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Harvard University has rejected various demands of a presidential commission on antisemitism.
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 antisemitism 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 antisemitic 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 Democratic 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.
Who would actually go to Harvard to receive that now second class liberal education unless they wanted to matriculate into government service or teach at some elite university where the same woke twaddle gets recycled.
It is no wonder why nothing changes in D.C. with a collection of moronic Ivy League college grads running things. The Obama admin was the perfect example this kind of buffoonish garbage.
It appears a bit odd that the obama is lecturing again. Could it be that he was still lecturing through moldy joe and was president until recently and cannot tolerate being relegated to the sidelines?
It is the American people that relegated Obama the Fraud to the sidelines. We elected Trump.
What an excellent point to make – and a very astute observation! Shame that topics like this never make it to a televised broadcast where more could watch, listen, and learn…
But who am I kidding? Not even Fox News would air that; it would be just like the time Newt Gingrich mentioned Soros’ name on air and Harris Faulkner promptly shut him down, cold.
Obama, like Hillary, Pelosi, Schumer, etc…will ride off gleefully into the sunset, laughing at how they got away with the zillions of diabolical crimes they committed, knowing they’ll never be held accountable.
In order to commit the “perfect crime”, you must first become a politician.
That’s an insult to Hillsdale.
I don’t think Harvard is worried a bit. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Arab Emirates and Kuwait can and will deliver far more “financial support” of what the Federal government can take away. They’ll just request Harvard to keep adding more and more islamic studies curricula, pro-palestine student groups, muslim professors and arabic-sounding “chairs” to its environment.
What the federal government agencies can do (and even some state agencies as well) is quietly avoid hiring any Harvard graduates. They can be followed by the larger corporations and law firms. The directive could be expanded to include other Ivy League partners, Columbia, Yale, U.Penn and Brown come to mind. Transform a Harvard diploma from a coveted possession to a pariah worthless piece of paper.
Harvard will wait for Trump to leave. Next President doesn’t give them funds, then they will wait again. Third time is lucky or not, they will wait again. Their reserves lets them act like tyrants of the Mao variety.
Scarlet Pimpernel:
Yes, you’re quite right. Harvard has a 53+ billion dollar endowment plus as a university, interest earned on that 53+ billion dollars is exempted from federal income tax. An obscure fact that most Americans are not aware of.
O Lord – I pray the USA is simply going through growing pains as we near our 250th year
I seriously doubt if that’s the case. The preponderance of evidence proves otherwise.
Harvard should have NEVER been given Federal money. They are a private institution with that huge endowment. More importantly, it was started by Protestants as a “white man’s college.” This excerpt about Harvard history is from the Harvard Crimson, in 2023: ‘In its early years, Harvard was restricted to white students, if not in principle then in practice. Before the surge of Jewish students in the 20th century, the applicants who were academically qualified by the standards set out by the administration — a combination of high school grades and exam scores — were usually white, Protestant, wealthy, and related to Harvard alumni. Other groups were explicitly barred from attending Harvard; notably, Black students were not admitted to the University until 1847.”
Harvard Presidents like Abbott Lowell were nativists and Eugenicists who were unconcerned with a 1924 group off graduates posing in Ku Klux Klan robes in front of the statue of John Harvard. Lowell and others at Harvard pondered the “Jewish problem” of so many Jewish students at Harvard who did better than the Boston Blue Bloods academically, and were not prone to drunkenness.
Agains from the Crimson article: “W.F. Williams, Class of 1901, wrote to Lowell after a Harvard-Yale Game, troubled by the number of Jewish spectators in the stands. “I cannot but feel that your New England blood must run cold when you contemplate their ever-increasing numbers at Harvard,” he wrote. “Are the Overseers so lacking in genius that they can’t devise a way to bring Harvard back to the position it always held as a ‘white man’s college?’”
Harvard wasn’t alone in this anti-Semitic thinking. Many of the sought after Ivy League schools were aghast at the numbers of Jews attending and graduating with honors.
Harvard and the IVY League in general should be cut off from taxpayer $$
That 4% loss of government funds from the federal government will only enrage Harvard authorities and cause them to double down on what they are already doing.
End the gravy train and fine Harvard $50 billion as accomplice in anti-American activities, pro-Islamic collusion and treason in perverting the minds of their students. Then fine each individual ‘head’ involved with treason as well. Only these strong measures will stop these Communist/Marxist enemies of freedom and human rights. By the way, the penalty for tree-son is death. Yes, bring back the noose ands hang ’em high !! Desperate times call for desperate measures. Guaranteed that all the other ‘institutes of higher learning’ will comply immediately. Give ’em the ‘Houthi treatment”.