Harvard University has rejected various demands of a presidential commission on anti-Semitism.
The task force wants to persuade Harvard to ensure Jewish students on its campus are no longer harassed, or else lose its federal funding.
Harvard retorts that it won’t be bullied by Washington.
Among its other requirements, the Trump administration also warned Harvard to cease using race as a criterion in its admissions, hiring, and promotion, contrary to law.
And it also directed the campus to ban the use of masks that, in the post-COVID era of protests, have emboldened violent demonstrators with anonymity.
The administration’s order to stop race-based bias was in accordance with civil rights statutes, and a recent Supreme Court decision specifically banning affirmative action at Harvard and elsewhere.
No matter. Harvard claimed that the Trump administration infringed upon its First Amendment rights.
So, it has temporarily rejected the administration’s orders. At least for now, Harvard has lost its annual $2.2 billion grant of federal funds.
Former President Barack Obama, among others, lauded Harvard’s rejection of the demands of the administration’s anti-Semitism task force. He claimed the Trump administration’s efforts were ham-handed.
But what academic freedom are Harvard and Obama talking about? The freedom to discriminate and segregate by race in hiring, admissions, dorms, and graduations?
The freedom of 500 Harvard students to crash the classes of others, shut down traffic, and harass students on the basis of their religion or views on Israel?
Despite all of Harvard’s platitudes, its classrooms are still being disrupted. Jewish students remain fearful.
And what would Obama say if, for example, African-American students at Harvard were harassed on campus by masked disrupters?
Or black studies classes were crashed by students wearing scarves over their faces as they vented their hatred? Would he press the Trump administration to force Harvard to honor federal civil rights protections?
Remember, Harvard is a private university with a largely untaxed endowment of over $50.2 billion. Yet again, it still receives some $2.2 billion—now suspended—in federal funds.
The administration task force is not forcing Harvard to run its university according to its version of federal dictates.
Instead, the Trump commission is simply warning Harvard that if, in addition to its huge sources of private funding, it still wishes continuance of some $2.2 billion in public money from the federal government, then it must comply with existing laws and executive orders.
Does Harvard remember the embarrassing testimony of its former president, Claudine Gay?
She failed to assure a congressional committee that Harvard had taken action against openly hostile anti-Semitic student protestors during its growing protest movements.
Does Harvard understand why the Supreme Court ruled it had violated the “Equal Protection Clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment and was culpable of prejudice against Asian-Americans?
Does Harvard have any clue why it has lost some $150 million per annum of donor giving?
Does Harvard realize that no one believes its pretenses anymore that it “cannot and will not tolerate disruption” of classes—given that it still happens all the time at its various professional schools and undergraduate courses?
Perhaps Harvard should follow the strategy of independent Hillsdale College, which long ago wished to be free of federal dictates.
So, unlike Harvard, the college put its proverbial money where its mouth was and agreed unilaterally to give up all federal funding to be free of Washington’s octopus tentacles.
Yet, there is one critical distinction between Hillsdale and Harvard.
Hillsdale does not take federal money, period—whether doled out by either a Democrat or Republican administration.
It sincerely believes that too often the federal government itself does not follow the Constitution, impinges on freedom, and forces colleges to violate equality under the law when discriminating by race and gender.
Harvard has no such principles.
Its beef is not with the notion of an overweening federal government, eager to coerce private colleges to follow particular protocols.
Instead, it is at war only with the Trump commission or, in theory, any other similar conservative administration that might wish it to adhere to the law as a condition of being federally funded.
Otherwise, Harvard has no problem with an activist federal government, as long as it is a liberal one forcing all sorts of Title IX or DEI initiatives on private and Christian colleges that apparently lost their autonomy by accepting federal money. It has said nothing when state and federal governments in the past gratuitously hounded Hillsdale.
So, Harvard loudly can set itself free by permanently pursuing its agenda on its own $50 billion, in the same manner Hillsdale does quietly with its $1 billion—without the taxpayer’s dime, whether Democratic or Republican.
Why on earth - unless a parent is abjectly braindead; unaware of the fact that Harvard?
Instead of being a bastion of learning that teaches the best and brightest how to think empirically, exactingly, pragmatically; how to hone their mind’s acuity, acquire refined skills in the upper reaches of human knowledge is anything but that?
Why would any compos mentis parent send their child to ANY of the Poison Ivy League centers for higher indoctrination?
Jordan Peterson feels - and has stated that in his opinion such vile, hellholes of conformity are totally beyond being reformed at this point.
Best to help facilitate their demise and ruin as they so richly now deserve.
Harvard is, theoretically, a private institution and if it wants to promote anti-semitism nothing in the US Constitution prevents it from doing so but consider what is really unconstitutional and also quite illegal. It is not only wrong morally, ethically, constitutionally and legally that the Federal Government is involved in just about everything we do but especially so when it supports speech that is untruthful, biased and racial based via taxpayer subsidies contributed to by everyone including the very semite minority victims. Compared to USAID fraud, waste and abuse Harvard is worse. Think of how Harvard views the Constitution. If the faculty permits the students to proselytize Islam for Hamas terrorists why not establish a safe zone, a common ground where conservatives can enjoy the opportunity to challenge the Soros and radical Islam funded propagandists? After all they never stop using the First Amendment and the Equality Clause of the 14th Amendment to remind us of the value students get from the very costly education they provide. Why not include those who don’t agree? At least some of them may then understand the the talking points they all use such as the name of the “river” and the name of the “sea” they often mention.
If America, once again becomes what it was designed to be and once was, where civil speech and dialogue flourishes as it did in Ancient Greece it will not be because of tax payer subsidized Harvard but because Donald Trump, and others, stop funding centers of indoctrination and that includes everything from Planned Parenthood to Public Radio in addition to educational facilities. It is not Harvard that is actually the problem. It is the very government that enables them. It is no different than a prodigal child which does what he/she wishes only because parents continue to provide support. Harvard is a prodigal institution that should never have been subsidized… ever.
Harvard cannot be reformed, and that goes for several other elite universities. The best and most likely option is to starve Harvard of federal funds, and concurrently stigmatize the University as a bastion of discrimination and elitist lunacy.
In time, Harvard’s reputation will become like that of a faded Hollywood sex goddess still trying to trade on her now diminished charms; Harvard will become a sad parody–a pathetic mockery of what it once was.
It’s a given that, as a proud member of the Resistance, Harvard can’t afford even the appearance of giving in to Evil Orange Man Bad. It doesn’t matter to the people running the place that laws against the discrimination it’s perpetrating have been on the books for decades. It’s the appearance of doing Trump’s ‘bidding’ they fear more than they fear breaking the law. Would they like to rid their school of antisemitism? Probably. But they’re caught in one of those classic binds leftists are so prone to when dealing with reality, and the school fears it might lose its Resistance membership if it gives in. So, its administrators will likely take the path of least leftist resistance despite the fact it also angers some of its private benefactors. In the final analysis, Harvard’s membership in the Resistance is too dear for it to do the sensible thing. It has a huge endowment to fall back on, after all. Unless people like USAID employees are in charge of the school’s finances, it should survive nicely. But if too much of its money is invested in China, it might have to painfully rethink its membership in the Resistance. Some things trump other things more than others.