RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-university-discrimination-dei-hiring-trump?skip=1

The Trump administration has escalated its battle with Harvard University, freezing all future grants and threatening to strip the school’s tax-exempt status. In response, Harvard has adopted some conciliatory measures— rebranding its DEI office and cancelling its racially segregated graduation ceremonies—but, behind the scenes, the university’s discrimination machine continues to operate at full capacity.

We’ve obtained a trove of internal documents that reveal Harvard’s racial favoritism in faculty and administrative hiring. The university’s DEI programs are more than “unconscious bias” training. They are vectors for systematic discrimination against disfavored groups: namely, white men. As one Harvard researcher told us, “endless evidence” suggests that the university continues to discriminate against the supposed oppressor class in hiring and promotions.

For years, Harvard’s DEI department has explicitly sought to engineer a more racially “diverse” faculty pool. The university-wide Inclusive Hiring Initiative provided “guidelines and training” for those involved in the hiring process and was explicitly tied to Harvard’s DEI goals. The stated mission of the initiative is to “[i]nstill an understanding of how departments can leverage the selection process” to build “an increasingly diverse workforce.”

In another hiring guide, “Best Practices for Conducting Faculty Searches,” the university recommends several discriminatory practices. At the beginning of the hiring process, Harvard instructs search committees to “ensure that the early lists include women and minorities” and to “consider reading the applications of women and minorities first.” The university counsels that committee chairs should “continually monitor” the racial composition of the candidate list and, as they narrow it down, “attend to all women and minorities on the long list.”

Harvard deliberately factors race into the hiring process. The university gives committee chairs privileged access to “self-identified demographic data, including gender, race, and ethnicity” and encourages chairs to “use this information to encourage diversity in the applicant pool, long list, and short list.” Harvard admits that some of its hiring programs have explicit “placement goals” for women and minorities—which, despite the university’s denial, function as a soft quota.

https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/columbia-exposes-the-academic-freedom-hypocrites/

There wasn’t much learning going on at Columbia  but the school provided an important lesson in hypocrisy for those paying attention. A key talking point from defenders of the universities against the Trump administration’s enforcement of civil-rights law has been: If the schools crack down on pro-Hamas protesters at the government’s behest, it will destroy academic freedom as we know it.

I’ve explained in the past why that argument is specious: The anti-Zionists have been erasing academic freedom on campus for decades and punishing the offenders will help to restore it. But honestly I couldn’t have made it much clearer than the fanatical tentifada mobs just did themselves when they stormed Butler Library and forced nearly a thousand students to stop studying for their final exams.

The first characteristic of yesterday’s chaos was that it was nothing new: It was far from the first time students, even at Columbia specifically, had taken over buildings. It was far from the first time these crowds had disrupted academic environments: Classes have been invaded and hijacked, students taking exams have been disrupted (try concentrating on your exam while a rabid mob outside your classroom window is psychotically chanting that you deserve to be murdered because you’re a Jew), libraries have been taken over by protesters, students have been blocked from attending class and moving freely about the campus.

What these groups did yesterday at Columbia is, simply, what these groups do. There was no escalation, in other words. This is just what defenders of the tentifada groups have been defending all along.

Here is how new Columbia President Claire Shipman described the scene she witnessed:

“I spent the late afternoon and evening at Butler Library, as events were unfolding, to understand the situation on the ground and to be able to make the best decisions possible. I arrived to see one of our Public Safety officers wheeled out on a gurney and another getting bandaged. As I left hours later, I walked through the reading room, one of the many jewels of Butler Library, and I saw it defaced and damaged in disturbing ways and with disturbing slogans. Violence and vandalism, hijacking a library—none of that has any place on our campus.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-spoiled-brats-of-academe/

President Trump’s campaign to restore Constitutional order and common sense to our government has rightly targeted our educational institutions, keeping the pledge he made on the campaign trail “to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left.” These institutions, like a fish, rot from the head down, and so the corruption of our universities must be reduced by starting with their administrations and faculties.

That corruption became obvious during the campus protests celebrating Hamas’s brutal terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. The despicable anti-Semitism of the students and faculty of some of our most prestigious universities, as well as violence directed at Jewish students, replete with genocidal chants and rhetoric, were tolerated by campus authorities and met with shameful appeasement, if not encouragement, rather than arrests and expulsions.

