Harvard. This year, Harvard found itself in a familiar spot on the annual ranking of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE): dead last among 251 universities and colleges. The Harvard Crimson has documented how the school’s departments have virtually eliminated Republicans. In one study of multiple departments last year, they found that more than 75 percent of the faculty self-identified as “liberal” or “very liberal.” Only 5 percent identified as “conservative,” and only 0.4% as “very conservative.” According to Gallup, the U.S. population is roughly equally divided among conservatives (36%), moderates (35%), and liberals (26%). So Harvard has three times the number of liberals as the nation at large, and less than three percent identify as “conservative” rather than 35 percent nationally. Among law school faculty who donated more than $200 to a political party, 91 percent of the Harvard faculty gave to Democrats. While Professor Randall Kennedy, in the debate, dismissed the notion that Harvard should look more like America, the problem is that it does not even look like Massachusetts. Even as one of the most liberal states in the country, roughly one third of the voters still identify as Republican. The student body shows the same bias of selection. Harvard Crimson previously found that only 7 percent of incoming students identified as conservative. Yet, the Institute of Politics student executive committee president wants it to be more official.

”Today, Harvard’s Institute of Politics has a choice to make too. Nonpartisanship — a founding principle of the IOP — is no longer a tenable position in today’s political environment. Donald Trump’s imminent return to power underscores the importance of the IOP finally breaking from our long-standing commitment to it.”

So, rather than considering the implications of a majority of voters rejecting the narrative of the media and political establishment, the idea is to move even further toward orthodoxy and intolerance. Mallick wrote that as the Trump administration moves forward, “we must resist platforming anti-democratic voices in the guise of nonpartisanship.” Those “anti-democratic voices” are likely to be found on one end of the political spectrum. In a truly Orwellian twist, Mallick added, “In fact, we must strive to defend principles of democracy, due process, and justice precisely to ensure that we can continue carrying out our age-old mission of nonpartisanship.” So, the Institute would become partisan in order to fulfill its mission of nonpartisanship. As I discuss in my book, The Indispensable Right, we have seen the same abandonment of neutrality in the media with disastrous results. Students in “J Schools” today are being told to abandon neutrality and objectivity since, as former New York Times writer (and now Howard University journalism professor) Nikole Hannah-Jones has explained, “all journalism is activism.” After a series of interviews with over 75 media leaders,  Leonard Downie Jr., former Washington Post executive editor, and Andrew Heyward, former CBS News president, reaffirmed this shift. As Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle, stated: “Objectivity has got to go.” The result has been the increasing rejection of mainstream media in favor of new media. The falling revenue and readership have not produced any more introspection among leading figures in the media. After the election, various figures such as MSNBC host Mika Brezinski did not acknowledge how media bias has led to the decline but instead blamed the election in part on the availability of opposing views as “massive disinformation.” Others called for free speech to be curtailed to prevent such contrary information from affecting another election. Ironically, the Harvard Institute has a number of advisory board members accused of such bias in the past, including CNN’s Abby Philip. While there are a couple of Republicans, it has a majority of current and former Democratic politicians and advisers, including Michael Nutter, David Axelrod, LaTosha Brown, William D. Delahunt, and Joseph Kennedy III. In the end, the Institute’s formal commitment to partisanship is unlikely to matter. While Mallick insists that “nonpartisanship—a founding principle of the IOP—is no longer a tenable position in today’s political environment,” it has long been out of vogue at Harvard. Read more at: JonathanTurley.org

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