Harvard University’s Hidden Authority

Herbert W. Armstrong raised up three liberal arts colleges. He said, “The future welfare and even the existence of civilization is dependent on the educational system” (Plain Truth, December 1965; emphasis mine throughout). If the existence of civilization is at stake, we all need to be deeply concerned about our educational system.

Harvard University began as a ministers’ college. Yet today, Harvard would not be recognized by its own founders! An Esquire magazine article from September 1981 by Timothy Foote titled “The Trouble With Harvard” had this to say of Harvard students during the 1980s: “Many students drift through Harvard with a nagging sense of failure and anxiety. ‘There is so much freedom here,’ says Kiyo Morimoto, ‘that studies become extracurricular. And you can’t get through if your studies are extracurricular.’ … [A] former Radcliffe student … [said] ‘You didn’t have to go to class because nobody took attendance. And you could get unlimited extensions on papers during the term.’”

The article stated, “Morimoto is worried about Harvard’s objections to using authority all up and down the line: It’s not insisting that students get papers in on time, not insisting on formal meetings between students and advisers, students and tutors, even between students and faculty. ‘Harvard is deeply ambiguous about authority,’ he says, ‘about being firm and clear and unambiguous. Today all authority is seen as negative.’”

But there is some hidden authority at Harvard that needs to be examined.

President Larry Summers was forced from his job at Harvard about two years ago because he made a politically incorrect statement (though many people agreed with it). He offended an ultra-liberal group of faculty members, and they pushed him out.

Newsweek magazine wrote an article March 6, 2006, saying it was concerned about the direction Harvard and all colleges and universities were going. But the issue was quickly forgotten and nothing was done—as usual.

So the faculty—at least a segment of it—won’t give Harvard’s president the authority to rule the university. It’s all about who is in charge. Harvard University has the largest endowment of any university in the country at $34.9 billion. That’s almost as much as Bill Gates’s charitable foundation has. How much does that money and power influence the nation?

In a 2005 study, 72 percent of college professors admitted to being liberal. Glenn Beck recently stated, “Most of our colleges and universities are only working to spread the radical political views of some of their professors” (cnn, May 14). That’s a very condemning statement, yet it rings true in light of the Larry Summers resignation. He was forced from his job when even most of the students didn’t want to see him go! That is authority. You wouldn’t call that a democracy, would you? You could call it tyranny by a small group of the faculty. And where is it leading us in our education today? That $34.9 billion endowment gives Harvard a hefty influence on the national psyche. That makes this issue extremely important.

Nicholas Lemann wrote this in Time magazine when Summers was about to leave: “One of Summers’ star faculty hires, psychologist Steven Pinker, told the Harvard Crimson just before the resignation announcement that he feared Summers was going to become ‘like every other college president—just a caretaker, a fundraiser, and a mouther of platitudes’” (Feb. 26, 2006).

This is one of the top educators today making this condemning statement about education and the government in education. That, to me, is frightening. Are presidents just caretakers, fundraisers, and mouthers of platitudes? Do they just say what they’re told to say? They are certainly not allowed to lead.

If the president had real authority, the public and our national government could hold him accountable. But who can control a shadowy, tyrannical segment of the faculty? It seems nobody has the power to stop this shamefully destructive force in education!

Let’s not forget that the existence of civilization is at stake.

What is the problem with all these changes in education? For 6,000 years, man has virtually destroyed every part of this creation he was intended to beautify and maintain. Throughout that time, man has experimented with what is right and wrong, and educated himself in this knowledge. The result? “[H]umanity has produced … a vast mountain of evils,” Mr. Armstrong wrote in the August-September 1970 issue of the Plain Truth. “His fund of knowledge is a mixture of good and evil—true and false—he has produced a civilization full of empty lives, discontent, unhappiness, pain and suffering, crime, immorality, broken homes and family life, corruption, injustice, unfairness, violence, pollution, war and death. Yet man refuses to believe the results of his own experiment.”

The fruits of our educational experiment are out there for everybody to see, and the experiment has failed! Why? Because there is a missing dimension in that experiment.

Today, colleges are attended by more students than ever before. Yet all these educated people cannot solve the problems between nations; they are not preventing economic troubles, family breakdown and other miserable modern-day conditions. This is a paradox!

“For decades now, many of the most educated scientists have insisted that the solution to all of the problems of society could be found if only we were given sufficient knowledge,” we wrote in our booklet Education With Vision (free upon request). “It seems the great educators and politicians of the day still cling to such faulty logic. It is time for the great minds of this day to face facts. World evils are increasing as fast as knowledge. Why the paradox? Can the increase in knowledge and the skyrocketing evils possibly be connected?”

The knowledge we have today is not curing our evils or preventing new ones. That should tell you that something is wrong with our knowledge and education! Do you know what it is? This world’s educators have simply closed their eyes to the great Creator God who gave us a Book telling us how to live—the foundation of all knowledge.

Education today doesn’t teach us how to solve our problems, and the Bible is not permitted in the classroom. We’ve allowed that to happen, and now we’re paying the price. Now, when we’re more educated than ever before, we face the most dangerous times ever! The day of reckoning is here: Our number-one problem is human survival!

Harvard began with the heaviest emphasis on God and the Bible. Today, that institution scorns and totally rejects the Bible as God’s inspired Word. There is an awesome and revealing lesson in this history. Are these educators humble enough to learn from their own history?

The founders of Harvard also taught that there is an evil spirit being who fights to get control of what we teach our people. That too is biblical (2 Corinthians 4:4). If these founders were resurrected today, they would recognize a deadly hidden authority behind even the small group of faculty directors.

The original Harvard faculty would have seen all the “freedom” today as the most horrifying kind of bondage. They would have seen precise design behind this “higher education.”

Where is education taking us today? Request our free booklet Education With Vision for the answer.

Surveys have shown that 95 percent of our students believe in God when they enter college as freshmen. When they graduate four years later, 95 percent of them are agnostics or atheists. That is the power of education—right or wrong.

Those are alarming statistics! How could that happen? The New Testament states, “their eyes they have closed” (Matthew 13:15). Colleges and universities will allow many wild theories to be taught, but they reject Bible instruction—even though many of them began as religious institutions. They have closed their eyes and minds.

Is that “higher education,” or is it the worst kind of ignorance? How can closing your eyes be called education? Isn’t education supposed to open your eyes? (Request our booklet The Proof of the Bible. All of our literature is free.)

As Harvard goes, so goes American education—and the nation itself.