Make Harvard Great Again

Our University was founded on the basic idea that the people we elect to the HoCos run this college. That isn’t how Harvard functions today.

Instead, a drone army in sneaker-bottom loafers — 8,250 administrators strong — drafts 26-page reports for the Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage, decries Harvard-Yale ticket scalping as the cardinal sin of Aristotelian virtue ethics, and busies itself making sure nobody describes what happened on Oct. 7 as “violent.”

With higher education’s approval ratings at rock bottom — and under the looming threat of losing federal funding — Harvard is in sore need of some administrative shakeup. It’s time for Harvard to take a page out of the great Vice President-elect JD Vance’s playbook: If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

To begin, I am proposing myself and American Patriot William A. Ackman ’88 as the dynamic duo behind a sorely needed Department of Administrative Efficiency. Since we’ve had problems with originality recently, we decided to come up with our own name: the Department of Unnecessarily Multitudinous Bureaucracy.

DUMB will maximize efficiency by learning from the best. No part-time idea generators here — Bill and I will work overtime like the super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries we are. Absolutely zero dollars spent on whether tequila makes sunfish more aggressive — it will be a lot easier to redistribute the tequila to where it belongs once we’ve axed the entire Dean of Students Office.

If a single “Associate Provost for Advances in Experiential Learning” dares to work from home, they will be removed immediately. The same goes for anyone who was hired on the recommendation of a task force, or whose job description includes the phrase “facilitate interdisciplinarity and transformative experiences across our intellectually vital community.”

And we’re not just draining the administrative swamp. If the nomination for Secretary of Health and Human Services tells us anything, it’s that Americans want to see less artificial Oatly soft serve and more raw milk frozen yogurt.

The vaccination hold has also got to go. Harvard University Health Service should allow us to make our own choices about whether or not we’d like to give our entire Justice section seasonal influenza. And how would the median voter feel knowing that we literally fluoridate all our water?

Education policy is easy money. They want to get rid of the entire Department of Education? We can do one better: fire all the faculty and have students just Google stuff instead. Project 2025 wants to deny civil rights to LGBTQ+ students? We don’t even have LGBTQ+ students – only BGLTQ ones. Take that, Moms for Liberty.

We can also try just poaching their guys directly. Forget the United Nations — Elise Stefanik should receive a competitive counteroffer to become our new Dean of Students so that she can enforce our policies on bullying and harassment regardless of context. Pete Hegseth may claim he’s returning his Harvard Kennedy School diploma, but let’s see how he’d feel about running Securitas if we promised to give him one of those nifty Harvard chairs. It seems Matt Gaetz is fresh out of a job – too bad he can’t be within 500 feet of a school.

It’s time to put our money where our mouth is. If Harvard is serious about winning the hearts and minds of ordinary Americans, we need to show that we’re not so different after all.

Yona T. Sperling-Milner ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a sophomore in Cabot House studying Social Studies. As a little girl, she dreamed of purging the Deep State.