Trump has responded by garnishing some of the billions of dollars that taxpayers provide to universities, which use these funds to finance politicized or dubious research, create anti-American programs, and graduate majors rife with leftwing curricula filled with postmodern “higher nonsense,” but lacking any prospects of employment other than political activism. Indeed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Wall Street Journal reports, “You have a higher chance of being unemployed these days if you go to college.”

In response, these institutions have been caterwauling like a spoiled, entitled brat whose rich father has reduced his exorbitant allowance. Typical are the comments of Princeton’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, who blustered, “The attack on Columbia is a radical threat to scholarly excellence and to America’s leadership in research . . . Universities and their leaders should speak up and litigate forcefully to protect their rights.”

So how did private universities with multi-billion-dollar, tax-free endowments get a “right” to taxpayer money? And how did the common-sense wisdom that “He who pays the piper calls the tune” disappear? Aren’t there conditions the feds impose on how public funds are spent? Are not politicized curricula, programs, and majors verboten?

But the left-wing’s “long march” to politicize universities is just one example of the left’s corruption of our schools. Postmodern and poststructuralist ideologies––the idiot children of Marx’s malign ideas such of “false consciousness” –– incorporate other sophistic ideas such as the simplistic, radical materialist determinism and relativism.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-universities-dei-diversity-center-right-critics

Since Inauguration Day, the Trump administration has taken decisive action against DEI in universities, threatening to investigate, punish, and withhold funding from higher education institutions that discriminate in the name of diversity. Most conservatives, who correctly see DEI as a threat to colorblind equality, have celebrated these maneuvers. But some center-right intellectuals, who claim to oppose DEI in theory, have criticized the White House for using administrative power to eliminate it in practice.

One such figure is Jeffrey Flier, former dean of Harvard Medical School, who has gained attention in recent years as an insider critic of DEI. He has been mildly critical of diversity statements in faculty hiring, which he claims infringe on “academic freedom” and diminish “the true value of diversity.” Some conservatives praise him as a reformer, but the truth is more complicated: as dean, Flier was not a critic of DEI at all. In fact, he oversaw its rapid expansion and became a critic only after he retired from that position.

Last month on X, I asked Flier to substantiate the facts about his opposition to DEI. “When you were Dean of Harvard Medical School, what did you do to stop racial discrimination in admissions, hiring, and programs?” I asked. “Why can’t I find any record of you speaking out against your department’s illegal DEI practices when you were in charge?”

Flier attempted to duck the question but eventually relented. “[W]hen I was dean, affirmative action in admissions and various DEI programs were not illegal,” he replied.

This approach distorted the law—discriminatory hiring programs have always violated the Civil Rights Act. And Flier’s reply was an evasion. He would rather quibble over legal technicalities than grapple with his conduct as an administrator.

After resigning as dean, Flier himself admitted that he knew requiring diversity statements in faculty hiring was wrong but could only publicly express his criticism once he was out of power. “As a dean of a major academic institution, I could not have said [that I oppose requiring diversity statements]. But I will now.” In other words, Flier knew that these initiatives violated his principles but refused to voice his opinion at the time, not because of legal technicalities—a post hoc rationalization—but because it would have jeopardized his career. He could have opposed DEI, but chose not to, out of fear.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/06/toward-a-negotiated-settlement-of-the-trump-harvard-showdown/

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

In the high-stakes clash between the Trump administration and Harvard – fraught with peril for the White House, for America’s oldest and most famous university, and for higher education in America – both sides have hardened their stances. In an April 11 letter, the Trump administration demanded supervision over reform of the university’s admissions, hiring, curriculum, and internal governance. In an April 14 email to the Harvard community, President Alan Garber rejected White House demands. The Trump administration promptly froze more than $2 billion in federal grants to Harvard and $60 million in contracts, and threatened to eliminate the university’s tax-exempt status. On April 21, Harvard sued several Trump administration officials.

Conservatives, who have been sounding the alarm about higher education’s failings for decades, have divided over how best the Trump administration should hold Harvard accountable.

On the one hand, the federal government has considerable leverage: It provides Harvard more than $500 million annually with billions in the pipeline. On the other hand, the Trump administration must respect constitutional and statutory limits on executive power. Political prudence dictates, moreover, that the president and his team consider that a sizeable majority of the public opposes increasing the federal government’s oversight of universities and that the federal government is ill-suited to the task.

