Could Harvard Have a Hoover Institution?

Walking straight through the center of Stanford’s campus, one conspicuous building looms above the rest. It’s the Hoover Tower, a 285-foot-tall, 14-story-high landmark — and one of the most recognizable buildings at the university. The narrow stucco fortress stands plain and unadorned, capped by a red shingled dome. The 14th floor contains an observatory, the 13th a carillon with 48 bells that ring out over campus, and the first floor a former radio room that broadcast military news to the front during World War II.

Despite all the ways the Hoover Tower’s physical presence is felt, it also houses one of the most isolated centers at Stanford — the Hoover Institution. Like the tower itself, the research-based public policy think tank, colloquially characterized as conservative, stands out at a school whose student body is vastly liberal.

The Hoover Institution is remarkably separate from the rest of the University. Its endowment remains independent, its governance is largely autonomous, and its fellows do not teach within the university unless otherwise Stanford-affiliated.

While it officially identifies as nonpartisan, Hoover adopts overarching “ideals of peace, individual liberty, free enterprise, and limited government,” according to its website’s vision of the institution, and is widely understood to harbor a conservative lean.

No parallel institution calls Harvard home. The Kennedy School, Harvard’s public policy school, has a certain inside-the-Beltway reputation — but not a particularly right-leaning one. Instead, a web of student-led and independently-run conservative organizations to attempt to create spaces for conservative thought to flourish at a similarly left-leaning university.

Some of these organizations have physical locations, too. The Harvard Salient raised $88,000 online last year to rent its new headquarters, located near the Harvard Kennedy School. (The Salient is on thin ice for the time being: It was recently suspended by its board of directors for publishing material considered “reprehensible, abusive, and demeaning,” then slapped with a cease-and-desist letter when its student leaders refused to comply.) The Abigail Adams Institute, a center for humanities scholarship that receives support from conservative donors, is housed just minutes from Harvard Yard. Though not as prominent as Hoover Tower, these spaces represent a vibrant, and perhaps more organic, presence of conservative opinion on Harvard’s campus.

And that presence is growing — or at least becoming more visible. For decades, the share of conservative-leaning students at Harvard has been vanishingly small, championed by a vocal few. Others maintain that their voices are often drowned out by an overwhelming liberal consensus. While politics in the Yard tend to run blue, among the few who lean red, a campus party rebranding has drawn in more energy, media, and supporters.

The Trump administration, for its part, has taken notice of the political tilt on Harvard’s campus. The president and his allies have lamented what they see as a dearth of viewpoint diversity at Harvard, launching a legal battle against the school in April and repeatedly characterizing the university as a far-left, antisemitic “liberal mess” full of anti-American “crazed lunatics.”

As Harvard sought a deal with the White House this summer, the Wall Street Journal reported that University leaders — led by Provost John F. Manning ’82, a conservative legal scholar — have been in talks with administrators and donors about a potential hub for conservative scholarship, “possibly modeled on Stanford’s Hoover Institution.”

No such plans have materialized, though Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 committed in April to the “establishment of a University-wide initiative to promote and support viewpoint diversity.”

Within Harvard College, Harvard’s undergraduate school, the idea surfaced as part of broader discussions with conservative students. Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh and Dean of Students Thomas G. Dunne held a series of four summertime discussions with select publicly conservative students. Former Harvard Republican Club president Michael Oved ’25 was present for some of the meetings, as well as at least one other conservative student leader. College Dean David J. Deming also attended one of the talks.

The discussions covered a range of changes conservative students might be interested in seeing, from more right-wing faculty to the elimination of gender neutral bathrooms from the Houses. They also covered another potential change — Hoover at Harvard. Or, rather, a Hoover-inspired institution that would constitute a center for conservative scholarship and policy research.

But conversations with students and faculty familiar with both Hoover and Harvard suggest that they may not be receptive to the approach — skeptical that establishing a conservative research juggernaut would amount to more than a bureaucratic intervention. Harvard would also face a challenge to balance pressure from too many interests — including a dual mandate of nonpartisanship and support of conservative students.

‘A Time Capsule of a Bygone Era’

Herbert Hoover, the Hoover Institution’s creator and 31st United States president, took a strong interest in foreign relations and worked in China and Eastern Europe before ascending to the White House. He is the only U.S. president to have ever spoken fluent Chinese.

The Institution is loyal to its founder, whose address to the Board of Trustees of Stanford University in 1959 serves as Hoover’s mission statement to this day. In the years since, Hoover has boasted notable fellows, from Milton Friedman to Henry A. Kissinger ’50 to Condoleezza Rice — the Institution’s current director — many of whom have served in Republican presidential administrations.

