In the early 2010s, the Salient, Harvard’s conservative student publication, quietly fizzled out. Then, in November 2021, students across campus found copies of the paper dropped in front of their doors.

Boasting four American flags on its cover and the title “Revising America,” the issue began with an introduction to the revived publication: since the “collapse of the old Harvard Salient,” the editors wrote that Harvard’s campus had a “marked dearth, not only of conservative thought, but of political thought in general.”

That same year, the Institute of Politics saw the creation of its Conservative Coalition, a space for conservative discourse within Harvard’s predominantly progressive political space.

In the years since, as more and more copies of the Salient pile in front of students’ doors, conservative thought on campus has also flourished — even as the University has come under heightened scrutiny for its lack of academic freedom.

Membership in the Harvard Republican Club has risen significantly, attracting hundreds of new students over the past year. This year, the IOP launched a conservative mentorship program, pairing students with powerful conservative leaders, providing a direct link between campus and national political influence.

But beneath this fervor are campus conservatives who have been operating more quietly, trading discussions of electoral politics for philosophical discourse and reading classical texts. They are found in groups like the Salient, the John Adams Society, and the Abigail Adams Institute, concerned with revitalizing debate and the humanities at Harvard. But while some of these organizations are ostensibly non-partisan, the truth they are pursuing is often steeped in — and used to justify — traditional, conservative values.

They are “idealistic conservatives,” wrote Issac T. Jirak ’25 in a Salient article this April — the academic conservatives who lend their policy-focused “rural” or “empirical” counterparts “the language and ideas they need to defend their political stance.”

Jirak claims that Harvard’s intellectual conservatives must “cure the decay of conservative values” in rural conservatives across the country who have gradually succumbed to “liberal ideology.”

Ask them, and they might insist that theirs is not so much a political project as is a philosophical one: rescuing the pursuit of deep truths and the Western canon from a University which has lost interest. Many said they shirked political labels or may not vote for former president Donald Trump, and they represent a range of policy positions.

But this same insistence on deep questions has also informed a rising conservative political movement — the so-called “New Right” — which eschews traditional Republican party politics in favor of more philosophical, and often more radical, views. Christopher F. Rufo — a leading conservative activist and Harvard antagonist — quotes Machiavelli; billionaire donor Peter Thiel was heavily influenced by obscure philosophers like Leo Strauss and René Girard and questions the very foundations of post-Enlightenment “progress”; and vice presidential nominee JD Vance, a mentee of Thiel’s, underwent his own philosophical transformation toward a Catholicism-hued postliberalism.

And at Harvard, it’s hard to see these two developments as necessarily separate: Thiel spoke at a conference this February organized by the Salient and other conservative organizations on campus. Harvey C. Mansfield ’53, one of Strauss’s most prominent followers, taught generations of Harvard conservatives until his retirement in 2023. And though the students themselves may deny any involvement with overt activism, they are frequently channeled into roles at some of the country’s most influential conservative organizations.

“Most of my students are outside academia,” Mansfield says with a hint of pride in his voice. “As I used to like to say, they run Washington instead of running Harvard.”

‘Philosophy Is in Danger at Harvard’

Sitting in a circle in sofas and armchairs in a book-filled office, 12 students and local professionals spend their Friday afternoon debating the meaning of ambition. There’s no dress code, but there may as well have been — not a single person is in jeans. One late-comer greets the room energetically before joining the circle, his “I love Jesus” socks peeking out above his loafers.

They are gathered at the Abigail Adams Institute, founded in 2014 to revive “traditional humanities education at Harvard.” Located one door down from the Harvard Catholic Center, the institute describes its mission as non-partisan, offering programming on classical texts and so-called “great ideas.”

The attendees at this week’s “Abby’s Coffeehouse” are clearly well-read in philosophy, casually referencing Plato and Girard in their debate of what is good. At first glance, the gathering appears like a typical Harvard book club. But the purpose of their weekly meetings — and the institute itself — extends beyond that.

The Abigail Adams Institute is founded on the belief that Harvard’s humanities education is lacking. Its director, Danilo Petranovich ’00, wrote last year that AAI seeks to protect the “special seclusion and separation from everyday affairs that once marked college years.”

The call for “seclusion” comes as many conservatives argue that universities like Harvard have become too intertwined with today’s progressive politics. The classroom, they say, should foster debate around foundational questions of virtue, human nature, and political life — topics that modern progressives are perhaps too afraid to tackle.

