At American Compass's New World Gala in Washington on Tuesday, the vice president said he does not know what the voting was like in the 2024 election among Harvard University's faculty, but his guess is that 90-95% voted for Kamala Harris.
"[If in] a foreign country's election, 80% of the people voted for one candidate, you would say, 'That's kind of weird,' right? 'That's like, not a super healthy democracy,'" he posed. "If 95% of people voted for one party's candidate, you would say, 'That's North Korea.' That's totalitarian. That is impossible in a true place of free exchange for that to happen."
Vance's comments come amid continuing disputes between Harvard and the Trump administration; the two have sparred for months over ongoing reports of antisemitism at Harvard, DEI initiatives in its instruction, and more.
Fox News reports the Ivy League university refuses to change its governance and admissions process in response to incidents of bias on campus targeting Jewish students since October 2023.
In April, Harvard President Alan Garber said the institution would not go along with the Trump administration's demands because they are, according to him, unconstitutional and go beyond just addressing antisemitism on campus.
"I think the ideological diversity at these universities has to get much better," the vice president continued Tuesday. "If that got better, if you actually had a place where people were open to debating these things and weren't terrified they were going to lose their job for saying something that was a little bit outside the Overton Window, then I think the science would get better, the reproducibility would get better, the quality of the institution would be so much better. That's what I want, because we need high quality universities. Right now, the problem is we don't have them."
American Compass is regarded as the institutional home of conservative economic populism in Washington.
