How Harvard Made Me a Better Conservative

By Isaac T. Jirak

Source: Matthew Boyer via Flickr

Coming to Harvard for the first time was a jarring experience. I was raised in rural America—fewer people live in my hometown than in my dorm—and I had never visited the Northeast. As my plane touched down in Boston, my mind swam with the different visions of campus I had fabricated from a virtual tour. These idyllic pictures of Harvard’s ivy-covered walls, however, quickly dissipated as I dashed across a busy Massachusetts Avenue, lost in the bustle of gaping tourists and chattering students.

Don’t get me wrong; I was still a starry-eyed freshman marveling at Harvard’s grandeur. But I could tell there was something missing from Harvard—something I would struggle to articulate for months. Nevertheless, I eagerly followed the crowd, faintly acknowledging the inscription above Dexter Gate: “Enter to grow in wisdom.” Little did I reckon with the moral weight and responsibility that comes with such a charge. Just like I needed to turn around to read the rest of the gate’s inscription, “Depart to serve better thy country and thy kind,” I would need to look back on my past to better understand the foundation of my beliefs. 

I grew up in a conservative community, which instilled in me the traditional values that I hold today. In attending Harvard, I expected to face an uphill battle. My family and friends repeatedly told horror stories of alienated relatives who went off to school and returned as radically different people. “Congratulations,” they would say, “just don’t come back a liberal.” At Harvard, I found the polarized campus I expected, but what I did not expect was the conservative community that sought me out.

While I wasn’t intentionally searching for friends with particular political views, that was a natural consequence of building close friendships with people who shared my deeper-held values. It was not by design, but all of us were de facto conservative. Yet, as we discussed politics, I found the conversations differed from those back home. Instead of discussing the direct implications of a policy, they questioned the policy’s historical context and philosophical justification. My friends would regularly cite thinkers from Plato to Hegel, and I quickly found myself out of my depth. 

My understanding of politics hitherto had been quite limited to whatever I picked up from those around me. I had certainly never studied politics, and my understanding of conservatism was rather simple. Consequently, my brand of conservatism was empirical: I considered politics only in light of the immediate advantages or disadvantages of a policy. Just like Humean empiricism, empirical conservatism classifies a political action according to its tangible results. I was still mostly concerned with social policy, but I wasn’t worried about the philosophical basis of my ideas.

In rural America, empirical conservatism reigns because politics aren’t all that complicated. Sure, it’s difficult to enact the right policies and get the right people into office, but the highfalutin’ political theories really boil down to a few simple questions: what do you value, and how much are you willing to pay to fill up your gas tank? Political theory overcomplicates matters, and we can leave Machiavelli, Mill, and Nietzsche to the suits in D.C. Admittedly, this is a stereotypical view of rural America, but there is some truth to it—and some wisdom.

The value of a social structure is in its results. The suits in D.C. can philosophize all day long, but what does it matter to the people they serve if they cannot guarantee the things that really matter? People in rural America have bigger problems than whether a Lockean or Kantian view on the origin of the rights to property is correct. Moreover, ordinary people are usually more capable than academics at discerning what is good for themselves.

Nevertheless, I must defend the academic conservatives because, after all, I have become one. These academic conservatives subscribe to an idealistic conservatism which aims to see and actualize a complete system of beliefs. Conservatism isn’t about achieving any one goal but about achieving an ultimate end. A policy can therefore be rejected if it fails to promote a conservative ideal, even if at first glance it seems to have some positive short-term effects. 

This pursuit of lofty ideals, however, can often distract us from practical realities and distance us from the empirical conservatives. But I also believe that intellectual conservatism is necessary to cure the decay of conservative values I have witnessed in rural communities. In response to numerous setbacks promoting socially conservative values, rural communities are turning toward libertarianism. The education system in particular has suffered from this. Numerous cases of dissenting parents appealing to boards of education about some infringement on their parental rights might be cited.¹ Nonetheless, speaking to my personal experience, nothing has been so disillusioning as seeing the decline of my home community through a gradual acquiescence to liberal ideology. 

To its credit, these regressions are made with an eye for the bigger picture. The battle for education is not lost; nevertheless, rural communities are gradually giving in because of impositions from above. The state boards are mostly corrupt, schools in the cities are a hopeless mess, and every counterargument must appeal to the all-encompassing liberal perspective of education, which, of course, incriminates conservative perspectives. There are still battles left to fight, but rural communities are rapidly losing ground and are striving to retain what they have through tactical retreats. 

The problem with dogmatic enforcement of progressive ideals is this: it is not simply the administrators and teachers who are being forced into compliance, but the students who are having ideological propaganda forced down their throats, which will alienate them from the very community that has raised them yet is being ordered to instruct anathema. Teaching radical ideologies that oppose conservative beliefs forces the schools to articulate values that contradict the conservative values embedded in their social structures. It is not a school’s place to imbue its curriculum with specific sociopolitical views; this responsibility belongs to the family alone.

