Omar Sultan Haque has spent 23 years at Harvard University. He is furious about what has happened within the school.

While the media have framed the recent fight between Harvard and President Donald Trump in partisan terms, Haque believes that the problem goes much deeper than political score-settling. As he rose through the ranks—from graduate student to postdoctoral fellow to medical researcher to faculty member at Harvard Medical School—Haque watched the university gradually abandon the pursuit of truth and replace it with left-wing racialism.

Rather than stay silent, Haque has spoken out. Last year, he wrote an essay about his experience and has continued to criticize the university throughout the recent campus turmoil. As Haque sees it, Harvard cannot be reformed from within. It’s an unconscious patient and requires CPR to survive.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

City Journal: Give us a sense of the ideological landscape and your experience at Harvard.

Omar Sultan Haque: Unlike many others at Harvard, I have no dramatic cancellation, or intellectual persecution, or struggle session to report. I stopped teaching at Harvard last year primarily because of its anti-truth-seeking culture, radical left-wing bias, racial and gender discrimination, and prevailing anti-intellectualism, which made continued participation a poor use of time. There are exceptions, but on the whole Harvard has strayed from its foundational mission of unbiased truth-seeking and has become ideologically driven, too often resembling a secular church or a partisan think tank. The university’s culture and practices prioritize ideological conformity over open inquiry and debate, suppressing dissenting viewpoints and compromising academic freedom. This shift undermines the core values of a secular university and poses a threat to the integrity of academia and broader society.

CJ: How have DEI initiatives affected day-to-day life at Harvard?

Haque: The university may have changed the official name of its DEI office to use more nebulous euphemisms, but DEI and “Diet DEI” (a diluted form) have the same effects in practices, norms, and the larger culture of orthodoxy and taboo. Diet DEI is just more dishonest. The university has made some progress by eliminating racially segregated graduations and required DEI loyalty oaths in one of its many schools—mandatory diversity statements when applying for a job—but the larger culture of DEI is the problem. Some tropes remain popular on campus that are legacies of left-wing racism, such as the idea that a person’s racial identity is central to one’s academic study; that people should be sorted into “oppressor” and “oppressed” groups by their immutable characteristics; that racism is specific to one race rather than a universal, sinful propensity in human nature; and that lowering academic or behavioral standards for certain racial groups is not happening (when advocates are confronted with evidence that it is happening, they argue that the practice is justified). These beliefs infect teaching, research, grading standards, hiring, promotions, campus debate, what is considered an acceptable topic for invited lectures, what projects get funded, and so on.