For generations, Ivy League universities, and many of America’s most prestigious institutions, were treated as the pinnacle of higher education. A degree from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton was not just an academic credential; it was widely seen as a passport to influence, opportunity, and professional success.
Today, many conservatives see those same institutions very differently. Rather than places where students encounter competing ideas and develop the skill of critical thinking, they are increasingly viewed as ideological factories. Where young people enter seeking an education and opportunity, and leave, four years later, fluent in progressive politics, activist jargon, and a belief that everything the world has to offer is owed to them.
That perception has led many on the right to conclude that the answer to the problem is simple: walk away. Stop sending their children, stop donating, and stop treating elite universities as institutions worthy of respect. But that raises a more difficult question: should conservatives abandon these institutions, or should they be willing to enter them, challenge their orthodoxy, and fight to reclaim them?
That debate came into sharper focus after a clip circulated yesterday of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy telling his daughter she could not attend Harvard because the university had “professionalized figuring out how they can take good young girls and corrupt their minds.” Duffy’s family was widely praised on social media for the decision. But some, including myself, were less convinced.
Is abandoning institutions like Harvard really the right move?
Sean Duffy tells his daughter she cannot go to Harvard because they have "professionalized figuring out how they can take good young girls and corrupt their minds" pic.twitter.com/opCB02jPEv
— FactPost (@factpostnews) August 19, 2026
The debate strikes close to my own experience in higher education.
I graduated from American University in Washington, D.C., in 2024, a school Niche repeatedly ranks as the “Most Liberal College in America” in 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026, and one that has remained near the top of similar rankings for much of the last decade. The university I attended was full of students espousing the greatness of socialism, treating individual rights as a subject for debate, and insisting that the world’s problems could always be traced back to the West’s history of colonialism, slavery, and capitalism. Progressive politics was not simply a single perspective, it was often the default worldview by which everything was analyzed.
Before I entered college, I was already a conservative, shaped in large part by the COVID-19 pandemic and the George Floyd riots of 2020. My parents instilled in me conservative values: accountability, personal responsibility, hard work, and a willingness to make my own way toward the American Dream. Many modern conservative parents may not have encouraged their child to attend an institution like American University. Mine did. They supported my decision, and I emerged from my educational career a far more committed, better-educated conservative than I was when I arrived.
Why? Because I did not take the progressive environment lightly.
While I was taught primarily through a progressive lens, I spent a significant portion of my own time reading Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell; listening to Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and Charlie Kirk; and engaging seriously with debates between competing political worldviews. In my eyes, my education was in my hands as much as it is in my professors’. If something I am taught seems wrong, it is my responsibility to educate myself on why, and to be prepared to make that case.
I made a name for myself by debating fellow students in class, challenging professors, and making my views not merely known, but unmistakably clear in every assignment, exam, and discussion.
I learned to do more than repeat conservative talking points. I learned how to make the strongest possible case for what I believed, and how to defend it when it was challenged. That is not an experience people get by retreating to institutions that are ideologically friendly. Growth does not come from never encountering opposition; it comes from being forced to confront it, understand it, and answer it. And despite the popular view to the contrary, my willingness to stand up for my beliefs did not result in professors failing me. In most cases, it actually earned their respect.
This is the path conservatives should prefer. We should not run away from liberal institutions. We should raise the next generation of conservatives not to be so ideologically fragile that four years at a university can reshape, or warp, their entire worldview.
Whether we like Harvard or not, it still has a great deal to offer. Rigorous academic opportunities, access to influential professors and alumni, and connections to people who will shape business, government, law, media, and culture. It is a doorway through which conservatives can make their mark on the world. We should not so casually surrender those vast networks to the left. If every conservative student, family, and donor withdraws, elite institutions will become even more ideologically uniform, and the people emerging from them will hold even greater influence over the country without having seriously encountered a competing view.
The mistake becomes even clearer when we realize that we actively encourage our politicians to wield executive power without fear. If we pursue political power without first challenging the ideological uniformity of the institutions that shape future leaders and voters, what does that power really mean?
Executive orders can be repealed. Administrations come and go. But universities shape the lawyers, journalists, teachers, corporate leaders, bureaucrats, and policymakers who will outlast any one president or governor. If conservatives surrender those institutions entirely, they may win elections only to find that the country’s most influential cultural and professional pipelines remain firmly in the hands of the left.
Conservatism has never been defined by cowardice, and it should not become defined by retreat. I do not intend to live to see the day conservatives surrender America’s most influential and respected institutions simply because they fear engaging the fight inside them.