Conservative students “see the wisdom in the ancients, and the progressives are not so much interested in wisdom as in power and equality,” Mansfield argues.

Harvey C. Mansfield ’61, former Government professor and an advocate for classical political philosophy, says he has never taught a class on conservatism. “Conservative is a kind of political position, more than it is an intellectual one,” he says. By Mae T. Weir

As a result, students like Fred W. Larsen ’24, a former AAI fellow and student of Mansfield’s, say “philosophy is in danger at Harvard.”

Mansfield was deeply influenced by Leo Strauss, a 20th-century German American philosopher, who focused on reviving ancient philosophy as a counter to the relativism of modern political thought. While Strauss was not explicitly conservative, he argued that modern students should look for hidden wisdom in the writings of canonical thinkers like Aristotle and Plato.

It’s not an approach that’s available to just anybody. Only the “esoteric” reader, so to speak, can parse through the layers of irony and contradiction to locate the true teachings that Strauss says are at the hearts of foundational texts. Sparknotes and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy just don’t cut it.

“The real contradictions in a thinker like Plato lie deep beneath the surface,” one writer argues in a February 2022 Salient article. “The average student never gets that deep, because he spends all his time at the surface creating a strawman to knock down in class.”

But Harvard’s conservatives say they are up to the task.

“Trump has opened the gate through which we might enter history. So let the venturing conservative heed the advice of Strauss and define himself on the questions upon which the liberal cannot tolerate an answer,” a student using the pseudonym Ira Eldredge wrote in the Salient’s April 2024 issue.

“Strauss reminds us of the permanency of political problems and the eternal value of philosophies that has never changed throughout time,” Larsen echoes.

True philosophers, Strauss held, tackled such permanent problems for what they were, without regard for the political mores of the era — even at the risk of ostracization or exclusion. Nowadays, that might translate to eschewing progressive social norms or “woke” orthodoxy.

Many writers in the Salient adopt this approach themselves, pulling from the texts of ancient philosophers to defend their rejection of progressive politics, under pseudonyms taken from the likes of Hippocrates and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius.

The “little bit of historical reminiscence,” as Mansfield puts it, is perhaps part of the appeal.

David A. Vega ’24, who took Mansfield’s course on the history of modern political philosophy, stressed the sense of belonging to an intellectual lineage. “Mansfield is attempting to kind of trace a strong historical lineage in the history of philosophical thought,” he says.

It is an intellectual tradition, one that stretches from the ancients to modern philosophers, allowing students to feel like they are participating in something larger than themselves: a narrative of Western thought that positions them as guardians of a certain kind of intellectual rigor.

But it also allows students to engage with ideas that sit, somewhat provocatively, outside the bounds of “normal” American political discourse: critiques of progress, of equal democracy, of liberalism.

In the Salient’s September issue, “Ira Eldredge” used Aristotle’s warning that democracy believes “those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects” to argue that Harvard’s affirmative action, grade inflation, and DEI officers have destroyed the value of merit at the university.

And in May, a student donning the name “Publius,” the pseudonym used in the Federalist Papers, pointed to the “noble myths” of the Roman empire’s founding to criticize the idea of America as “a nation of immigrants.” They advocated instead for a national identity centered around the Founding Fathers’ vision of a “grand moral order, one inspired by the Christian faith”or “Johnny Appleseed’s plantings and George Washington’s tobacco fields.”

But while certain elements smell of conservative radicalism, the overall project, many said, remains essentially — comfortably — nonpartisan.

“If there is a philosophy of Strauss, I would contend it’s really just philosophy itself, unending search for wisdom, truth,” Larsen says.

‘Pursuing the Truth in a More Intellectual Way’

The pursuit of wisdom through big questions or debates implies the existence of a single truth — one that, as many of AAI’s events illustrate, often embodies socially conservative values that are parrotted in right-wing political spheres.

As Abby L. Carr ’25, co-chair of the Harvard Conservative Coalition, explains, conservatism partly hinges “an appeal to a moral foundation,” namely the belief that “there is an absolute right and wrong.”

On Oct. 1, the AAI hosted its annual lecture, promoted by posters across Sever Hall that asked passers-by “Is marriage necessary?” and “Does our economy prevent family flourishing?” Taught by Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, a University of Pennsylvania economist, the talk revolved around the need to increase America’s fertility rate. This, Fernández-Villaverde said, is “our top national priority.”

