Harvard University Finally Tells Trump To F Off In His F'ing Face

The world's richest school uncaves.

Dylan Goodman/Harvard University

Eighty-five days with our new fascist world order and Cultural Revolution, as well as a leader legally empowered to send Seal Team 6 to assassinate university presidents, and finally there’s a bold voice from the university world! Harvard, endowment $53.2 billion, has stood up, forcefully, to our dictator’s demands that the school turn itself into a conservative mouthpiece. Non-sarcastic: Thank goodness! Making over universities to be tools of a regime is a priority of every authoritarian ever, and schools have been alarmingly quiet and supine until now. But That Man and his Linda McMahon-led university-rasslin’ task force pushed Harvard to the absolute edge with their escalating demands for the most outrageous, balls-out “The Party will tell you what to teach, and study, and who to admit and hire” rules list yet.

Harvard had already rolled over and agreed in January to expand its guidance on antisemitic bullying, and then two weeks ago dismissed leadership at its Center for Middle Eastern Studies, suspended programming focused on Israel and Palestine at the Harvard Divinity School, and terminated its partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank. But even that was NOT ENOUGH; a few days later the government sent a letter with even more demands, including:

Leadership and governance “reform”: Harvard must vow to choose its leadership only among “exclusively those most devoted to [...] the changes indicated in this letter,” and get rid of anyone who might “interfere with the possibility of the reforms indicated in this letter.”

Viewpoint diversity: Harvard must let the government audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually “viewpoint diverse.”

Vague! Wondered Harvard’s Steven Pinker in the New York Times, “Will this government force the economics department to hire Marxists or the psychology department to hire Jungians or, for that matter, for the medical school to hire homeopaths or Native American healers?” Ha, ha, I think we ALL know what viewpoints they’re talking about there. Or maybe we don’t! Vagueness is a friend to authoritarianism, because it keeps people worrying all the time about not committing viewpoint crimes.

Also, “if the review finds that the existing faculty in the relevant department or field are not capable of hiring for viewpoint diversity, or that the relevant teaching unit is not capable of admitting a critical mass of students with diverse viewpoints, hiring or admissions within that department, field, or teaching unit shall be transferred to the closest cognate department, field, or teaching unit that is capable of achieving viewpoint diversity.”

So the government will tell them what students, professors, and departments they are allowed to have.

Government-approved overseers policing for “ideological capture”: Harvard should “commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit those programs and departments that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture.” Which “include but are not limited to the Divinity School, Graduate School of Education, School of Public Health, Medical School, Religion and Public Life Program, FXB Center for Health & Human Rights, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Carr Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic.”

But but but viewpoint diversity?

And this “external party” will also root out and name any professors who “discriminated against Jewish or Israeli students.”

“Merit” based hiring and admissions: The government can review everyone the university hires and admits, and audit the university to make sure they aren’t doing “DEI.”

International admissions: The university must screen its prospective foreign students for their viewpoints “to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions” and also report to the government any foreign students that commit a “conduct violation.”

The administration also wanted masks banned on campus (in the research labs too? Who knows) and Harvard police will immediately stop any “disruptions or deplatforming,” and the school will remove or reform any “institutional bodies and practices that delay and obstruct enforcement, including the relevant Administrative Boards and FAS Faculty Council.”

And there was more! They demanded Harvard get rid of the student clubs Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee, Harvard Graduates Students 4 Palestine, Law Students 4 Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine, and the National Lawyers Guild, and prevent them from re-forming by any other name, and not let anyone who was a member of those clubs join any other club.

They demanded Harvard permanently expel the students involved in the October 18 “assault” of an Israeli Harvard Business School student. (No one has been convicted for assault. In October 2023 Israeli student Yoav Segev walked through a “die in,” and protestors, including Ibrahim Bharmal, an editor of the Harvard Law Review, shooed him out.)

And Harvard must establish a “whistleblower” hotline for anyone to report noncompliance.

So, the administration’s tentacles in every cranny. Complying would have been the end of the school’s independence, and reputation in the world.

Which is exactly the point of the wide-ranging assault on education from the administration of the guy who reportedly paid somebody else to take the SATs for him. His education Task Force has targeted at least 60 colleges, public and private, large and small, for the fake probe-and-cut routine, in which they pretend to investigate “DEI” and/or “antisemitism,” pronounce that they found some, freeze funding to the school, and then produce a list of demands that amount to the school letting the administration do Cultural Revolution. And, or, they just yank research grants completely, fighting science and universities in a two-for-one. The administration has already pulled or frozen more than $11 billion in funding from at least seven universities, including Cornell, Princeton, and Northwestern.

And Columbia University, which has found out that giving in does not pay. After the administration pulled $400 million in their funding, Columbia agreed it would let ICE come on campus to take its students, let officers arrest protesting students, ban certain student groups, and take control of the department that offers courses on the Middle East from its faculty. And the administration thanked them for their supplication by freezing even more money, has revoked the green card of another student for protesting, and now wants Columbia under a consent decree anyway.

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Columbia University Obeyed In Advance, Why Is That Not Working Out For Them???

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Within hours of Harvard’s FUCK YOU announcement, federal officials said they would freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants to the university, along with a $60 million contract. And Trump got on his web platform:

Terrorist, terrorist, terrorist! Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s a terrorist, protestors are terrorists, everybody’s a sick terrorist. Guy’s a broken record.

Well, stay strong, Harvard! They’ve got a $53.2 billion endowment, the most billionaire alumni in the world (104 of them) including some of the best lawyers, and have existed since before America was a country. No other school is better-positioned to fight. In the meantime, many other lawsuits flow, at least 25 of them against Trump’s educational policies.

Maybe something will still be left standing after this national fascist nightmare eventually ends!

[Harvard Crimson / Education Week]

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