Harvard’s ‘resistance’ to Trump isn’t about science or academic freedom The school would rather lose $9 billion in federal funding than offend the left and give up woke indoctrination policies that enable and encourage antisemitism. Jonathan Tobin
It’s nice to know that the school that is widely considered to be the most prestigious institution of higher education in the United States is willing to stand up for its principles. Unfortunately, the main principle for which Harvard University is standing up—and earning deafening applause from liberal elites in politics and the media—is the right to go on enabling and encouraging the hatred of Jews.
Of course, that’s not the way the political left is spinning the announcement that Harvard would defy the demands of the Trump administration to cease its tacit support of the surge of antisemitism since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
For Trump’s “progressive” opponents who have acquired near-total control of higher education in the United States, the demands are unacceptable. They would rather lose federal funding, which is crucial to their survival, than end discrimination in admissions and hiring rooted in the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) that creates viewpoint uniformity that excludes conservatives and supporters of Israel. They also refuse to adopt disciplinary policies against those who advocate for Jewish genocide and harass Jewish students, or prevent the pro-Hamas mobs on their campuses from wearing masks while they commit their acts of intimidation and violence.
For the far left, their refusal to treat antisemites the way they would bigots who threatened African-Americans or Hispanics is a heroic act of “resistance.”
In a letter sent to the government by the school’s attorneys in response to the ultimatum sent by President Donald Trump’s Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, said: “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”
Cheers from Obama and Israel-bashers
The task force has targeted Harvard and several other elite institutions, such as Columbia University, Brown University, Cornell University, Northwestern University, Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania, for scrutiny and threatened to end all federal funding to these schools if they don’t enact fundamental reforms. So far, Harvard, which is the richest of American universities with an endowment of $53.2 billion, and which gets $9 billion a year in aid from Washington, is the only one to say it will not comply.
According to former President Barack Obama, “Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions—rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom.” He was echoed by NeverTrump former jurist J. Michael Luttig, who told The New York Times: “This is of momentous, momentous significance. This should be the turning point in the president’s rampage against American institutions.”
Times opinion columnist M. Gessen endorsed Harvard’s stand, saying, “No other response should have been possible by the logic of the law—or the logic of academic freedom or the logic of democracy.” Gessen, who has falsely compared Israel’s efforts to defend itself against Hamas terrorism to the Nazi’s tactics in the Holocaust, was just sorry because Harvard’s act of “self-respect” was so rare in a country where so many were prepared to treat Trump’s victory as giving him the right to govern and roll back the left’s excesses.
Obama and Luttig may be correct on one point: The hosannas for Harvard being sung by liberal pundits and academics across the nation are likely influencing some of the other institutions targeted by Trump’s task force. Columbia University, which had agreed to the administration’s demands, is already backtracking.
Its president, Katrina Armstrong, told a Zoom call with faculty that the school planned on reneging on its pledges but then resigned. Her replacement, Claire Shipman, has doubled down on this. Less than a day after Harvard’s announcement, Shipman declared that the academic institution would not allow the federal government to “require us to relinquish our independence and autonomy.” She went on to say that she would “reject heavy-handed orchestration from the government that could potentially damage our institution and undermine useful reforms” and that any agreement in which federal officials dictated “what we teach, research or who we hire” would be unacceptable.
Decades of federal ‘interference’
The notion that Trump’s demands are an unpardonable interference in academia may sound reasonable. Or at least they might have prior to the passage of the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin in any program or activity that receives federal financial assistance. And lest there be any confusion on this point, the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations all agreed that Jews were covere by the Title VI protections of the Civil Rights Act.
From that point forward, the federal government was given free rein to interfere in the life of schools like Harvard. That interference took the form of rules that, among other things, made any discrimination against minorities like blacks and Hispanics illegal, and the adoption of “affirmative action” diktats that had an enormous impact on their hiring and admissions policies. Those schools that didn’t like it were informed that they could forget about receiving federal money. And that is what some conservative institutions like Hillsdale College or a number of fundamentalist Christian schools did to protect their independence.
Nor is it about defending science, as so many of those who have rationalized opposition to Trump have asserted.
