University Presidents Teaming to Challenge Trump’s Targeting of Harvard Prove Unfit to Serve

President Donald Trump stated yesterday that a broad settlement with Harvard University was near at hand. But the determination of solid blue college administrations and faculties to thwart Trump’s policies to combat antisemitism and racial discrimination in admissions and to reduce the cost of higher education, means that Harvard and before it, Columbia University, will just be the beginning.

To better combat the corruption of higher education we must understand the lengths to which these schools will go in abandoning principle and academic integrity in their pursuit of protecting their havens of left-wing ideology.

And there is no better place to start than the letter prompted by the president’s investigation of Harvard.

A Misguided “Call for Constructive Engagement”

On April 22 two higher education trade groups issued a letter called “A Call For Constructive Engagement.” To date, 660 college and university “leaders” have signed the letter. Advertised as a public defense of Harvard University in its disputes with the federal government, the letter is widely understood as an attack on the Trump administration and its efforts to root out antisemitism and sky-high student tuition.  

These signers committed a fundamental logical fallacy, abandoned core principles of higher education, and put their names to what they knew—if indeed they even read it—was a document containing blatant untruths. They are unfit to serve as heads of their organizations. In short, the men and women must go.

Sign On Because So Many Others Have

First, the fallacy. The ad populum fallacy is used to sell toothpaste and deodorant: buy, believe, endorse, use, sign because so many other people do likewise. And if you look at the demands by students, faculty, and political advocacy groups to pressure university presidents to sign, the argument is simply that so many others have signed. They use words like “collective,” or “solidarity,” but it all amounts to the same thing: Sign on because so many others have. It’s like they are pushing junk stock or swamp land.

This is the type of ad populum fallacy known as the bandwagon fallacy, which Kassiani Nikolopoulou described as “a cognitive bias that causes people to adopt the behaviors or opinions of others due to a desire to fit in and be liked.”

And what is wrong with that? The non-signing presidents, from Dartmouth College (my alma mater), Stanford University, Vanderbilt University, Penn State University, and Syracuse University, have been pummeled with the same threats: sign or else, sign or face disgrace, sign or be forever labeled a traitor.

Both Sian Beilock of Dartmouth and Stanford’s Jonathan Levin have responded in a similar fashion: I write my own letters; I do my own work. Here is Levin: “I don’t disagree with the sentiments in that letter, I just prefer not to sign open letters in general. I think it’s good practice at a university for people to formulate and express their own views.”

Precisely. Putting your signature to a letter that someone else wrote is a betrayal of the basic principles of a liberal arts education. Think for yourself wherever that lands you, be it with or against prevailing opinion, and, above all, use your own words. What these 660 odd presidents have done, each of them, is to surrender to intellectual plagiarism and they deserve our contempt.

Two Falsehoods

Further, the letter contains two blatant falsehoods. There are the following choices: a signer did not read the letter; the signer read the letter and recognized the falsehoods but signed it anyway; or the signer read the letter but did not realize that it contained the falsehoods. Choose any of them: They are equally damning.

This is the language:

“Our colleges and universities share a commitment to serve as centers of open inquiry where, in their pursuit of truth, faculty, students, and staff are free to exchange ideas and opinions across a full range of viewpoints without fear of retribution, censorship, or deportation.”

The key word here is “share,” by which each of the 660 signers vouches for each of the other signing institutions as “commit[ed] to serve as centers of open inquiry,” where “faculty, students and staff” have the freedom “to exchange ideas and opinions across a full range of viewpoints without fear of retribution, censorship, or deportation.”

There is no evidence that any of the signers engaged in the diligent inquiry necessary to state that a school other than his or her own is committed to freedom of speech and freedom from fear by exercising free speech. But 660? Or even 10 other schools? Or even one? An impossible task. But that is what each president attested to by his or her signature. An evident lie.

And the universal commitment attested by these 660 signers is demonstrably false. “Fear” of expressing views is rife among college students. Just review the FIRE surveys, or the December 2024 Buckley Institute/College Pulse Study titled “Yale’s Free Speech Campus Culture,” or the September 2024 report from the Buckley Institute’s Report on Faculty Political Diversity at Yale: “Across 14 departments in the Social Sciences and Humanities, the report identified 312 Democrat faculty (88%) and only 4 Republicans (1.1%), a ratio of around 78 to 1.” The (Harvard) Crimson reported on May 22, 2023, that approximately 32% of Harvard faculty described themselves as very liberal, 45% as liberal, 20% as moderate, and about 3% as conservative or very conservative.

Professor Jonathan Turley and independent scholar William Deresiewicz, among many others, have written about the purposely non-intellectually diverse faculty and the intentional efforts to keep non-leftists off the faculty rosters.

“Across a Range of Viewpoints”?

I am reminded about the famous quip by Dorothy Parker about Katharine Hepburn that the actress ran the gamut of emotions from A to B. On most college campuses, including Yale, Harvard, and Princeton, every student and faculty member is free to express opinions across viewpoints that range from A to B.

The letter? An abandonment of intellectual integrity and a rejection of the core values of liberal education. They should be ashamed of themselves, but, of course, they won’t.

And as to Dorothy Parker: Not one of the signing presidents would have survived even one lunch at the Algonquin Round Table.

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