Elitism Is Eating Harvard Alive | Opinion

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A Double-Edged Sword? Double Concentrations Create Both Pressure and Opportunity for Harvard Students

Something is rotting Harvard from the inside out.

Last month, the Department of Justice released millions more pages of documents on convicted sex offender Jeffrey E. Epstein, revealing far more pervasive ties to Harvard than previously reported.

Emails from a staff member recount Epstein instructing a boat captain to bring Harvard professor Lisa J. Randall ’84 to his island. Files reveal Epstein gave at least $225,000 more than previously known to the Hasty Pudding Institute of 1770. Documents detail how Harvard Hillel leaders personally solicited his donations on multiple occasions.

Harvard’s deep connections to one of the world’s most infamous sexual criminals is disgusting but not surprising. The University has long been a bastion for elite power, and the new documents only widen the cracks in an increasingly unstable ruling class. As the scandal rears its head, it’s time for Harvard to have a serious reckoning with its own elitism.

This past year, the Trump administration has made its mission to delegitimize, attack, and destroy higher education. S. May Mailman, Trump’s former deputy assistant, devised many strategies to threaten Harvard’s federal funding. The Department of Health and Human Services, under the control of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ’76, moved to block Harvard from receiving future research grants. Pete B. Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, recently severed academic ties between Harvard and the military. These stories display a glaringly obvious similarity: every member of the Trump administration mentioned above attended Harvard.

It’s the epitome of the absurd irony that is becoming American fascism. The university under constant attack by an increasingly authoritarian government is the same university that propagates such authoritarianism. Harvard can claim that it is anti-Trump, but Harvard and Trump both occupy the same ivory tower.

When Harvard took the Trump administration to court over federal funding cuts, it ostensibly attempted to bury this fact. To the outside observer, a seemingly simple binary emerged: Harvard is the elite done right — the intellectual, the culturally-competent, the politically-reasonable. Trump is the elite run amok — the dirty-dealing, the democracy-destroying, the bigot.

Yet the line between these two elitisms becomes increasingly blurred when the individuals enacting Trump’s authoritarian vision come from the same social circles as those they attack. In this sense, Harvard’s ties to Epstein are not failures of an otherwise perfect system — they were built into its design.

The release of the documents should compel the University to reflect: How can Harvard claim its goal of teaching students to serve the world when our professors, clubs, and organizations prioritize a tiny fraction of it? The documents should also compel the administration to act: Harvard itself is an incredibly inequitable place. Student organizations — and undergraduate social life more broadly — have been criticized for being stacked heavily against those without connections. And perhaps most insidious is Harvard’s unwavering preference for so-called ALDCs – athletes, legacies, dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff. Without dismantling our own elitism, how can Harvard begin to fight the product of it?

Elitism is more than a school name on a diploma or a transcript filled with classes in art history and discrete math. It’s a culture, a way of establishing and maintaining power through social relationships and financial connection. And in order for some to be powerful, others must be powerless. Upholding ideals of democracy and human rights requires a redistribution of this power — a sacrifice that Harvard is apparently unwilling to make. As our own elitism turns sour, it should conjure more than a moral reckoning, but rather a complete restructuring of the way we experience and use our own Harvard education.

I know this task might seem unrealistic. After all, isn’t elitism what makes Harvard, Harvard? Why should we give up the distinction that makes our degree so sought after in the first place? While much of Harvard’s appeal lies in its scarcity, this claim ignores what the true function of higher education ought to be: social mobility.

The University should not pretend that the opportunities it currently awards to privileged few are the result of some sort of meritocratic sorting or democratized competition. If anything, the Epstein scandal should force Harvard to repudiate its function as a tool to preserve the elite. While the University alone cannot correct these societal ills, it can begin to create change from within, reorganizing the aim of education from a force that maintains inequality to one that dissolves it.

In order for the University to save itself, it must sacrifice a part of itself as well — or risk being destroyed by the same beast it created.

The ivory tower is crumbling. Instead of scrambling to pick up the pieces, let it fall.

Sylvia A. Langer ’28, an Associate Editorial editor, is a Molecular and Cellular Biology concentrator in Currier House.

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