Even further, restructuring schools to instruct their own children in beliefs they condemn pits generations against each other to destroy communities. The worst part of promulgating liberal ideology in schools is the gradual degradation of conservative communities. Yet, with all these terrible consequences, these social prescriptions are being adopted by these communities because they do not realize their full toxicity. They do so because they have only ever had an empirical view of conservatism, and this view can make them rather heedless when it comes to protecting social institutions. They hold strong beliefs when it comes to faith, family, and community—as they have the right to do—but things become fuzzy when it comes to applying them to a political battle. 

Consequently, just as Ivy League conservatives need their rural counterparts to bring them back down to reality, the empirical conservatives need the idealistic conservatives to give them the language and ideas they need to defend their political stance. We are all, ultimately, part of the same movement and share common principles.

These principles were well articulated by the 20th century writer Russell Kirk.² Three of his ten ideals are particularly relevant to this problem:

(1)    “The conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order.”³

(2)    “Conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism.”⁴

(3)    Conservatives “feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems.”⁵

Properly understood, education is an unspoken relationship between parents and educators to foster social order by teaching the next generation about the “enduring moral order.” This understanding is largely the inheritance of the decisions and discoveries made by our predecessors. By participating in the education system, we assume a set of expectations and values that were mutually agreed upon in its creation. 

The modern prescription of ideology in the classroom, however, is a violation of this initial agreement because it redefines values and expectations without the consent of the community. Consequently, the initial decision which was made in cooperation between parents and educators is overruled by taking power out of the parents’ hands. These changes may seem subtle because modern educationists tell us that they have the singular responsibility for transmitting values to the next generation, but they are not. Indeed, disunifying parents and educators by promoting a foreign ideology can only damage this moral order. 

Inserting ideology in an essential societal structure is also a contradiction of Kirk’s second principle. Even if the educational system is prescribing an ideology consistent with conservative morals, the educational system is assuming the power to establish ideology by compelling the parents to comply with their pedagogy. The right to recognize a moral order belongs to the people and not to individual institutions. The educational system has been abstracted away from the people in the rural communities, and as a result, they are subjected to it. This is an inversion of the proper order that underlies this principle. The people are forced into “involuntary collectivism,” as opposed to the “voluntary community” that their predecessors had agreed to in establishing our schools.⁶

Last, coming to Kirk’s third point, it is essential to recognize why conservatives find these social structures so important. Why do conservatives find a common moral order so important to a society, and why must that order be directly sourced from that immediate society and not an externally-controlled school system? The reason is that conservatives deeply value the idiosyncrasies that make up each of these communities. In the case of the rural community, larger institutions, like the education system, are insensitive to the unique social circumstances of the people. 

Societies should be appreciated for their intricacies and not sterilized by some universal vision for an ideal society. Such a vision is against diversity, culture, and individuality. Therefore, what I am suggesting is a re-establishment of Kirk’s moral order that draws society together. Institutions like schools can participate in this process by helping preserve the unique characteristics of their communities, instead of trying to homogenize them with the broader culture. We ought not reduce every society to egalitarian sterility.

These principles are common to all conservatives; however, they are frequently only recognized by the idealistic conservatives. This is the value that idealistic conservatism has to offer to empirical conservativism. Realizing the full danger of liberal practices, I hope empirical conservatives can shed their libertarian mentality and recognize the crisis before them. While we cannot get carried away with idealism—philosophy can only get us so far—we might be more proactive in preventing the spread of liberal ideology. The harsh reality is that our political system is terribly flawed. But we must never grow despondent nor so eager for improvement that we fall into a system far worse than what we have now.

It is necessary for us to understand our past, not simply to see what has worked empirically but to understand what values have guided us. Understanding what we believe both gives us a robust defense against the encroachment of ideology and a definitive path forward. Looking back on my arrival to Harvard through Dexter Gate, I realize that my work here is not a desperate grab at the values I hold; it is a perpetual revision and integration of my past with my future. This is the distinguishing factor between my halcyon vision of Harvard and the comparatively pale complexion it had when I first came to campus. Harvard has lost its sense of history—it does not understand the very principles that hold it up. Despite the tempests that sweep up from the whirls of Massachusetts Avenue, however, I have not lost my values. Admittedly, I had hurried impetuously into Harvard under the guise “Enter to grow in wisdom,” but now I accept the charge that followed my arrival: “Depart to serve better thy country and thy kind.” 

FISHER AMES

A version of this article originally appeared in The Right Tomorrow, the April 2024 print issue of the Salient.

1. Paul Best, “Virginia Parents Protest Critical Race Theory Outside Loudoun County School Board,” Fox News, Sep. 13, 2022; “Clark v. State Public Charter Authority,” Liberty Justice Center, 2023; Aimee Cho & Walter Morris, “Montgomery County Parents Protest Literacy Lessons on Gender and LGBTQ+ Issues,” NBC News, Jun. 28, 2023.

2. Russell Kirk, “Ten Conservative Principles,” The Russell Kirk Legacy, March 19, 2007.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.