Harvard gets schooled by China as America's universities choose activism over excellence
Harvard isn’t supposed to be chasing. It’s supposed to be leading.
Yet a new global ranking put out by Holland’s Leiden University — a measure of the number and importance of research publications — has Harvard down to third place worldwide, and both institutions ahead of it are Chinese. It gets worse for America: in the top 20, Harvard and the University of Michigan are the only U.S. universities. China takes 16 of the top 20 slots.
Unlike many such university lists, this ranking isn’t a reputational beauty contest, but a statistical analysis based on publication data. In other words, it’s one way of measuring what a research university is supposed to do: produce serious scholarship at scale.
So, if the most famous university in the world is sliding — and if China is dominating the top of the table — we should stop handwaving about "globalization" and start asking what, exactly, has gone wrong in American academia.
The answer is not that Americans suddenly got dumber. It’s that our universities have become less serious.
The center of gravity on many campuses has shifted in recent years from truth-seeking, merit and education to DEI, identity and activism. That dynamic shows up everywhere that matters for research production: hiring, teaching and the basic culture of inquiry.
Hiring increasingly rewards ideological compliance rather than intellectual excellence. Diversity statements and "commitment" litmus tests have become routine. Whole searches are designed to narrow the acceptable range of viewpoints and methodologies. When a university hires activists who happen to hold PhDs instead of scholars who happen to hold opinions, it should not be surprised when scholarship suffers.
Teaching has been reduced, in too many places, to therapeutic affirmation and political mobilization. Students get more indoctrination than instruction, producing graduates who aren’t equipped with the writing, numeracy and disciplinary rigor needed to power the next generation of research and innovation.
Research culture has become timid and conformist. Entire categories of questions are treated as morally impermissible to even ask. But real research requires risk: contesting assumptions, poking sacred cows and following the evidence wherever it leads. A campus that punishes dissent will eventually punish discovery.
And hovering over all of this is the growth of the diversicratic state: offices, trainings, compliance regimes, "bias response" systems and an endless paper trail that consumes money and time. Universities can call it "inclusion" all they want; functionally, it’s overhead, which is the enemy of productivity. In a previous Fox News piece, I argued that elite American institutions won’t just fix themselves because the incentives inside these places run toward ideology and away from excellence.
Meanwhile, China has been building research capacity like a state project — because it is one. It funds labs, scales programs, recruits talent and measures success in outputs that translate into technological and geopolitical power.
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Even 10 years ago, this contrast was stark. In the 2015 Leiden rankings, U.S. institutions dominated the top 20, with MIT, Harvard, and Caltech at the top. That’s not ancient history, but within the careers of almost all current university officials.
At the same time, institutional leaders that lecture Americans about "democracy" have been disturbingly casual about foreign cash, which typically comes with strings.
The federal government has repeatedly had to investigate universities for failures to disclose foreign gifts and contracts. In 2020, for example, the Department of Education investigated Harvard and Yale over potential failures to report large sums of foreign funding; Department of Education (DoE) records showed billions in foreign gifts from countries including Qatar and China. Last April, an executive order intended to remedy foreign influence noted that DoE investigations led universities to disclose $6.5 billion in previously undisclosed foreign funds.
And it’s not just money. U.S. law enforcement and congressional investigators have warned for years about programs designed to exploit America’s open research environment. The FBI describes Chinese "talent plans" as often incentivizing one-way transfers of research and intellectual property, sometimes through undisclosed affiliations and contracts. A Senate investigation similarly detailed how China’s talent recruitment programs were designed to extract research and expertise from the United States to advance China’s national goals.
The bottom line is simple: America’s universities are being outcompeted abroad while being hollowed out at home. If we want to reclaim research leadership, we need to reclaim the university’s purpose by doing at least four things:
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Harvard’s slip in the Leiden ranking isn’t a quirky statistic, but a warning light. China is surging because it’s focused on research, development and education. America is slipping because our universities have too often swapped those priorities for DEI bureaucracy, identity politics, and activism.
We can reverse this. But first we have to admit we have a problem.