For better or worse, the institutions of the “elite” were brought to justice – and found to be hopelessly flawed.

Harvard cannot erase the contempt it has accumulated. In the Trump era, we must instead remind America that higher education is consistent with, not contrary to, the meritocratic distribution of power.

Despite our current branding in the Republican consciousness, Harvard is neither unproductive nor broken — and we are not a training ground for radical philosophy. It is a rigorous school that produces capable leaders with the broad knowledge and mastery needed to accomplish great things in any field. For this university to survive, it must rely wholeheartedly on this image.

The stakes are high: Today’s Republican agenda includes the gutting of American education, from public elementary schools to our nation’s most famous institutions of higher learning. On the stand, Trump happily turned a blind eye to his own Ivy League education and called elite universities like Harvard hotbeds for “the radical left and Marxist maniacs.”

Simultaneously, actors like Vivek G. Ramaswamy ’07 and Elon Musk, poised to embody Trump’s great administrative revolution, appear to envision a government disinterested in political ethics and entirely trained in efficiency. In doing so, they respond to the popular attitude that centralized power – both in terms of status, education and thought – should be dismantled and redistributed.

The Trump administration, emboldened by a decisive victory, would like schools stripped of their autonomy. At Harvard, liberal arts education, naturally critical, could be reorganized to defend “the American tradition and Western civilization.”

The fact that the majority of Americans voted in favor of political interference in private education should give Harvard pause – and a reason to act quickly and tactically.

We represent the philosophically-minded elite who allegedly failed to govern and are therefore responsible for the country’s misfortunes – for the neglect of the middle and working classes and the flourishing of the administrative state. The Americans are looking for a culprit and the Republicans have dressed the academy on a silver platter.

I understand. Harvard is out of touch; it’s not new. But today’s anti-academic impulse tells us more about America’s relationship with concentrated status and power than with Ivy League universities in particular.

Harvard should bolster its image by asserting that it is a place where smart kids – rich and poor, rural and urban – come to learn practical leadership skills.

The University will survive by reminding the nation that it remains an engine of technical success and that this success is enhanced when combined with a liberal arts education. We teach writing, mathematics and oratory alongside subjects like economics, and we do it very well. We also excel at teaching government and politics, as well as all kinds of technical subjects.

But schools like Harvard, through a liberal arts education that goes beyond purely technical teaching, also produce graduates who are uniquely capable of understanding the “big picture.”

Look no further than Trump’s closest allies for proof that universities like Harvard nurture promising people and — rather than indoctrinate them — teach them the skills to put their own philosophies into practice on a large scale. Ivy League graduates JD Vance, Ramaswamy, Scott KH Bessent, Elise M. Stefanik ’06, Mehmet Oz, Pete Hegseth, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. ’76, to name a few within the new administration.

The Trump administration – like any aspect of American politics – shows us the redistributive and meritocratic power of the Ivy League in action. Harvard and its peers have been and will continue to be the birthplace of American leadership of all stripes.

This moment demands that Harvard and peer institutions change how we identify ourselves. We should do without the abstract – that we are primarily organs of personal and philosophical transformation in one sense or another. This is obviously not the main wish of the American public.

Instead, we should embrace—both in how we market ourselves and in our teaching itself—the way our university teaches leadership and creative thinking, skills that are useful to Republicans and Democrats alike. . In doing so, we provide an essential service, consistent with our status and selectivity.

To justify its existence, Harvard must clearly state that it remains an academy where future leaders of all political persuasions learn to govern. Failure to do so would condemn it in the public eye – a loss Harvard can no longer afford.

Lorenzo Z. Ruiz ’27, editor-in-chief of Crimson Editorial, is a government concentrator at Winthrop House.