Trump Smashes Harvard

The executive branch is now making the claim that Harvard University should have its funding removed because it is in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

Harvard declared it was going to resist the Trump administration’s demands to change its governance structure over campus anti-Semitism concerns. And so the government responded by announcing a $2.26 billion freeze of Harvard’s multiyear grants and contracts.

Harvard President Alan Garber put out a statement complaining that the federal government was wrong for involving itself in this way. How dare the federal government actually attach strings to the things it has always attached its strings to?

The Trump administration asked for nine actions. Most of the demands concerned how the university operates. The government was asking for changes like a comprehensive mask bans, changes to governance and leadership, along with reforms to admissions and DEI programs.

These programs are in violation of the Civil Rights Act. There is no question that DEI would be predicated on the false notion that inequality of outcome by group must be due to discrimination and therefore must be rectified by reverse discrimination. That is in violation of the Civil Rights Act and certainly in violation of Supreme Court standards with regard to affirmative action.

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As far as a comprehensive mask ban, the idea is you don’t want people who have shown up to campus on student visas participating in anti-American activity that would otherwise get them deported.

And the university is facilitating all of that. 

The government is also demanding necessary changes to address bias, improve viewpoint diversity and end ideological capture, fueling anti-Semitic harassment, according to the task force’s letter.

This will likely all get played out in the courts.

But the idea that Harvard University is somehow owed federal money is absurd on its face. There is no reason the Trump administration should not be able to attach strings to money that it is sending to a university with a $53 billion endowment.

You know what’s an easy way for Harvard to continue its policy of independence from the federal government? To be independent of the federal government.

Don’t get in bed with the government if you don’t want to be controlled. That tends to be a pretty good way of approaching life.

On Friday, the Harvard chapter of the American Association of University Professors sued the Trump administration, saying the government’s actions “overtly seek to impose on Harvard University political views and policy preferences advanced by the Trump administration and commit the University to punishing disfavored speech.”

That’s not correct; they’re simply saying if you engage in anti-Semitism, that it’s in violation of the Civil Rights Act.

When Lawrence Summers was the president of Harvard University, they became angry with him because he made the mere suggestion that perhaps the lack of women in scientific institutions might be due to the fact that women are less interested in scientific pursuits overall, as opposed to men. Not to mention that the ends of the bell curve with regard to scientific performance on tests tend to be heavily male. He was soon ousted from his position.

So don’t give me your free speech concerns when you’ve been cracking down on free speech yourself for a long time. If you want to say free speech doesn’t apply at Harvard because it’s a private university, then you have to be a private university. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say, “Free speech applies to us; we are a free speech institution. And also, we want your taxpayer money.”

That’s not the way it should work.

The idea that Harvard did not violate the Civil Rights Act is ridiculous. Does that mean that every demand that the Trump administration is making is going to get upheld in court? Some of the demands will most likely be held to be extraneous.

But Harvard does not have any moral grounds to stand on when they insist that everyone else pay the bills so they can continue pushing whatever nonsense it is they are pushing.