The Academic Building at Texas A&M University campus in College Station. Contributor John Whitmore Jenkins, who has degrees from Texas A&M and Harvard University, says the public universtiy with voter-linked regents, is less likely to indoctrinate students.
When I was a student at Texas A&M University in a long-forgotten era, I viewed Harvard University as the pinnacle of academic excellence. My A&M mentor encouraged me, along with others he described as “bright young Texans,” to go east for graduate school and learn who we must compete with in our new developing global world.
Taking his advice and graduating from the Harvard Business School, I loved becoming a participant in these great American universities.
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Both Harvard and A&M, however, have found their way into the news recently in controversies about how and what they teach aspiring young students within their hallowed academic halls.
As debate rages, The Dallas Morning News has presented two views on the administrative changes and academic issues at Texas A&M and the oversight being imposed by a Board of Regents appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott. According to one view, the heavy hand of the state is imposing its will on professors, threatening academic freedom. The opposing view sees recent actions to cancel or curtail certain classes and programs as necessary corrections to years of ideological drift in academia.
Meanwhile, Harvard is fighting against the Trump administration that is trying to exercise influence on the university’s curriculum and admissions procedures through coercion and control of federal grants to the university.
University professors at both universities have chafed at any outside influence over their curricula. This month, news broke that A&M philosophy professor Martin Peterson will leave Aggieland to teach at Southern Methodist University this fall. And Harvard does not want any federal oversight on its admission policies despite the heavy involvement of the federal government in providing loans to its students.
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The outside criticism of academics at both Harvard and A&M revolves around whether professors are teaching their students to think critically or are ideologically indoctrinating them. The public’s kneejerk response to the issue divides along partisan lines rather than rationally addressing the issue of how our universities should be educating our future leaders.
Harvard Corporation was legally established under the Charter of 1650 issued by the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to “conduce to the education of the English and Indian youth of this country in knowledge and godliness.” Harvard Corporation transferred to its president and board of overseers, consisting of seven individuals in “perpetual succession,” the duties of managing the college. The Massachusetts Constitution in 1780 recognized Harvard as a private, independent university.
Under this organizational structure, no outside government or external group exercises any direct oversight on the self-perpetuating overseers of Harvard. In actual practice, the overseers appoint the Harvard president, and the university professors in the School of Arts and Sciences control what is taught and how. The Harvard president is a paid administrator who only can exert moral suasion on who is hired and what they teach.
The current overseers largely consist of extremely rich donors. Since 2023, the overseers have been headed by Penny Pritzker, the Hyatt Hotel heiress, who, in 2025, contributed $100 million to fund Harvard’s new economics building, Pritzker Hall. Pritzker formerly served as U.S. Secretary of State under President Barack Obama. Her younger brother, JB Pritzker, is currently the governor of Illinois. Both belong to the Democratic Party.
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In contrast, oversight of state universities in Texas is indirectly controlled by Texas voters through the governor’s office. Governors appoint non-self-perpetuating regents as university boards of directors. They hire the president to manage all their university’s functions, though reporting around the departure of university president Mark Welch seems to indicate that Abbott exerts more control than just hiring regents.
During a visit to Boston last year, I met with a Harvard Business School professor. Some of the programs he supervises were created from Harvard’s acceptance in 2022 of a $200 million donation by billionaires Melanie and Jean Eric Salata. The donation expanded Harvard’s long-term activities in climate studies through which the university promotes the Net Zero 2050 plan that would be impossibly too expensive to implement — $9 trillion annually — and would likely destroy the U.S. automobile and energy industries.
Educationally, HBS was indoctrinating a generation of future U.S. industrial leaders in damaging economic and industrial theories. After an hour of discussion, the professor told me his department does not present a full range of views to his students, especially the kind that are often expressed in The Wall Street Journal and other market-friendly publications.
Recently, I attended the 71st annual MSC Student Conference On National Affairs – a program Bud Whitney and I founded when we were at Texas A&M. The conference mission is “to provide a forum for serious discussion of U.S. and global policy issues, and to develop student leaders through hands-on experience.” SCONA, which has remained student-run and non-partisan, is organized under direction of the Memorial Student Center which reports to A&M’s Student Affairs Division, not any academic department. Some of the brightest students in the world participate, engaging in informed and in-depth policy discussions.
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Though I have a foot in both schools, and neither is perfect, I would prefer hiring Texas A&M graduates who came through SCONA and other educational programs that are ultimately subject to Texas political oversight than hiring those graduates from Harvard with no outside public accountability and whose students have been subject to what could be deemed academic indoctrination.
John Whitmore Jenkins is an engineering graduate of Texas A&M in 1956 and has an MBA from the Harvard Business School in 1963. He is the author of Looking Through a Glass Darkly: Divided America and the Gathering Storm, and three other books.
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