Ivy League schools are aghast to learn that they really have to stop racially discriminating and start protecting Jewish students from antisemitic threats.
According to the Daily Caller News Foundation, “the Department of Education sent a letter to [Harvard University] April 11 demanding the school agree to a host of reforms, including adjusting and enforcing disciplinary processes, improving screening of international students for ‘hostile’ views, and auditing ‘programs with egregious records of antisemitism.’”
If the school did not comply, the Trump administration threatened to review and pull some or all the nearly $9 billion in federal grants from Harvard.
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Harvard President Alan Garber responded Monday by saying that the school will essentially ignore President Donald Trump’s demands.
“No government,” Garber wrote, “regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”
If you don’t want the conditions, don’t take the cash.
I’ve got news for Harvard. Like most higher education institutions in America, they take federal money. And federal money will always come with strings attached. They are used to dealing with friendly administrations happy to fork over billions to the ludicrously rich Ivy League schools without question.
But now Americans are very seriously questioning the blank check they’ve handed higher education for generations. Why is it that the average American taxpayer who has never attended Harvard, whose children will never attend Harvard, and who may even be outright discriminated against by Harvard (despite the Supreme Court ruling), has to pay for a school that has an endowment larger than the GDP of many small countries?
Harvard’s endowment is worth a staggering $53 billion dollars. It’s practically a hedge fund with a school attached to it.
No school has a right to federal money. And if Harvard is so concerned with federal interference now that it has our money, Hillsdale College offered an excellent solution on X.
Hillsdale is one of the rare academic institutions that doesn’t take federal funding, in part to avoid the strings that are inevitably attached to getting government money. That’s looking like a good decision.
Obama cheers Harvard for resisting Trump
Former President Barack Obama weighed in on the controversy in his typical, phony “above it all” way. He wrote on X that he’s glad that Harvard is setting an “example” for other institutions to resist Trump.
This is rich coming from Obama. In 2011 his administration used the threat of Title IX lawsuits to browbeat schools into creating rules that would deprive students accused of misconduct of due process rights. They essentially wanted to force schools into assembling kangaroo courts.
Of course, many also compiled because Obama was essentially the pope of the church of liberalism at the time, with most colleges and universities being parishes of that faith.
Obama’s threat was lifted by the first Trump administration.
President Joe Biden brought back the Title IX blunt instrument and sued Hillsdale College over it, even though it wasn’t taking federal money. The Biden administration tried to argue that it could sue the school because of its tax-exempt status, but this argument failed in court.
Free speech for Leftists, but not for thee
I’m going to be blunt here. The Harvard president, Obama, and most of those with power in higher education don’t care one bit about academic freedom or the ability of private institutions to operate without government interference. What they really care about is free speech for leftists and ensuring that institutions they control continue to stay on the taxpayer-funded gravy train.
The idea that Ivy League schools like Harvard are truly committed to diverse speech and a vigorous exchange of ideas is nothing but a farce. They are fine allowing “conservative” opinion to exist on campus as long as it isn’t particularly conservative and never really challenges the Left’s current dogma.
Harvard made the full transition over the generations from a Christian to secular institution. And now it, like higher education in general, holds dearly to an extremely narrow left-wing worldview that has become the dominant ethos of the West’s ruling elite. That ethos is very much at odds with the general American public that underwrites the institution.
If they want to be like that, then fine. But now, thanks to the Trump administration, they may not be able to do that on the public dime anymore.
Higher education is both hyper-partisan and, other than Hillsdale and a handful of other schools, now hyper-reliant on government largesse. The Trump administration is doing the right thing in holding Harvard accountable to the law and to the American people.
Originally published at The Daily Signal.
Jarrett Stepman is a contributor to The Daily Signal and co-host of The Right Side of History podcast. He is also the author of the book The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.
