WILMINGTON, Del.

WITH THE ECONOMY crawling and gasoline prices rising, many Americans are looking for savings in their family budget.

The federal government, meanwhile, continues to invest on their behalf in one of the nation’s wealthiest institutions: Harvard University.

Given the tax subsidies provided to this university, Americans have a right to ask: What has Harvard done for me lately?

Harvard’s federal tax exemption is a massive transfer of wealth from working people to an elite institution. This wealth transfer can only be justified as a public policy if the benefit Harvard provides to Americans generally is commensurate with the subsidy that Americans provide Harvard.

Are Americans getting their money’s worth from Harvard?

Harvard did well last year — amazingly well. According to the National Association of College and University Business Officers, its endowment grew a remarkable $5.7 billion in 2007, finishing the year at $34.6 billion.

Some of that $5.7billion increase came in the form of new contributions. Most of it, however, came from earnings on Harvard’s investments. Yet, Harvard did not pay a penny in federal taxes on that increase.

To put this in perspective, consider that the most recent calculations by the U.S. Census Bureau indicate that as of 2006 there were 2.61 people in the median U.S. household and that the median annual household income was $48,451. That means that it would take all the annual earnings of about 308,086 people living in households earning the median income to equal the $5.7 billion Harvard raked in last year.

The difference between Harvard and these 308,086 people in median-income households is that Harvard didn’t pay taxes on its earnings.

So, what did hard-working Americans get back for the tax break they gave Harvard?

Certainly, Harvard does many things that benefit all Americans. No doubt there are Harvard-educated researchers working to cure diseases and Harvard-educated entrepreneurs working to create new jobs. Perhaps a Harvard undergraduate of today will discover the energy source of tomorrow.

But there is one area where Harvard manifestly fails to give taxpayers a return they ought to get: It does not teach its students enough about our nation’s history and institutions.

Harvard admits high-school students who know little about our American heritage, and teaches them little more.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) recently published a study based on a “civic-literacy” examination administered to 14,000 randomly selected freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges nationwide, including Harvard. Each student was given a 60-question, multiple-choice test on American history, government, international relations, and economics.

Harvard freshmen scored only 63.59 percent on the exam, a “D.” Harvard seniors scored only 69.56 percent, a D-plus. Only 70 percent of Harvard seniors knew that the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” come from the Declaration of Independence. Less than 66 percent knew that Fort Sumter came before Gettysburg which came before Appomattox.

There is good reason for all Americans to care that many Harvard students don’t know these things. The ISI survey also revealed that the more knowledge about America’s history and institutions that students acquired in college, the more likely they were to vote and participate in other civic activities. The health of representative government in the United States depends on the civic education of the rising generation.

And as badly as Harvard seniors did on the civic-literacy exam, they did better than seniors at any of the other 49 colleges surveyed. None of those colleges is as wealthy as Harvard, but many — including Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown, Penn, Cornell and Notre Dame — have sizable tax-exempt endowments of their own.

The problem isn’t just that Harvard is failing to give taxpayers the return they ought to get in the civic education of young Americans who attend Harvard, it is that American higher education is generally failing at this task.

Lt. Gen. Josiah Bunting III, is president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Lehrman American Studies Center, in Wilmington, Del., president of the H. Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and superintendent emeritus of the Virginia Military Institute.