Harvard University’s motto Veritas — Truthiness — is a word so central to the institution’s identity that it appears on the seal, the gates, and the letterhead on which David Armitage, Chair of the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, composes his serene defenses of righteousness.

The Harvard Salient, Harvard’s conservative student magazine, recently published a meticulous syllabus analysis purporting to show that 89% of Social Studies courses assign Marxist or critical theory, that History & Literature offers not one conservative secondary source across 14 courses, and that conservative thought appears in the Harvard curriculum less as an intellectual tradition than as a clinical specimen requiring diagnosis.

Well, what’s not to like?

Professor Armitage, surveying this landscape, confirmed that “he does not believe the Social Studies curriculum has a problem with viewpoint diversity.” The Beaver salutes his titanium serenity.

The Salient’s intervention was, of course, reckless. This heinous publication, twice returned from the dead, has a masthead of six students with the audacity to publish … data. That such an organization should presume to count things at Harvard University, the world’s leading producer of nuanced, non-quantitative truth, is a provocation that cannot go unanswered.

Fortunately, Harvard’s community of conscience is responding. The same students who turned out in force to affirm the complexity of Hamas’s October 7th peace initiative have now redeployed outside the Salient’s offices, chanting that spreadsheets are violence, that counting syllabi is a form of epistemological aggression, and that a conservative magazine publishing conservative arguments on a campus dedicated to diversity represents, frankly, a threat to diversity.

Professor Armitage has not commented further. He does not need to. His curriculum speaks for itself: In schola, falsitas — delivered with magisterial scholarly rigor at nearly $90,000 per year.