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Forty-five years ago today, Gateway Editions/Henry Regnery published my first book, Harvard Hates America. Little did I know back then that education — and specifically what went on inside the classroom — would become a major national campaign issue. It may have taken these 40-plus years but it is indeed time that our country wakes up to what is happening at all levels of education.
At the time of publication, I was a second-year student at Harvard Business School. Two and a half years earlier, I had graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College.
The book caused a firestorm of protest in many quarters. Although there were no conservative-leaning media in those days, the book earned surprisingly strong — and fair — publicity from the so-called mainstream media. Reviews were good. Television shows booked me, and there was no censorship of me or my views.
The book had a series of premises that seem even more relevant today:
- I illustrated through my own experiences on campus, as an undergraduate at Harvard, that hypocrisy was a hallmark of many liberals. They preached one thing while living another. I told the true story of a government professor who was also an adviser to then-Democratic presidential nominee Sen. George McGovern (S.D.). The professor bragged to a group of students one day that “it is not right for some people to be born poor and others to be born rich.” He advocated massive redistribution of wealth to “equalize everyone.” Later, I learned he was married to a wealthy industrial heiress and lived off her inheritance.
- Such hypocrisy was all over the campus. Students railed against “the corrupt system” and then hopped into their Mercedes-Benzes and whipped off to Boston for lunch.
- I had a history tutor in my sophomore year who, on the first day of class, announced, “I am a Marxist and I will be teaching you American history this year through a Marxist perspective.” For the next nine months, every class and every paper were judged by a man who rewarded with higher grades those who regurgitated his leftist propaganda — and punished through lower grades those who disagreed with him.
- After four years as a Harvard undergraduate, I had come to realize that much of the teaching at Harvard was a subtle indoctrination, which rewarded the regurgitation of leftist mantras and punished those of us who refused to buckle to the Left.
- There was also an arrogant, smug sense of superiority throughout the Harvard campus, combined with condescension for average, regular people, that seemed to declare: “I am at Harvard, so I must be smarter than everyone else.”
Then, at Harvard Business School (HBS), I encountered an entirely different mentality:
- During my years there (1977-1979), HBS was oblivious to ethics. None of the business case studies we used as teaching instruments included an ethical dilemma. In fact, those who raised concerns in class were ridiculed by classmates. The one formal second-year class taught about ethics wasn’t even a business school class; it was a joint production of the business school and Harvard Divinity School.
- The consensus of opinion in those days was that we were being trained to be corporate officers whose job was to “maximize return to the shareholders.” Period. Nothing else mattered. I came to label this the Big Business Mentality.
- Within years came the Wall Street film starring Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko, whose most famous line was, “Greed is good.” That indeed summarized HBS in the late 1970s. Many of my fellow HBS students were obsessed with making money, to the detriment of their marriages, their families and what is moral and right.
- One of my classmates was Jeff Skilling, with whom I had an epic in-class disagreement over a case study. Years later, he would be convicted in the Enron case and sent away to federal prison for 19 years — for almost the same behavior he had advocated in class in 1978. For several decades, Skilling would be America’s most nefarious business criminal, until he was supplanted by Bernie Madoff.
These two experiences — first at Harvard College, with its inherent hypocritical leftist indoctrination, and then Harvard Business School, with its excessively greedy and selfish Big Business Mentality — combined to be the heart of Harvard Hates America.
Today, we as a country have changed in some ways — and not so much in others.
The liberal indoctrination I experienced at Harvard College years ago is no longer confined to one Ivy League university; it has spread throughout other colleges and universities, and also downward into high schools and elementary schools. More and more teachers take it upon themselves to “indoctrinate” instead of to teach. Over the years, many people have shared their similar experiences in their schools. And now comes the widespread debate over whether or not critical race theory is being taught in our kids’ classrooms. You can bet that, in one form or another, it is indeed being at least subtly introduced by some teachers.
There is also a smug arrogance, reminiscent of what I experienced at Harvard, displayed by many teachers who, protected by lifetime tenure, see their role to be a social activist. No wonder so many Americans today reject higher education, experts and science. Beginning as young students, they have been repelled by the arrogance, the condescension and the sense of superiority that has been lorded over them.
In our country during these past 45 years, the Big Business Mentality has resulted in an enormous income disparity/pay gap in corporate America, which is contributing to the divisiveness in our country. Can we blame workers for protesting when their bosses make several hundred times their pay? General Motors CEO Mary Barra was paid $29 million last year, which is 361 times the $80,000 the average GM worker makes.
To its credit, Harvard Business School has changed course since Enron and other scandals. Ethics issues now are embedded in the cases and class discussions.
But Big Business has not addressed the pay gap; in fact, it continues to grow annually. Until this disparity is fixed, we will remain a divided nation.
Politically, the education issue — leftist indoctrination by some teachers — has become a central tenet of Republican politics. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin owes his 2021 election to the feeling that the educational system is biased, teaching an ultra-leftist agenda and telling parents they should butt out.
Until and unless we do a better job of educating our young, loving and praising traditional American ideals, from preschool through graduate school, we will continue to struggle as a divided, angry country.
John LeBoutillier has written four books besides “Harvard Hates America,” including the upcoming historical novel, “Madame Whitney: The Richest Woman in the World” (MacDougal Alley Press) with Mary Quillen. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives (R-N.Y.) from 1981-1983.
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