“The drop in marriage rates accounts for all the recent drop in fertility,” Fernández-Villaverde argued. And, in addition to reaping financial benefits, he explained that married people are happier and healthier.

Near the end of the lecture, he pointed the captive listeners — mainly older white men — towards further reading, including a book titled, “Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization.” The book claims that Asian Americans, conservatives, faithful people, and “strivers” have defied anti-family messages of liberal elites.

In AAI and other organizations, many of the same people who study ancient philosophy also find truth in traditional views on family and gender roles. Mansfield, a longtime critic of feminism, has argued extensively that gender differences should dictate traditional roles within family and society. And this summer, the John Adams Society changed its slogan from “Harvard’s premier undergraduate debate organization for political and moral philosophy” to the “premier organization for the reinvention of man.”

These discussions provide intellectual fuel to a movement that’s become known as “neopatriarchy”: a push for a return to certain patriarchal values without directly advocating that women leave the workforce or fully return to domestic roles.

Vance, considered a leader of this movement, has become infamous for his rhetoric about “childless cat ladies” in positions of cultural and political influence, implying that those who choose nontraditional paths, such as remaining unmarried, contribute to societal decay.

And while Mansfield made it clear that he will not be voting for Trump and has strong disdain for him, he has nevertheless praised Trump for his rhetoric around gender roles and using “manliness” to win elections.

Past AAI events have echoed these ideas from Mansfield and Vance about gender and family structure. Last year, AAI partnered with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an organization of “conservatives who are upholding America's founding vision and the Western tradition,” to host a debate titled “Does Feminism Necessarily Undermine Family Life?” According to a poll of attendees, the winner was Erika Bachiochi, director of AAI’s Wollstonecraft Project, who argued that 19th century feminism was compatible with robust family life.

Other previous lectures include “Pro-Life Feminism Then and Now” and, featuring Mansfield, a panel titled “Are Men in Crisis?”

“The mix of the students that we get at Abigail Adams Institute does lean conservative,” Petranovich acknowledged. But, they “encourage all sorts of perspectives.”

Maura Cahill, director of communications and marketing at AAI, explains that the institute encourages “intellectual freedom and pursuing things that students might not get a chance to explore or they feel like maybe are underexplored in their classes at Harvard.” But the topics that AAI chooses to address and the events it provides are undergirded with a clear set of values, one that may be left out of classrooms because of its conservatism.

One floor above the Abigail Adams Institute on Arrow St., the Human Flourishing Program tackles similar questions. The program seeks to combine empirical research and the humanities to understand what leads to human well-being, focusing on the “pathways” to flourishing of family, work, education, and religious community.

“There are moral complexities and real disagreements on controversial moral issues, on questions, say, of abortion in this country,” says Tyler J. VanderWeele, director of the Human Flourishing Program. But, he argues, that people focus too much on disagreements and not enough on “where we agree,” noting virtues like courage, justice, generosity, and wisdom that are seen as moral across cultures.

He believes Harvard must provide an environment to “have these difficult conversations around what are often painful issues and questions on both sides.” HFP, he emphasizes, is composed of people on both sides of the political spectrum.

The conservative perspectives he sees as necessary to the pursuit of truth, however, range from studying the effect of decreasing religious service attendance on rising suicide rates to adding a “pro-life scholar of women’s health” to Harvard’s faculty. And, these views in practice led VanderWeele to sign an amicus curiae brief against legalizing gay marriage in 2015.

In response to criticism, he argues that conservatives would also say progressive views are harmful, such as their stance on abortion. “From the perspective of not all, but many conservatives, this is basically just allowing for what many view as the wrongful ending of innocent life — effectively murder,” he says.

While both non-partisan, the Human Flourishing Program and AAI are grantees of the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education, which “strengthens elite universities and forms the next generation of leaders” with an emphasis on human flourishing, truth-seeking, and free inquiry. Many of FEHE’s other grantees promote Catholic life, Christian intellectual tradition, and Western thought.

The draw to the Western canon and Catholic morals often goes hand-in-hand. After being raised Protestant, VanderWeele is now a practicing Catholic, something that has no doubt informed his controversial stances on abortion and gay rights. Several of the AAI fellows we talked to had converted to Catholicism during their time at Harvard and begun attending St. Paul’s Parish, the Catholic church neighboring AAI.

