Harvard University is having a rough time. I know, how tragic, right?
On Monday, President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that his administration was considering giving $3 billion in grant money initially slated for Harvard to trade schools.
This comes right after he tried to block foreign students from attending the school. That move was initially halted by a court, but there is plenty of reason to believe Harvard and other schools are violating federal law and are admitting foreign students who are connected to terrorist groups.
And if they are and the order stands it won’t be good for Harvard’s current model since 27% of the school’s enrollment is foreign and that’s where it makes a lot of its money.
On Tuesday, Trump tripled down. An administration official said Tuesday that all direct federal aid to the Ivy League school will be stripped.
What should we make of all this?
The Trump administration’s moves are about more than Harvard. It’s about the relationship between elite institutions of higher education and the American people. Given that Harvard has a $53 billion endowment that it runs like a hedge fund, it’s in a unique situation to “resist” the president. The school’s president has done so, proudly, with all kinds of what I consider shallow paeans to free inquiry and academic freedom.
Of course, those same institutions have had little concern for academic freedom and diversity of thought in recent years. What they have circled the wagons for is an aggressive left-wing protest class that’s been disrupting campuses for the last few years and for their own ability to racially discriminate.
Right now, Harvard President Alan Garber is going with the “fire the firefighter” tactic of saying that the federal money they are losing was going to something that everyone wants, which is research funding.
“Why cut off research funding? Sure, it hurts Harvard, but it hurts the country because after all, the research funding is not a gift,” Garber said recently. “The research funding is given to universities and other research institutions to carry out work—research work—that the federal government designates as high-priority work. It is work that they want done. They are paying to have that work conducted.”
First, maybe there’s some reason to believe that not all the research done by the Ivy Leagues is as valuable as they say it is.
Worse, what Garber is saying is essentially that the American taxpayer should continue giving these institutions a blank check because they are doing some good things there without any consideration for the rotten things.
In fact, Harvard has only made the slightest of attempts to comply with the administration’s insistence that it stop violating civil rights law and crack down on the antisemitism Harvard has essentially admitted is plaguing the school.
If you want to know how unserious Harvard is, a story on Monday confirms it. Harvard Divinity School named as class marshal for their graduation ceremony, a student who The Jerusalem Post reports “assaulted a Jewish classmate during an anti-Israel protest in October 2023.”
Another student involved in that assault “was awarded a $65,000 Harvard Law School fellowship to work at the Council on American-Islamic Relations.”
These schools just can’t help themselves.
Northwestern went one step further. After absurdly negotiating with anti-Israel campus protesters, it went and hired a professor who, according to The Washington Free Beacon, “sits on the board of two organizations that were founded by and frequently partner with Palestinian terrorists.”
With decisions like that, they deserve to have their funds pulled.
And even after all that’s happened, Trump could even go further. Congress could decide to tax their considerable endowments, and it’s looking more likely that’s going to happen.
Even more, the administration could decide that due to Harvard and other schools violating Title IV of civil rights law, which prohibits race-based discrimination, students will no longer be eligible to receive federal loans to go to those schools.
So, this saga is far from over for Harvard and higher education. They’ve dug in their heels with the belief that the American people should essentially subsidize the credentialing system of the global elite. They are hoping that other powerful institutions, like the legacy media, bail them out.
But they are in it a lot deeper than they are admitting publicly.
In the immediate sense, the schools being defunded are in trouble financially, even Harvard. Half of Harvard’s research budget comes from the federal government. Even if it wins in litigation, the instability could cause researchers to go elsewhere. And maybe they should.
If I were an enterprising president of a mid-tier state school, I’d be doing my best to convince the administration that my institution is free from antisemitism, open to bringing more intellectual diversity to campus, and will wisely use the money.
The bigger problem for higher education is existential. For a long, long time Americans gave support to elite educational institutions, billions of taxpayer dollars, based on the idea that they were of invaluable contribution to the country. But do we need more over-credentialed people in this country who passed through the DEI crucible, or do we need more welders and shipbuilders?
Higher education institutions now have to answer for why, despite sitting on a fantastical amount of wealth and privilege, they deserve the massive amounts of money we give them. Higher education is finally facing some accountability, and it has a lot to answer for.
