Sec. Sean Duffy: My job is to get my daughter into heaven, not Harvard

My wife and I have a saying we’ve repeated often over the years to our nine children, "My job is to get you into heaven, not Harvard." This week, I learned that motto is pretty controversial.

On Wednesday, I officially launched "The Great America Road Trip" series on YouTube. The show, which follows my family as we discover America, promotes road trips at a time when so many Americans feel disconnected from their country and even from their own families.

On one of our stops, my family did what many families do; we visited prospective colleges. We drove to Boston to tour Boston College and Harvard University, the latter being our daughter Paloma’s first-choice school. Before we arrived, I sat down with her and spoke frankly.

I told her that Harvard, like so many of America’s elite universities, has become a factory for anti-American and anti-Christian ideas. I had no interest in writing a check so that an institution could undo the 18 years Rachel and I spent instilling our child with our Catholic morals and values.

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No surprise — leftists on social media are losing their minds. How dare a father express concern for his daughter’s soul in the college decision-making process? They can’t imagine anyone would forego the bragging rights of an elite Ivy League.

In fact, Democrats and their media allies seem utterly unaware that millions of ordinary parents are having precisely the same kitchen table conversations. As I told Paloma, these institutions have "professionalized figuring out how they can take good young girls and corrupt their minds."

Back in 2020, our oldest daughter, Evita, was canceled and even received a death threat at the University of Chicago for holding conservative opinions. After this dramatic experience, Rachel and I resolved that we would only pay for colleges we approved.

Our list, partially formed by a conversation we had with Victor Davis Hanson, did not include Harvard for its hostility to free speech, lack of ideological diversity among its faculty and crazy woke antics.

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Despite all my reservations about Harvard and institutions like it, Paloma applied during her senior year, and I decided we should take a family road trip to see it for ourselves. The experience, documented on the road trip, proved eye-opening.

At Harvard, we met with Father Nathaniel Sanders, the undergraduate Catholic chaplain. I was struck by the strength of the Catholic student community at Harvard. Not only does the Catholic center retain incoming Catholic students; it also has a remarkably large rate of conversions among non-Catholic students — nearly 80 last year alone.

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During our meeting, Father Sanders said something that shifted my perspective: "If someone has a sense of themselves and a sense of God before coming, I think that will only flower."

The truth is, some young Christians can handle a place like Harvard — provided they have a strong religious community in which to take refuge. Others will fall prey to woke indoctrination. It is up to me as a parent to discern which of my children will thrive in this adversarial environment and which would do best with the support of an authentically Christ-centered university.

I believe conservatives should not cede our nation’s elite institutions to the left. We must populate them with conservative students and professors, cut federal funding to universities that house critical-theory curricula, demand ideological diversity in hiring and strip woke schools of the tax-exempt status that shields their multibillion-dollar endowments. The Trump administration has already begun applying that pressure to Harvard and its peers.

Paloma is a remarkably intelligent young woman with strong character and values. As the episode unfolds, her mom and I decide to bend our rules and let her attend if she is accepted. You will have to watch the series to see where she is accepted and decides to go.

What I will never do is apologize for wanting to protect her soul. That is a father’s sacred duty, whether the left likes it or not.

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In a sane society, this would be the most ordinary of statements. Yet modern culture has spent decades denigrating the very role of the father. Sitcoms made the bumbling, clueless dad a staple, while academic and media narratives frame traditional paternal authority as "toxic masculinity" or a relic of patriarchy.

Ultimately, if you want to arm your kids against the modern world, a family road trip is a powerful place to begin. Our broken institutions work overtime to disconnect families from one another and from the country itself. By loading up the car and facing the open road together, parents do the slow, essential work of transmitting faith, values, and identity that no radical classroom can easily erase.

Freed from the constant distractions of screens and extracurriculars, a road trip gives you the time and space to talk to your kids, teach them to love their country by actually seeing it, and prepare them for the day they eventually hit the road without you.

You can watch "The Great American Road Trip" for free on the U.S. Department of Transportation’s YouTube channel.