Conversions to Catholicism — among them, notably, Vance — have been noted as a trend in the conservative movement. Just as many in the New Right have sought wisdom from ancient philosophers, young men, reacting to a progressive world, find solace in the longstanding institution of the Catholic Church. In Western philosophers or Catholic teachings, the “truth” these conservatives find is a moral code that provides a solution to the failures of modern liberalism – at the university or nationwide – through the return to tradition.

Cahill explains that Catholicism “takes intellectual learning very seriously.”

“I think that’s very attractive to a lot of Harvard students who are pursuing the truth in a more intellectual way,” she says.

‘The World Outside Looks Different’

Another aspiring great thinker who found Catholicism is William Long ’19, a former AAI fellow who converted during his time at Harvard and led Harvard Right to Life, a pro-life student organization.

After graduating, Long formed the Cicero Society in Washington D.C., a parliamentary debate society influenced by his time in the John Adams Society and AAI. Like both Harvard organizations, the Cicero Society — which has become something of a meeting place for young New Right thinkers and operatives in D.C. — insists on being a home for those who want to continue the “Western intellectual tradition.”

And like John Adams, membership is application-only and decidedly exclusive.

Among the people we spoke to, all stressed nominally apolitical values of truth, intellectual exploration, and discussion. Several, like Mansfield, argued that what they do is not necessarily conservative, never mind Republican. Some declined to answer questions about their personal political ideology or who they are voting for, or, if they did answer, offered vague descriptions of pragmatism or differentiated between different types of conservatism.

Most avoided speaking on this subject altogether. Of the over 127 people we reached out to, just more than a dozen were willing to talk. All members of the Salient declined to speak, saying they would prefer to “use our own channels to promote our perspective.”

This distancing seems to fit into a broader trend of not wanting to publicly identify with ideologies that are increasingly unpopular on a liberal campus. Since its revival in 2021, the Salient switched to using pseudonyms for most of its writers. This summer, John Adams Society redesigned its website to remove any identifying information about its members or leaders, and the Harvard Republican Club only lists one name publicly, that of its president, Michael Oved ’25.

Oved and other conservatives attribute this to a fear of “social isolation.”

“Some of them worry that in expressing their Republican views in a public forum, they’ll lose friends over it. And that may be true,” Oved says. “The misconception is that you can’t be a Republican and have friends at Harvard.”

This rhetoric echoes that of Vance as he describes his time at Yale Law School. “If you were a conservative student with conservative ideas, you were terrified to utter them — terrified of being socially ostracized,” Vance said in a 2021 speech.

Rick Perlstein, a historian and journalist of American conservatism, notes that secrecy has long been a feature of conservative movements. “There’s always kind of this veil between what you can say publicly and what you have to keep hidden,” he says. “It suggests that they are expressing ideas that, if they attached their own names, would sound so outrageous that it would place their professional prospects at risk.”

A 2023 faculty survey by The Crimson found that only 2.5 percent of surveyed faculty identified as conservative, while a separate Crimson survey of the class of 2027 found 8.4 percent of surveyed students identified as conservatives. Small, insular debate and philosophy groups may be the only avenues to explore conservative ideas in a predominantly liberal environment.

Yet for this apparent aversion to backlash, these campus organizations and students are embedded in a much broader network for conservative students, supported by those outside Harvard with a vested interest in supporting the new generation of leaders.

“A lot of Republican students kind of know that the world outside looks different than in Harvard,” says Bridget K. Toomey ’22, former co-chair of the IOP Conservative Coalition. Many of these students, who often feel they must operate with caution on campus, enter a completely different environment in the professional world. “If you want to work in D.C., about 50 percent of Capitol Hill offices are Republican, very different than the environment in the IOP.”

When the Salient was revived in 2021, it was supported by a grant from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which aims to fill “the void left by modern higher education” and is on the advisory board of Project 2025. On its most recent tax filing, the publication reported over $90,000 of income. In 2023, the AAI had a revenue of about $5.4 million, supported by grants and donations from alumni.

The AAI itself sponsors the David Network, a conservative conference across “elite institutions” that was founded by the brother of Jacob A. Cremers ’24, who orchestrated the Salient’s revival. The David Network’s conference last year boasted Mike Pence as its keynote speaker and provided networking opportunities with the National Review, the office of Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and federal judges.

