Is the Woke Tide Turning in American Universities?

The student giving a tour at an elite American university this summer hit all the right points: what the core and elective courses are, how hard they are, and what campus life is like. It’s what the guide didn’t do that raised my eyebrow. Suddenly, there was no land acknowledgment.

It was like Sherlock Holmes’ famous “Dog That Didn’t Bark,” where the Victorian sleuth deduced whodunit from something that hadn’t happened—in this instance, a stable dog that did not raise the alarm while a horse was being stolen. The perpetrator was the horse’s trainer, Holmes rightly reasoned.

And in this college tour there was no talk of what Indian tribe happened to be based on or around the land where the university is located at the precise moment the first Europeans showed up and took it, just as the tribe had taken it from a previous tribe or nation, who had taken it from a previous tribe or nation, etc., ad infinitum.

Or, come to think of it, there was a land acknowledgement, but it was of the right type. When the guide spoke up about the origins of the town where the university is located, the talk was all about when it was founded and by whom. It was an acknowledgment of the people to whom we actually owe a debt of gratitude, who created lasting things, things from which all Americans today benefit.

The times, in other words, may be going back to normal. The woke fever may have broken. The moment of mass hysteria may have passed.

We see a concrete sign of this in Columbia’s surrender to the Trump administration. Nobody can accuse gritty Columbia, the urban campus in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights, of rightish deviation. It continues to be “bolshie,” as the British say, in their endearing diminutive for Bolsheviks.

But Columbia is also brainy and understands that taking on the U.S. government is a dangerous game. That makes its administrators apparently more intelligent than those of stuffy Harvard 200 miles north, in the fastness of Cambridge, Massachusetts, which continues to fight on.

Harvard expects, and is likely to get, a reprieve when District Judge Allison Burroughs finds in its favor after a hearing two weeks ago.

At issue is $2 billion in federal funding, which President Donald Trump’s administration froze when it launched a review of $9 billion in aid and contracts because of charges that Harvard engaged in antisemitic behavior by not protecting Jewish students during pro-Hamas protests in 2024.

Burroughs, appointed to the federal bench by President Barack Obama in 2014, has time and again decided cases in Harvard’s favor. In June, for example, Burroughs found in Harvard’s favor in a separate suit. In that one, Harvard is fighting the administration for revoking its ability to sponsor students from overseas.

And in 2019, Burroughs famously decided that Harvard could continue to discriminate against Asian and white students and in favor of black and Hispanic ones during the admissions process.

But Harvard would be foolish if it believes that Burroughs’s decision in either of the Trump administration’s cases will be permanent or set a precedent. As Howie Carr wrote in Harvard’s real hometown paper, the Boston Herald, “Being a loyal Democrat from Brookline, Comrade Burroughs always rubber-stamps whatever The Party demands.”

In the 2019 Students for Fair Admissions case, the Supreme Court reversed Burroughs decisively four years later. Or as Carr put it, “when Burroughs told Harvard that they could continue their reverse Jim Crow admissions policies, SCOTUS slapped her down 6-3.”

“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” quipped Chief Justice John Roberts.

Trump is undoubtedly aware that the partisan judge will decide against him. “She is a TOTAL DISASTER, which I say even before hearing her Ruling,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “She has systematically taken over the various Harvard cases, and is an automatic ‘loss’ for the People of our Country! … When she rules against us, we will IMMEDIATELY appeal, and WIN.”

Today’s antisemitism charges against Harvard are just as malodorous as the discrimination case, or more, which is the reason Columbia sued for peace last week.

It decided that reaching a settlement with the Trump administration was a wiser course of action. Columbia agreed to pay $200 million in fines over the next three years, and will join forces with the U.S. government to select a monitor to look into the administration’s charges.

In exchange, the administration will end the investigations into antisemitism and civil rights violations, also stemming from last year’s campus protests. The Trump administration will restore millions in federal grants it had paused.

“This agreement marks an important step forward after a period of sustained federal scrutiny and institutional uncertainty,” said acting Columbia President Claire Shipman, obviously breathing a sigh of relief.

And Columbia was not the only recent win. It emerged this week that Cornell is revising downward the number of foreign students it sponsors, by a factor of a thousand. And late Wednesday, Brown also surrendered. It will pay $50 million over 10 years, and has agreed to provide access to all data showing it is compliant with not engaging in racial discrimination in admissions of university programming.

There is little chance that Harvard will in the end emerge victorious. It either surrenders, or in a few centuries future students may have to make a land acknowledgement about the august and great university that once stood in its place.

Originally published by the Washington Examiner

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