Abstract

Affirmative action and the decline of merit-based admissions was the beginning of the decline at Harvard University, as it was at most universities. This essay seeks to determine what has happened to the rest of academic first principles as a result, to academic freedom, scholarship, and student/faculty culture. To determine this progression requires decades of observation. The results of this investigation between 1969 and 2019 is that all of these university functions, in succession, were severely compromised, and that the token Asian student lawsuit that was heard against Harvard in 2018 has had no effect on this progressive decline. Recovery may have to come from outside the university. A beginning solution would come from a definitive ruling from the U. S. Supreme Court on the appeal of the Asian student lawsuit. Other areas that the present Harvard system of “social justice” are vulnerable to are the growing financial dependence on global executive education, the increasingly contradictory professorial and departmental policies regarding academic freedom, and, ultimately, the selection of other educational forms produced by “diversity."