It’s true that the bulk of Harvard’s funding goes to its medical institutions. That raises the possibility that the fallout from this conflict might hurt important research and health care. It has persuaded some to say that Trump is going too far in threatening funding to these universities, all of whom depend on Washington to maintain their scientific establishments.
Yet would anyone currently decrying Trump’s moves defend the funding of any medical school, hospital or research facility if it involved giving a seal of federal approval to an institution that discriminated against racial minorities protected by the Civil Rights Act? To the contrary, the same voice raised in defense of the “resistance” to Trump would demand the defunding of any entity—no matter how vital its scientific or medical research—that targeted blacks or allowed a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan to operate with impunity on their grounds or in their school buildings? Yet that is exactly what Harvard, Columbia and many other schools did by allowing pro-Hamas groups that support Jewish genocide to operate freely.
Moreover, as author Heather Mac Donald has pointed out, the impact of the DEI policies being defended by Harvard has led to discrimination and the lowering of standards throughout the sciences and math. That poses a far greater threat to American medicine and scientific research than Trump’s request that these schools give up their woke policies and stop antisemitism.
So, let’s be clear about what’s actually at stake in this controversy. It’s not science or academic freedom. It’s about elite schools wishing to remain in thrall to progressive orthodoxies on race and Western civilization that have fueled the surge in Jew-hatred.
Part of this can also be explained by politics.
The success of the left’s long march through American educational institutions over the past decades has created a situation in which conservatives and Zionists are rarities on college and university faculties. A career in academia for anyone who dissents from DEI and woke orthodoxy, as well as the notion that Israel and Jews are “white” oppressors who must be suppressed, can only do so by keeping their opinions to themselves. To openly dissent against the left’s toxic myths about critical race theory, intersectionality or settler-colonialism theory is to effectively guarantee that you won’t be hired for any post in the humanities and social sciences and to never obtain tenure even if you do get that far. Republicans or anyone who openly supports Trump are virtually an extinct species among those who work in higher education.
That’s why faculties like the ones at Harvard and Columbia have been so vocal in their support for the pro-Hamas mobs that target Jews and in defense of Middle East studies programs, often funded by Islamist sources like the Emirate of Qatar that have become hotbeds of antisemitism.
However, it also creates a dynamic on campus that makes any accommodation with a Trump administration that left-wing Democrats view as beyond the pale, even on anything as clearly legitimate as a response to the rampant antisemitism that has been on display since Oct. 7, as a betrayal. Indeed, so strong is the pull of partisanship that many leading liberal Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and even Hillel have put themselves on record as having reservations about Trump’s all-out effort to fight antisemitism or even to oppose it. In a country where politics now assumes the role that religion used to play in most people’s lives, opposing Trump is clearly a higher priority for many of those who identify as liberals or Democrats than combating Jew-hatred.
What Harvard is really fighting for
This debate isn’t about Trump’s alleged authoritarian tendencies. It is being triggered by the stubborn refusal of the most prestigious and venerable of American institutions, such as Harvard and Columbia, to ensure the safety of Jews and to give up practices in admissions, discipline and hiring that ensure their continued adherence to leftist ideologies that are at war with the Western canon and Jewish survival.
The cheers for Harvard’s stand are a reflection of the emotional needs of a portion of the American electorate that is overrepresented in the credentialed elites that venerate schools like Harvard. Their anger at the 2024 election results, hatred for Trump and affinity for woke racialism are so deep that they are willing to figuratively die on a hill that involves their support for or acquiescence to the legitimacy of a genocidal war waged against the only Jewish state on the planet. That is a telling indication of, as Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) put it, how “Harvard University has rightfully earned its place as the epitome of the moral and academic rot in higher education.”
Trump’s response to such defiance must be resolute. If Harvard won’t give up its toleration and support for antisemitism, then it must lose every penny of federal funding. And the same should go for any other school that follows its example. The pious platitudes about democracy, science or academic freedom that we are hearing from Trump’s opponents notwithstanding, the only thing they are really fighting for is the right to empower those who seek to harm Jews.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
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