Conservative students can also find mentors in faculty members or visiting fellows at the IOP. Toomey says that “because Harvard has the reputation of being such a liberal environment,” these faculty and fellows have been eager to support students. The newly launched conservative mentorship program at the IOP boasts two former governors and four former members of Congress.

As a result of these networks and support, many of those who distanced themselves from politics at Harvard have monumental roles in shaping them, shortly after graduation. Doing this, they follow a similar path to Vance, who moved from intellectual circles at Yale into the political spotlight, where his ideas are at center stage in current political discourse.

Mansfield’s former students include high-profile figures like U.S. Senator Tom B. Cotton ’99, a former Crimson Editorial editor, and political commentator Bill Kristol ’73, who now hold prominent roles in shaping conservative thought. Other Harvard alumni have become rising stars in the Republican party, namely Rep. Elise M. Stefanik ’06 — chair of the House Republican Conference — and 2024 Republican presidential candidate Vivek G. Ramaswamy ’07, who was described “as the candidate of the New Right.”

Current conservative students seem destined for similarly influential positions.

William N. Brown ’24, the Salient’s former Editor-in-Chief and a former John Adams Society chairman who gave a “Student Scholar Presentation” at AAI, is a fellow at Cooper and Kirk, a law firm which sued a school board to restrict protections for trans students and defended a ballot initiative to ban same-sex marriage in California.

Benjamin R. Paris ’21, a current student at Harvard Law School, went from serving as chairman of the John Adams Society to working at the Heritage Foundation on a “pro-family and pro-work welfare system” and fighting “arbitrary” regulations. The Heritage Foundation is the organization behind Project 2025, a proposed presidential transition project if Trump wins in November that has been relentlessly attacked by Democrats.

And Tyler A. Dobbs ’16, founding chairman of the John Adams Society, served as a summer associate at Cooper and Kirk and a clerk for Judge James C. Ho of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, who’s been listed as a potential Supreme Court nominee under Trump and who Vox once called the “edgelord of the federal judiciary.”

With the support of conservative mentors and a network of like-minded organizations, seemingly innocuous studies of philosophy and the classics translate into jobs in politics and law, where the conservative ideas whispered at Harvard are shouted wholeheartedly in policy briefs, on the presidential debate stage, and in the modern right-wing movement.

A Proud Lineage

In 1960, Mansfield, then an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, would spend Wednesdays driving to Palo Alto to attend a reading group at Leo Strauss’s house. According to Mansfield, Strauss was the most intelligent man he ever met.

However, this wasn’t Mansfield’s first introduction to Strauss. His mentors during high school and graduate school impressed the thinker onto him, and the year that Mansfield graduated from Harvard College, Strauss released his book “Natural Right and History,” something Mansfield — raised a Democrat but “disgusted with liberal relativism” at the time — read voraciously.

Two years after attending Strauss’s reading group, Mansfield joined Harvard’s faculty. And while he taught a long list of influential students throughout his 60 year tenure, in the late 90s, Petranovich attended his courses. After graduating from Harvard and finishing graduate school, Petranovich then obtained his first job as a literary assistant to William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of the National Review. Years later, Petranovich returned to Harvard to take the helm of the newly formed Abigail Adams Institute.

Now, Petranovich and Mansfield, in his retirement, pass along their knowledge to a new generation of Harvard students, some who study Strauss, others who intern at the Heritage Foundation, and many of whom go on to shape an evolving conservative movement.

But, until then, they debate, discuss, and read.

Corrections: November 1, 2024

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Benjamin R. Paris ’21 worked at the Heritage Foundation on “anti-marriage welfare policies.” In fact, his work at the Heritage Foundation focused on identifying such policies and proposing a “pro-family and pro-work welfare system.”

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the John Adams Society’s new slogan was the “premier organization for the reinvention of men.” In fact, it is the “premier organization for the reinvention of man.”

Clarification: November 1, 2024

This article has been updated to reflect that Benjamin R. Paris ’21 is currently studying at Harvard Law School.

Magazine writer and staff writer Rachael A. Dziaba can be reached at rachael.dziaba@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @rachaeldziaba.

Staff writer Saketh Sundar can be reached at saketh.sundar@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @saketh_sundar