Trump v. Harvard

OPINION:

The fight is on between President Trump and Harvard University. Odds are being placed on who will blink first, but the smart money isn’t on the Ivy League institution.

Administration officials wrote to the venerable school’s leadership Friday to demand an end to discrimination under the guise of diversity, equity and inclusion.

In its place, the White House seeks a return to merit-based hiring and admissions. It also wants viewpoint diversity in a faculty where only 2.5% identify as conservative, compared with 77% who identify as “very liberal” or “liberal,” according to the Harvard Crimson.

When department heads hire only Marxist professors who are big fans of Hamas, the inevitable result is campus speech codes that suppress views contrary to leftist groupthink. Those codes must go.

In a dig at Harvard’s former president, who had a habit of copying the words of others, the proposed settlement also insists that “all existing and prospective faculty shall be reviewed for plagiarism and Harvard’s plagiarism policy consistently enforced.”

Faced with such demands, the nation’s wealthiest college wasn’t interested in surrendering the activist indoctrination center it had worked so hard to create.

In a letter Monday, Harvard rejected the “unsupported and disruptive remedies” even though it meant losing billions of dollars in federal funding. “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government,” the school’s very expensive attorneys wrote.

Not one to back down, Mr. Trump flexed his fingers over the nuclear button before writing on Truth Social: “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’”

Columbia University grasped the peril and gave in when a mere $400 million in funding was threatened. However, Columbia’s leaders weren’t dumb enough to risk their $14.8 billion endowment.

Harvard just put those endowments in play. Elite colleges around the country sit on so much cash that they have become hedge funds that do nothing to improve students’ educational experience. Harvard’s endowment stands at a whopping $53.2 billion, yet the cost of attendance is a stratospheric $87,000 per year.

Perhaps recognizing the storm that was coming, Harvard last month preemptively announced that students from families making less than $100,000 annually could attend free of charge, something it should have done decades ago.

It makes little sense for taxpayers to underwrite moneyed organizations that instill deeply anti-American values in students. As education reform advocate Christopher Rufo points out, Harvard holds racially segregated “affinity celebrations” for Black, Asian, Arab, LGBTQ, disabled and Indigenous students.

White and Jewish students are conspicuously omitted.

“Harvard’s statement today reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges — that federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws,” the administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism wrote in its response to the school.

Some $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard are now frozen out of the $8.7 billion Harvard receives from Uncle Sam. Harvard can survive without them. Many traditionally minded schools, such as Hillsdale College, Patrick Henry College and Thomas Aquinas College, reject federal subsidies and still provide a rigorous education at far less cost to each student.

Harvard’s choice is simple. Either stop taking taxpayer money or stop discriminating. Better yet, it should stop doing both.