Harvard University enters The Bob Zadek Show not as a subject of discussion but as an institutional affiliation attached to economists whose arguments the show uses. The excerpts identify Jeff Miron as a member of Harvard’s economics faculty and as Director of Undergraduate Studies in that department, and they place George Borjas, described as an economist from Harvard University, on the skeptical side of the immigration wage debate. Harvard also appears once as an institutional actor in a discussion of reparations. No excerpt examines the university’s governance, curriculum, admissions, or finances.
Jeff Miron and the show’s libertarian framing
Harvard is first named in the program’s introduction of a recurring feature: short clips of libertarians explaining their views. The clip is delivered by Jeff Miron, who introduces himself as Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Economics at Harvard University. In the clip, Miron says that being a libertarian means, at the most fundamental level, having a lot of respect for individual decisions and for the ability of people to make reasonable choices and decide for themselves what is in their own interest, coupled with a huge suspicion of the ability of government to make people better by coercing individuals into doing things that they do not want to do America’s Student Loan Problem (2012).
Miron goes on to distinguish the libertarian view from standard Republican and standard Democratic views, saying it does not align well with either. He states that libertarians are against drug prohibition, tolerant of gay marriage, and against severe restrictions on abortion. He characterizes liberals and conservatives as being at some level the same, calling them authoritarians who both have views on the right way for people to run their lives and want to impose that on people, whereas libertarians want to let people choose for themselves America’s Student Loan Problem (2012).
The same episode’s framing material describes the discussion with guest Arvin Vora as concerning economic distortions caused by federal student loan subsidies and the government’s role as a primary lender. The episode summary states that the two argue government intervention has created an artificially inflated market for higher education, leading to skyrocketing tuition rates and a generation of underemployed graduates burdened by debt. Miron’s clip is not presented as part of that argument; it is presented as a standalone statement of libertarian first principles America’s Student Loan Problem (2012).
Miron as a recurring presence
Miron’s Harvard affiliation recurs in later episodes as a marker of standing rather than as a topic. In the 2014 episode with Derek Khanna, Bob Zadek opens the program by recounting four days of liberty at the Cato University annual week of discussion and lectures, describing it as four days of Jeffrey Miron, economics professor rockstar at Harvard University, alongside Randy Barnett, described as the law professor who led the charge against Obamacare before the Supreme Court Derek Khanna - What’s Stifling Innovation? (2014).
In the 2017 episode with Tom Palmer, Miron appears again, this time as a contributor to an edited volume. Palmer describes assembling a group of writers for Self-Control or State-Control?, saying he wrote a number of the essays himself but also recruited fine authors who are experts in their fields, in environmental economics and in financial economics, naming Jeffrey Miron from Harvard University economics faculty and Lynne Kiesling from Northwestern University. Palmer says the essays address the relationship between personal freedom and personal responsibility and why those two need to be understood as a bundle, because you cannot have only one without losing the other Dr. Tom Palmer on Self Control vs. State Control (2017).
In that same conversation, Palmer discusses a chapter by Lisa Conyers on the nanny state, describing it as based on huge numbers of interviews with people who have been or currently are trapped in the welfare state. Palmer offers the example of a person on rental assistance and food stamps who inherits an automobile and is told by welfare workers to get rid of it quickly so as to requalify, illustrating that the system is set up to make it very difficult to get out of welfare once you are in it Dr. Tom Palmer on Self Control vs. State Control (2017). Harvard figures in this episode only through Miron’s affiliation.
Harvard economists in the immigration debate
The 2019 episode with Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute brings a second Harvard-affiliated economist into the program, on the opposing side of a disputed empirical question. Nowrasteh states that immigrants make up about 13.5% of the U.S. population and about 16% of the workforce, and that they boost GDP by somewhere around 12 to 15% based on the estimates. He says nobody disagrees with these points, even the most anti-immigrant economist, and that the only point of disagreement is the effect on wages of native-born Americans What Part of Illegal Immigration Are You Against? Alex Nowrasteh Returns (2019).
Nowrasteh then names George Borjas, described as an economist from Harvard University and probably the most skeptical economist of the benefits of immigration. According to Nowrasteh, Borjas finds that from 1990 to 2010 the roughly 30 million or so immigrants in the U.S. lowered wages of native-born high school dropouts by about 1.7%, but raised the wages of every other group of Americans by about 1% or so overall. Nowrasteh contrasts this with economists Giovanni Peri and Gianmarco Ottaviano, who he says find that over that entire time period immigrants raised the wages of native-born Americans by about six-tenths of 1%. Nowrasteh characterizes the differences as very small and says the most negative finding in the entire academic peer-reviewed literature is the 1.7% figure, which he says is outweighed even in that research by wage benefits to other native-born Americans with at least a high school degree What Part of Illegal Immigration Are You Against? Alex Nowrasteh Returns (2019).
Harvard as an institutional actor in the reparations discussion
The one excerpt in which Harvard appears as an institution rather than as an employer is the 2020 episode with Michael Tanner on anti-racism. Discussing reparations, Tanner distinguishes private reparations from public reparations, saying the latter are much more problematic. In the private category, he says you can identify to some degree people who benefited from slavery, naming certain banks, certain insurance companies that started by selling insurance on enslaved property, and universities like Georgetown and Harvard whose endowments were largely built on the sale of slaves. Tanner says such institutions can take steps to rectify that by giving scholarships to descendants of some of the slaves that they know that they bought and sold Towards a Libertarian Theory of Anti-Racism (2020).
Tanner’s argument in the exchange is that public reparations raise a much harder question of who is entitled, how one proves descent from slaves given poor record-keeping, and who would pay. He concludes that on a practical basis you have to rule out the idea of reparations, while saying there is a moral debt owed to African Americans for 400 years of mistreatment that should be kept in mind. Zadek characterizes Tanner’s position as treating the matter as an appropriate topic for continued conversation rather than a call to action, and Tanner agrees that it is not something you solve by legislation Towards a Libertarian Theory of Anti-Racism (2020).
Across episodes
Four episodes touch on Harvard, and the excerpts show no development in how the university is treated. In each case Harvard supplies an affiliation — Miron’s in 2012, 2014 and 2017, Borjas’s in 2019 — or, in the 2020 episode, an example of an institution whose endowment Tanner says was built on the sale of slaves. No guest or host advances a claim about the university as such, and no later episode responds to an earlier one on the subject.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe Harvard’s founding, governance, admissions practices, endowment size, or academic programs, and they do not report any statement by a Harvard official. They do not say what Miron’s or Borjas’s research concluded beyond the specific figures quoted, nor do they identify the departments or centers in which Borjas works. The excerpts also do not state whether any guest studied at Harvard, and the episode summaries break off before the student loan discussion develops.