Best for both sides would be a negotiated settlement. The settlement should minimize the federal government’s role in managing Harvard while ensuring that the university obeys civil-rights law, curbs progressive indoctrination, and bolsters traditional liberal education.

Harvard precipitated the crisis. The proximate cause of the Trump administration’s drastic intervention was the university’s violation of civil-rights law by indulging antisemitism and discriminating based on race.

Harvard’s indulgence of antisemitism stands in marked contrast to the alacrity with which it has protected non-Jewish minorities and women. For decades, Harvard has been narrowing the boundaries of permissible campus speech to shield students – particularly favored minorities and women – from supposedly offensive utterances, the offense of which often consists in departure from progressive orthodoxy. Yet following Iran-backed Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel, former Harvard President Claudine Gay discovered that campus free speech is wide and flexible enough to sometimes protect calling for the genocide of the Jews. Furthermore, as the university has acknowledged, it has harbored antisemitism and has been slow and ineffective in responding to campus antisemitism’s post-Oct. 7 surge.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/education-battles-get-national-attention/

Two critical education issues have reached the U.S. Supreme Court. One involves Montgomery County Public Schools, one of the nation’s largest school districts. A group of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim parents is arguing that the Maryland school district violated their First Amendment right to religious freedom when it refused to allow them to opt their children out of LGBTQ-themed lessons.

The case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, illustrates the growing tension between sex-obsessed schools and the rights of religious parents, who are  challenging the Montgomery County School Board’s decision in 2022 to approve more than 22 LGBTQ+ books for classroom use, including works like “Pride Puppy,” “Intersection Allies,” and “What Are Your Words.”

According to court documents, one of the books, Pride Puppy, is a “picture book directed to three and four-year-olds that describes a Pride parade and what a child might find there.” The book invites students to search for various images, including “underwear, leather, lip ring, drag king, and drag queen.”

Other books adopted by the Montgomery County School Board promote pride parades and gender transitioning while advocating for a “child-knows-best” approach to social transitioning. The books tell students that their decision to transition to another gender doesn’t have to “make sense,” and unbelievably, that physicians in the delivery room guess newborn babies’ sexual identity.

Montgomery County argues that if families choose to attend public schools, they “are not cognizably coerced by their children’s exposure there to religiously objectionable ideas.” If the First Amendment gives parents a right to pick and choose from the curriculum, the county says there’s “no discernible limit,” and it would work the same in science or history classes. Public schools “simply cannot accommodate” these exceptions.

Ultimately, the case is really about parental rights, as it also applies to nonreligious parents. As Melissa Moschella, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame, writes, “When I told my father, who is secular and a staunch Democrat, about this case, he said that you don’t have to be religious to object to telling 3-year-olds that doctors only ‘guess’ a baby’s sex at birth or giving them a ‘Pride Puppy’ storybook instructing them to search for images of things they would find at a pride parade, such as a drag queen, leather and an intersex flag. He thinks that parents having the right to opt their children out of such indoctrination is just common sense.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trump-administration-wants-colleges-to-reveal-foreign-donors/

The Trump administration is not letting up in its determination to make American colleges and universities shape up and fly right. First, it has asked the universities to supply the administration with information on what they have been doing to record, punish, and prevent antisemitic acts on their campuses. Second, the administration has asked them to furnish the government with information on DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs that are enforced at the schools, so that their observance of the law, or failure to do so — the law as set out in the 2023 Supreme Court decision that struck down Affirmative Action programs for college admissions — can be judged. And now the Trump administration wants colleges and universities to reveal what foreign money they have accepted, with particular attention to moneys coming from China and Qatar, two countries that do not share our values, and are, indeed, hostile to us.

More on this request for more information on foreign “influencers” of American universities can be found here: “Trump order will prevent Qatari, Chinese influence at schools, ed. sec. says,” by Michael Starr, Jerusalem Post, April 24, 2025:

A Wednesday executive order from US President Donald Trump will require transparency in foreign university funding, with Education Department Secretary Linda McMahon emphasizing that the order would address the problem of Chinese and Qatari influence in American academic institutions.

Trump’s order called for McMahon to take all appropriate action to enforce preexisting laws on foreign funding to universities and to demand the disclosure of more details about the donations, their sources, and purposes.