Sec. Duffy Says He Wants His Kid to Reach Heaven, Not Harvard

Unlike most politicians and plutocrats, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has his priorities straight as a father.

Duffy wrote an opinion piece that appeared August 21 on Fox News. “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,” Duffy noted drily. He has a new video series called “The Great American Road Trip,” featuring his family and including stops at Boston University and Harvard University. But Duffy warned his daughter that these stops did not mean he wanted her to go to college there.

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Leftists promptly began excoriating Duffy on social media. “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,” Duffy said. But he recalled how his other daughter Evita received a death threat and ended up canceled at the University of Chicago in 2020. The Duffy family learned the hard way that prestigious universities are not necessarily worth the money.

Duffy did acknowledge that after meeting Fr. Nathaniel Sanders, the undergraduate Catholic chaplain at Harvard, and learning how many conversions occurred there, he did end up conceding that some young Christians might do well at Harvard if they were already strong enough in their faith and were able to build a good community there. But despite that, he doesn’t believe that he has anything to apologize for being averse to having his children attend woke universities for a high cost. As a father, he believes his primary duty is still protecting his daughter’s soul, not boosting her ego.

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Too many parents in America, indeed, are still willing to pay a small fortune to send their children to a university for little more than woke brainwashing simply because the university in question is an Ivy League or similarly elite institution with a longstanding reputation, however little deserved at the present. How many conservatives have sent their children off to Harvard or Columbia or UC Berkeley to form valuable connections, only to have the children return as blue-haired, antisemitic, socialist wackos? How many college graduates can boast about going to Yale or University of Pennsylvania or Boston University even if they needed remedial math, never read a full book, or majored in gender studies?

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While there are still good people and devout chaplains at certain elite universities, the overwhelming majority of young people would do much better at a conservative Christian university. In other words, the goal should be to find an institution that promotes biblical and traditional American values, only turning to large secular schools as a rare exception for very specific reasons.

(*) Full article: https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2026/08/22/sec-duffy-says-he-wants-his-kid-to-reach-heaven-not-harvard-n4956435