Can the U.S. Be a Great Power Without Harvard?

Despite the institution’s formidable reputation, though, and for all of U.S. President Donald Trump’s fixation on bringing it to heel, the Harvard that the world thinks it knows is a surprisingly recent creation.

Over the decades, Harvard University has become so prominent in American culture that it is easy to mistake it for the prototypical modern university. Founded in 1636, Harvard is older than the United States itself. Besides this, there are few, if any, universities in the world that have a lower acceptance rate or more distinguished faculty. And Harvard’s $53 billion endowment is larger than the GDP of nearly 100 countries.

Over the decades, Harvard University has become so prominent in American culture that it is easy to mistake it for the prototypical modern university. Founded in 1636, Harvard is older than the United States itself. Besides this, there are few, if any, universities in the world that have a lower acceptance rate or more distinguished faculty. And Harvard’s $53 billion endowment is larger than the GDP of nearly 100 countries.

Despite the institution’s formidable reputation, though, and for all of U.S. President Donald Trump’s fixation on bringing it to heel, the Harvard that the world thinks it knows is a surprisingly recent creation.

Even well into the 19th century, Harvard was a place of stultifying, rote-like instruction. As late as the mid-20th century, acceptance rates were higher than 50 percent. And though Harvard is being pilloried by the White House for its international student body and supposedly undue emphasis on diversity, it was overwhelmingly dominated by Anglo-Saxons, leery of Jewish applicants, and all but closed to African Americans for most of its history.

These details are all gleaned from Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China by William C. Kirby, a former dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and former Harvard Business School professor. At the heart of Kirby’s engrossing book is the idea that “an enduring[ly] rich country cannot have, as a rule, poor universities.” And as the book suggests, nothing about Harvard’s current preeminence—or that of the United States’ world-leading university system—is a given.

The fact that Kirby’s book was written before the full thrust of Trump’s campaign against universities only serves to heighten a precarious sense of the United States’ position