America Can’t Forget the Ivy League Made Trump

For better or worse, institutions of the “elite” have been brought to trial — and have been found desperately wanting.

Harvard cannot write off the contempt it has gathered. In the Trump era, we must instead remind America that higher education is aligned with — not counter to — the meritocratic distribution of power.

Despite our current branding in the Republican consciousness, Harvard is not unproductive or broken — and we are not a training ground for radical philosophy. This is a rigorous school that produces competent leaders with the wide-ranging knowledge and fluency to do great things in any field. For this University to survive, it must lean wholeheartedly into that image.

The stakes are high: today’s Republican agenda includes gutting American education, from public grade schools to our nation’s most celebrated institutions of higher learning. At the helm, Trump has gladly turned a blind eye to his own Ivy League education and branded elite universities like Harvard as hotbeds for “the radical Left and Marxist maniacs.”

Simultaneously, actors like Vivek G. Ramaswamy ’07 and Elon Musk, set to act out Trump’s grand administrative revolution, seem to envision a government disinterested in political ethics and trained wholly on efficiency. In doing so, they cater to the popular attitude that centralized power — alike in status, education, and thought — should be dismantled and redistributed.

Trump’s administration, emboldened by a decisive victory, would have schools be stripped of their autonomy. At Harvard, the naturally critical liberal arts education could be retooled in defense of “the American tradition and Western civilization.”

That the plurality of Americans voted for political meddling in private education should give Harvard pause — and reason to act swiftly and tactically.

We represent the philosophically minded elite that have, allegedly, failed to govern and are therefore to blame for the country’s woes — for the neglect of the middle and working class and the flourishing of the administrative state. Americans are looking for a culprit, and Republicans have dressed up the academy on a silver platter.

I get it. Harvard’s out of touch; that’s nothing new. But today’s anti-academic impulse tells us more about America’s relationship with concentrated status and power than with Ivy League universities in particular.

Harvard should shore up its image by reinforcing that it is a place where smart kids — rich and poor, rural and urban — come to learn practical leadership skills.

The University will survive by reminding the nation that it remains an engine for technical achievement, and that achievement is enriched by its pairing with an education in the liberal arts. We teach writing, math and oratory skills alongside disciplines like economics, and we do so well. We likewise excel at teaching government and policy — along with all manner of technical subjects.

But schools like Harvard, through an education in liberal arts beyond pure technical instruction, also create graduates uniquely capable of understanding the “bigger picture.”

Look no further than Trump’s closest allies for proof that universities like Harvard elevate promising people and — rather than indoctrinate them — teach them the skills to practice their own philosophies at scale. The Ivy League trained J.D. Vance, Ramaswamy, Scott K.H. Bessent, Elise M. Stefanik ’06, Mehmet Oz ’82, Pete Hegseth, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. ’76, to name a few across the incoming administration.

The Trump administration — like any corner of American politics — shows us the redistributive, meritocratic power of the Ivy League in action. Harvard and peer institutions have been and will continue to be the cradle of leadership in America on all sides.

This moment demands that Harvard and peer institutions change how we brand ourselves. We ought to dispense with the abstract — that we are, principally, organs of personal, philosophical transformation in one direction or another. Evidently, this is not the main desire of the American public.

We should instead embrace — in both how we advertise ourselves and in our instruction itself — how our University teaches leadership and creative thinking, skills that are useful for Republicans and Democrats alike. In doing so, we provide an indispensable service becoming of our status and selectivity.

To justify its existence, Harvard must make clear that it remains an academy where future leaders of all political stripes learn how to govern. Failing to do so will doom it in the eyes of the public — a loss that Harvard can no longer afford.

Lorenzo Z. Ruiz ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Government Concentrator in Winthrop House.