But Hoover fellows have also served in the Obama and Clinton administrations. The Institution broadly promotes itself as nonpartisan, avoiding political labels in its description of its mission and policies. Rice has addressed criticisms of Hoover’s right-leaning tendencies, arguing that fellows have made equal financial contributions to Republican and Democratic campaigns and that the Institution closely follows its mission statement, not a political party.

Several students and fellows who have worked at Hoover say that they were not struck by a particular institutional ideological slant. Samuel H. Davidson ’26, who worked as a summer research intern for Hoover’s program on “US, China, and the World,” notes a wide range of perspectives across the institution. In comparison to the primarily left-leaning world of higher education, “perhaps they attract within academia some more of the conservative voices,” he says.

Davidson and Sophia A. Craiutu ’29, who worked at Hoover for two consecutive summers in high school before coming to Harvard, agree that they didn’t feel involved in party politics during their internships, and neither of their research areas focused on flashpoints of political tension.

“I didn’t feel like I was being pulled one way or the other,” Craiutu says.

And indeed, a partisan bent might not even be what draws students to Hoover. The research assistant positions, internships, and fellowships available allow select students — from Stanford as well as other schools — to work at one of the most influential public policy think tanks in the country. But the availability of these opportunities doesn’t necessarily sanction widespread support for conservative students and their ideas among the rest of the Stanford community.

Yici “Isabel” Cai, a Stanford graduate now pursuing a master’s degree in East Asian regional studies at Harvard, feels that few of the students who work at Hoover are seeking out “Hoover’s stereotypical ideology — as in conservative-leaning.” Rather, she says, “they are just there for the research experience, they’re interested in a topic.”

Still, Hoover keeps its ideals of peace, individual liberty, free enterprise, and limited government in mind when setting its research priorities. “You recruit people who broadly hold those views, and you let them do their work,” says Stan A. Veuger, a former Hoover visiting fellow and a current Harvard lecturer in economics.

Once Hoover draws these policy experts, the Institution supports them in producing data-driven work with a distinct conservative inflection. Its Education Futures Council’s 2024 report prescribes decentralizing bureaucratic authority as a remedy to the current state of public education. Hoover’s Middle East and Islamic World Working Group and its program on “US, China, and the World” similarly approach foreign policy from a conservative angle, often advocating for leveraging U.S. power to pursue American interests abroad.

But Hoover’s agenda is under pressure today from all angles. Having faced decades of criticism from Stanford faculty and students for right-wing partisanship, the Institution has similarly received criticism for bowing to pressure from the left. As former Stanford Review editor-in-chief and Hoover research assistant Julia Steinberg wrote in an op-ed, “Hoover has gone woke.”

Steinberg was referencing the Pride Month programming that Hoover incorporated in 2023, including a celebration event and pride-themed lapel pins.

The Review’s current editor-in-chief, Abhi Desai, voiced a similar sentiment in another op-ed. “For decades, the Hoover Institution stood as conservatism’s intellectual wing, but in 2025, it feels like a time capsule of a bygone era,” Desai wrote. He argued that Hoover, still clinging to “pre-Trump” policies, has been “out of sync with the conservative base for years.”

“Letting Students Think”

Conservatism at Harvard has undergone its own ideological shifts since 2016, when the Harvard Republican Club rebuffed Trump’s party nomination, calling him a “threat to the survival of the Republic.”

Following Trump’s first term in office, members of the HRC reported feeling “torn” — caught between loyalty to conservative ideals and a chance to join the national MAGA reckoning. Some members argued that supporting Trump would erode the club’s credibility, while others saw his rise as a desired and long-overdue challenge to elite institutions like Harvard itself. This tension reflects a broader divide within the Republican Party — between the traditional establishmentarian restraint of the HRC and the new, confrontational style of the Trump-era resurgence.

In Trump’s 2020 rematch, the HRC offered a conditional and critical approval of his reelection bid. By 2024, that tension had decisively tilted toward the latter. The HRC’s meetings began to draw a larger and more vocal base, energized by the possibility of a national conservative comeback. The club’s visibility on campus grew, aided by high-profile events featuring MAGA-aligned speakers, such as Steve Bannon and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ’76, and by financial backing from prominent conservative donors, such as Kenneth C. Griffin ’89.

While the creation of Hoover might look like an olive branch to the conservative minority at Harvard that Trump claims is ostracized, many right-leaning student leaders see a makeshift gesture of appeasement instead.

“I see the appeal,” wrote Richard Y. Rodgers ’28, editor-in-chief of The Salient, in a statement to The Crimson. “But this is little more than an off-ramp for the Harvard administration. It lets them feign support for right-wing intellectualism and keep one or two milquetoast Romney-ites around in a tangential way — without ever doing the one thing Harvard actually needs to do: hire honest-to-God right-wing faculty.”

