Harvard gets schooled by China as America's universities choose activism over excellence

New global ranking shows Harvard drops to third place as China dominates research publications, revealing how American universities prioritize activism over scholarship.

Research culture has become timid and conformist. Entire categories of questions are treated as morally impermissible to even ask.  Ilya Shapiro is the director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. He is also author of the "Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites" and writes the Shapiro’s Gavel newsletter on Substack.

Unlike many such university lists, this ranking isn’t a reputational beauty contest, but a statistical analysis based on publication data. In other words, it’s one way of measuring what a research university is supposed to do: produce serious scholarship at scale. 

So, if the most famous university in the world is sliding — and if China is dominating the top of the table — we should stop handwaving about "globalization" and start asking what, exactly, has gone wrong in American academia.