A conservative hire at Harvard

Conservatives have a unique ability to do three things simultaneously that are in seeming tension but actually make total sense. Without missing a beat, conservatives are at work attacking mainstream institutions for being crazy liberal, creating new conservative alternatives to those mainstream institutions, and trying to place conservatives within the existing mainstream institutions they are otherwise lambasting.

The three strategies are actually mutually reinforcing: external political pressure and competitive market forces actually push mainstream institutions to hire more conservatives.

Proof positive that the concept works comes this week in the news that Sherif Girgis, perhaps the most brilliant conservative legal mind of the rising generation, has accepted a tenured full professorship on the faculty of Harvard Law School. Girgis is truly remarkable, and in a fair world he would have received the same position on merit alone. But as we all know, merit alone is never enough for a conservative trying to rise in academia.

Girgis’s credentials evidence his worthiness for a Harvard slot: summa cum laude from Princeton, a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, and a J.D. from Yale before clerkships on the D.C. Circuit and U.S. Supreme Court, followed by a Ph.D. from Princeton. He is currently on the faculty at Notre Dame Law School in South Bend.

Girgis’s mentor and teacher, the also brilliant Robert George of Princeton, describes him as a “superstar.” George would know—they were coauthors of What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense (2012), alongside Ryan Anderson. The trio took on the difficult but important work of providing an intellectual account of the meaning of marriage through the cultural crucible of the same-sex marriage fight. George now says Girgis’s appointment to Harvard is “huge news in the academic world.”

True enough. It is huge news—it’s also not an accident.

First, Girgis’s appointment is a credit to Harvard’s current provost, John Manning. Himself a former HLS dean, Manning clerked for Judge Robert Bork and Justice Antonin Scalia and is a prominent scholar of textualism, the legal approach championed by Scalia. He’s long been associated with the Federalist Society, as has Girgis. As dean, Manning presided over the opening of the Antonin Scalia papers donated by the late justice’s family to Harvard’s Law Library.

When Manning took over as provost, he was replaced as HLS dean by his longtime deputy, John Goldberg. Not particularly political, Goldberg has mostly kept his head down and tried to lower the temperature on campus. It’s a far cry from former deans Martha Minow—a liberal advocate who was the favorite law school teacher of a young Barack Obama—and Elena Kagan, a Clinton presidential aide later nominated to the Supreme Court by President Obama.

Harvard has also faced significant external pressure, primarily from the Trump administration, to “do better” on a variety of topics. The administration has scrimmaged with Harvard on no less than four different legal fronts: admissions and affirmative action in the light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard; anti-Semitism and the university’s response to the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel; federal research grants and ongoing funding; and enrollment of international and exchange students.

Though the Trump Administration has yet to win any of these battles in court, Girgis’s appointment is evidence it is winning the larger war to advance institutional change at the university.

Conservative-leaning donors also play a role in changing the conversation on campus. Investing maven Ken Griffin has given over $500 million to Harvard, including signature gifts of $150 million in 2014 and $300 million in 2023. In 2024, he halted that philanthropy alongside other major donors nationwide who were frustrated by the leftism dominating their alma maters.

That one-two punch of inside actors and outside pressure is how we secure victories like this: a tenured professorship for a brilliant conservative academic, in a position now to influence both legal thought and generations of law students for years to come. He absolutely deserves the opportunity, and it’s a credit to the movement as well as himself that he’s been able to realize it.