Harvey Mansfield ’53, a recently retired Harvard government professor and former senior fellow at Hoover, echoes that sentiment. The real issue, he says, isn’t the absence of a think tank — it’s the near-total ideological homogeneity of Harvard’s faculty. “The Kennedy School is a policy school that is totally run by liberals,” Mansfield says.

“The whole conservative outlook is missing at Harvard,” he adds. Mansfield has been a vocal advocate of affirmative action for conservative faculty and has applauded Trump’s criticisms of the University’s oversupply of liberal faculty voices.

Rodgers believes students themselves should counter that imbalance. The future of political thought at Harvard, he says, lies not in bureaucratic institutions, but in student-led spaces like his own. “That’s how the University can begin repairing the divisions it helped create — by letting students think and argue for themselves,” he wrote.

“The best thing Harvard could do for conservative spaces is open the doors to us like it does for liberal groups, and then get the hell out of the way,” Rodgers adds. The irony, he says, is that liberals don’t need sanctioned spaces at all. Aside from the official Harvard Democrats Club, liberal ideas animate campus discourse on their own. Conservatives, in contrast, are siphoned into predefined organizations — such as the Conservative Coalition within the ostensibly nonpartisan Institute of Politics.

Evan J. Doerr ’28, chair of the Coalition, agrees that at an ideal Harvard, conservative opinions wouldn’t require designated structures. But, he says, the “entrenched orthodoxy” of the IOP necessitated the Coalition’s founding last year. “My ultimate dream is for the Institute of Politics to be the place where the Conservative Coalition doesn’t need to exist,” he says.

“We don’t tell students what to think — we teach them how to think for themselves — and we help them hone their ideas across partisan lines on their journey to becoming great public leaders,” Harvard Kennedy School spokesperson Daniel B. Harsha wrote in a statement to The Crimson, in response to the IOP’s alleged partisanship.

For now, Julia G. Grinstead ’27, president of the Salient, agrees with Rodgers. Student groups, she says, offer a more “authentic” and “responsive” forum for debate — one unencumbered by the institutional choreography of a complex organization like Hoover.

‘The Rigorous Pursuit of Truth’

What differentiates Hoover from existing conservative groups on campus is its policy-oriented philosophy, students say. Isabel C. Hogben ’29, a fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute, says that she sees potential in the Hoover model because it could “organically” foster conversations with the “world more broadly,” rather than limiting discussions to Harvard-specific topics.

That interaction outside of the Harvard bubble is also key for students interested in a dedicated policy-oriented think tank at the University. Part of that ability to engage comes from Hoover’s autonomous endowment, which Davidson points out “probably does make a difference” in supporting Hoover’s independent scholarship when compared to opportunities at the Kennedy School.

Creating a Hoover-like think tank could appeal to students like Davidson and Craiutu, who desire policy opportunities. “There could be more space at Harvard for this really focused policy analysis of China and less academic analysis,” Davidson says as an example.

For student leaders like Oved — whose recent term leading the HRC saw its mailing list increase eightfold — institutional independence could also foster the kind of intellectual exchange Harvard seeks to sustain. “At the core of Harvard’s mission is Veritas, is the pursuit of truth, the rigorous pursuit of truth, and that is only attained through the exchange of ideas,” he says.

“If Harvard as an institution can find a way to foster greater debate and great dialogue among its student body — the greater exchange of ideas, the pursuit of what Harvard deems so essential to its mission, the pursuit of Veritas — that, I think, is an ideal,” he says.

Whether or not a Hoover-like institution represents the answer to Harvard’s conundrum, its success in facilitating civic discourse would require student buy-in. Rodgers suggests that some conservative students have already found a sense of satisfaction in their own student-run organizations and have little interest in a Harvard-branded equivalent of Hoover.

The gap between Hoover’s work and Harvard’s conservatism isn’t just a difference of coasts — it's one of philosophy. Hoover’s thinking is based in pragmatism, but Harvard’s conservative revival is more interested in theory. Students cite Aristotle and Burke more often than they do Reagan, and prefer to debate Machiavelli’s virtues over marginal tax rates. Their project is more moral and metaphysical, and less about optimizing systems than recovering purpose. To some of Harvard’s conservative student leaders, Hoover’s policy realism fails to address their concerns.

“I’m not particularly interested in ‘viewpoint diversity.’ I’m interested in Veritas Christo et Ecclesiæ,” Rodgers wrote. The phrase, which translates to “Truth for Christ and the Church,” was the University’s original motto. “Harvard would do well to rediscover that interest,” he adds.

—Magazine writer Caroline G. Hennigan can be reached at caroline.hennigan@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @cghennigan.

—Magazine writer Mira M. Nalbandian can be reached at mira.nalbandian@thecrimson.com.