Harvard’s Radicalization: Lower Standards, Middle Eastern Cash, Politicization

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I wanna talk about a little esoteric topic very quickly: law schools. Specifically, our so-called elite law schools: Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, Stanford Law School, UC Berkeley’s law school.

I know you think, “Well, who cares?” Well, we should care.

The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you. Donate now

If we look at all of these district judges that are issuing injunctions against President Donald Trump or we look at many of the most powerful people in the Obama or Biden Justice Department, or even anybody’s DOJ, or if we look at these PACs and political organizations that are trying to influence public opinion and look at the lawyers, we find these law schools—Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Duke—mentioned all the time.

And the problem with them is that they’re no longer empirical. About 95% of their faculties are Democratic or left-wing. And more importantly, they have started to do things they didn’t do in the past. They’ve lowered their admission standards and they have become politicized and they’ve been recipients of large amounts of foreign cash.

Let me give you a few examples.

As we speak right now, Harvard University got together a group of its radical law students for a complete weekend-long session. You know what they were doing? They were trying to collectively go into Wikipedia and warp the descriptions of major law firms that had said to Harvard, “If you continue the antisemitism that is endemic on campus in general and at the law school in particular, we may not wanna hire you.”

So, they were retaliatory. And they were going through their entire caseload to try to damage them in the public eye on Wikipedia.

At the same time this was happening, though, Harvard was always traditionally ranked, along with Yale or Stanford, No. 1, No. 2. It dropped out of the top five. It dropped out of the top five by the U.S. News & World Report rankings, which kind of polls admissions officers and tries to get the general opinion of the relative merit of each of these law schools.

And it reflects something else that was going on at Harvard. Harvard has a traditional math class—it’s very difficult—that most undergraduates are supposed to take, but they couldn’t pass it. So now, Harvard, because they have changed their admissions—and remember for three or four years, like other campuses, they didn’t rate comparative GPAs or really require the SAT—they have to have remedial math at Harvard.

And what am I getting at? These law schools then, by changing their curricula to diversity, equity, and inclusion and changing their admissions policy, where they were not looking at the LSAT or grade point averages in the way they used to say was important, and more importantly, in garnering huge amounts of money from the Middle East, Qatar in particular—if you go back to any news account from 2010 to 2020, it’s all about Qatar and Middle East money pouring into places like Harvard Law School.

So, what am I getting at? They created people who, under their own—people, students—under their own requirements a decade or two earlier wouldn’t have qualified. They changed their curriculum and they became politicized. And especially, they reflected the interest of radical groups in the Middle East. And the result is law firms, when they see the recent graduates, they get disappointed.

I want to just end with Stanford Law School. They follow that same trajectory. And in 2022, only about 84% passed the bar on the first try. Five other law schools—this was when Stanford was rated No. 2 in the country. The University of Southern California had a much higher rate.

Stanford went into full panic. They said, “Oh my gosh, the post-George Floyd admissions, the change in the curriculum, our students are not passing. We’ve got over 15% flunk the bar from Stanford.” And by the way, the California bar had lowered its standards and it had itself become woke.

So, what did Stanford do? Well, very quietly, they began to readjust their admissions policy. They began to get more, not a lot, but two, three, four conservative or at least middle-of-the-road law professors and they began to crack down on radical student activism. This year, 95% passed. Just, three years, two-and-a-half years later in 2024.

So, what am I getting at? The law schools are very important. They’re very politicized. And they went in a politicized, ideological direction rather than empiricism and traditional law curriculum. And the result is that law firms and agencies look at these law graduates and they’re not impressed.

And that’s why, for example, Vanderbilt is starting to surge up to 14. Cornell is going down to 18. And we’re watching a very interesting transformation.

Wouldn’t it be good that we just hire people not on their blue-chip brand—Harvard, Stanford, Yale—but actual quality of their graduates to the degree they pass bars on the first try, they are impressive in interviews?

And in that case, if we were to do that, I think these Ivy League and prestigious schools would have to adjust very, very quickly and stop the politicalization, the foreign money coming in, and especially, the antisemitism.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.